Welcome


My name is Gina and I would like to welcome you to my blog!

On this blog, I not only share the dietary and lifestyle approach which reversed my metabolic disease and achieved my weight loss, but I also debunk many misconceptions surrounding obesity and its treatment.

I am 5'5" and was weighing 300 lbs., at my heaviest. I lost a total of 180 lbs. I went through several phases of low carbohydrate dieting, until I found what worked best and that is what I share on this blog. Once on a carbohydrate restricted diet, along with intermittent fasting, I dropped all of the weight in a little over two years time.

My weight loss was achieved without any kind of surgery, bariatric or cosmetic. I also did not take any weight loss medications or supplements. I did not use any weight loss program. This weight loss was solely the result of a very low carbohydrate, whole foods based diet, along with daily intermittent fasting and exercise.

I allow discussions in the comments section of each post, but be advised that any inappropriate or off-topic comment will not be approved.

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Apr 8, 2019

Six common beliefs addressed, Part 15

1. Do women need more carbohydrates than men?

No. 

Women would actually need less because a woman's metabolism is already honed for fat gain. This means that women have a metabolism that responds more aversely so blood glucose changes than men. This is why women gain weight so much more easily than men do. 

2. Will counting calories cause weight loss? 

No. 

Restricting calories will cause temporary weight loss due to the loss of water and some muscle. 

3. I think dietary decisions should only be evidence based.

That's the problem. There has been no evidence of anything so far, except that humans are very adaptive and can thrive consuming many different diets. Obesity still has no known cure and the only metric found that has tracked closely with it are abnormalities in blood glucose. 

For this reason, on this blog, we only follow what the science has shown so far. This is why the advice given here is exclusively to obtain and sustain proper blood glucose homeostasis. That should be the primary target as everything else occurs downstream. 

4. Butter cannot make you fat, because it ranks 0 on the Glycemic Index and Glycemic Load lists.

The 'Glycemic Index' is a list of foods ranked by their effect on blood glucose. The 'Glycemic Load' calculates the grams in those foods, in order to determine how much of them have to be consumed to get an affect on blood glucose. For example, you need to eat a basket of carrots to get the same blood glucose effect that a candy bar would have.

At first glance, this sounds like a great way to control blood glucose but unfortunately it's smoke and mirrors. This is because monitoring the isolated affects on blood glucose from individual food items has not been proven to be helpful in combating diabetes. Proper blood glucose regulation is much more than just postprandial readings. Remember, diabetes is not a disease of high blood glucose. 

Aside from that, both of these indexes are highly inaccurate and have proved worthless for controlling metabolic syndrome, since a person who is diabetic will have an exaggerated response to one carrot and doesn't have to eat the whole basket to have an adverse effect.

Butter has no glucose in it, so it can not have a score on the Glycemic Index and thereby obviously cannot have a rank on Glycemic Load. This means nothing as far as insulin is concerned, how we metabolize foods or what their hormonal effects are. Neither index addresses the effects of excess fat on metabolism, but you will develop an obesogenic hormonal profile if you eat excess fat, just as you would with excess carbohydrates. 

Remember, fat bypasses its effect on blood glucose and affects insulin instead. That insulin then affects blood glucose. So this makes fat work the same way as carbohydrate, just in the opposite way. 

5. Is there a recommended and specific amount of fat grams everyone should consume a day?

Everyone has a different fat threshold, because we all have a different amount of fat cells. We also have differing leptin expression, depending on what stage of metabolic syndrome you are in. The amount of fat cells we have is determined at birth, by genetics, and it remains mostly static for the rest of our lives. This is different for everyone. 

A good rule of thumb is to not consume less than 50 grams of fat a day. For most people, there is no need to deviate much from this amount. Fat becomes easier to store once it goes past 150 - 160 grams a day. The thinner you are, the more fat you can handle. The fatter you are, the less of it you should have. 

This is why it's important to listen to your body, because there is no one size fits all macronutrient gram recommendation. Eat mindfully and use common sense. There are certain practices that put you at risk for excess dietary fat consumption.
  • Adding fats to foods that are already fatty.
  • Consuming isolated fats as snacks or meals.
  • Consuming fat in place of protein.
  • Adding fats to coffees or teas.
If you are stalled and/or are gaining weight, you need to lower your dietary fat. Insanity is when you continue to do what isn't working and expect different results.

6. I heard that the body does not have macronutrient receptors.

It absolutely does have macronutrient receptors, because the body knows exactly how to use and allocate carbohydrates, fat and protein. The body doesn’t use protein the way it uses carbohydrates, nor does it use fat in the same way as carbohydrates and protein, etc.

Each macronutrient and their combination causes different hormonal expression, in the body, to create different metabolic states. This is crucial for the organisms long term survival in the food environment it’s placed in. From these macronutrients, the body extracts calories and allocates them according to their profile. This ultimately determines body composition and a metabolic profile that either burns or stores calories.

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