There's not enough starch in the potatoes

A bit late posting this but went out for breakfast with Sis last Sunday. Was asking the waitress if they put flour in their scrambled eggs. She asked if I was celiac. I said yes for simplicity sake. She responded that I better not have the hash browns because they were dusted with flour. DUSTED WITH FLOUR. OMG. It's probably because there isn't enough starch in potatoes already. So if you are a typical, naive, breakfaster, you're getting your sugars and starches in your omelets, toast, jam, hash browns, etc. Hey why don't we just eat bowlfuls of sugar? But when you talk to people you hear them saying, "I hardly ever eat sugar." Oh yes you do, you just don't know it.

So when I now order breakfast, it's 3 poached eggs accompanied by 6 slices of bacon or steak :P Maybe a couple of slices of tomato if I feel daring.

Feast or Famine

One of the things that gives me panic attacks is not having at least a hundred books waiting to be read. Ok I'm exaggerating perhpas 60 or so. Right now I'm on a roll. I have tons of books waiting to be read but everything is getting held up by the book I am now reading.

Forget plot, forget information, forget anything else. My gauge for rating a book is: If I want to continue reading, then it's a good book. If I want to continue reading and find the material fascinating then that's a bonus. If I want to continue reading and the material is fascinating and the writing style superb then I'm in heaven.

So getting back to the book I am now reading by Dr. Robert H. Lustig called "Fat Chance." I'm on page 58. This book is great and meets all the criteria outlined above. Dr. Lustig has a great writing style and I'm sure I'll learn a lot and really enjoy myself. I'm finding the section on fast food is making me hungry so I need to get through that part really fast. lol

I'm not a scholar but this book should be read by everyone whether or not they are interested in nutrition and obesity.

Laugh Out Loud

Reading up on Ashton Kutcher's experiences with a raw fruit diet that had him hospitalized, I came across a comment made on a raw fruit forum. There's a very simple explanation and here it is according to the vegans,

His symptoms were classic detox symptoms! It seems really obvious to me. I had similar symptoms in some of the early stages, especially the pain in my liver and pancreas and stomach when my glands were being swamped by all the toxins my cells were releasing. You can read about it from anyone that has an understanding of how powerful a fruit detox is! I have no idea what he did to prepare for it, if he went from a heavy cooked diet which included dairy and meat and grains I'm not surprised his body went into detox shock. Maybe I'm being too simplistic but this seems like a no brainer to me.

 So there you have it in a nutshell.  If you get sick on a vegan diet, it's your body detoxing from all the poisonous food you were eating before. Don't even think it could possibly be anything else.

At my age, it's about health

What I keep forgetting is that no matter how much or little weight I lose, as long as I'm eating clean low carb my lipids and blood pressure are great and I feel great. Whatever mickey mouse doctor I have at the time drops their jaw at my lipid results because "fat person" and "perfect lipids" just don't jive. The obsession with weight loss seems to cast everything else aside and we tend to forget how great we feel.

How many times have we given up because weight loss has been low to non-existent? It seems like a good excuse at the time but we need to consider how we feel and how healthy we are. Perhaps if we regain that great feeling and stop obsessing about the amount of weight we lost we may be able to continue. How many times have I heard, "Low carb just doesn't work for me?" Really?

When I was doing the low fat thing, it took me a whole year to lose 17 lbs. Sure it was progress of a sort weight-wise but my deteriorating health as in arthritic pain, increased depression and and constant migraines made me reconsider this way of eating.

So taking pressure off myself a tad, initially I'm going to just eat good stuff that I'm allowed to eat, as much as I want, and not worry about calories, weight or anything else. At my age, health is what really matters.

Snap, Crackle, Pop

I have a desk job and I get up often to flex my lower body and walk around a bit. Today when I got up a thought came to me and I rolled around the floor laughing. Thinking of the old commercial for Rice Crispies, my body is starting to make those snap, crackle, pop type of sounds more and more.

The case of the missing data

Well, well, well, CBC finally came out with it.

The case of the missing data here

and

Heart Healthy Oil Claims Reconsidered here

Took them a while but at least Health Canada is looking into the matter and not dismissing it out of hand.

I've yet to see anything on BBC.

Finished reading the Coroner's Lunch by Colin Cotterill. What a fantastic book but now I'll have to order the entire set because the library has a sporadic supply and not all of the published works, dammit. Also, finished reading all of the Detective Zhong Fong books by David Rotenberg. Another very worthwhile endeavour. David Rotenberg's new book is called the Placebo Effect and is also very good.

Memories of how great I felt

Reading the latest Woo articles here, got me thinking about something very important to me personally, well not for the first time but this particular time I feel like commenting in my space. I will quote the part where she says:

When one has spent large chunks of their life feeling poorly for whatever reason, it's quite easy to meditate upon the simple pleasure of being alive, happy and healthy; the strength in your body, how it radiates glorious heat, so on.  I can sit in my car in 30 degree weather and keep the windows down and the sun roof down, my breath can fog the air and I feel warm. My body is a fortress. This is because I eat, I eat a lot of dirty hedonistic gluttonous calories. I no longer weigh myself. I eat if I'm hungry. The only dietary rule I have is to alway elect at least a mildly ketogenic diet. I've never felt better.

Two years ago I lost 50 lbs doing an all meat ketogenic diet. From 245+ lbs to 195 lbs. This was monumental at 60 years of age where it was so difficult for me to lose weight for over a decade. I had lost some weight earlier just doing Atkins, but all meat worked perfectly for me with a lot more success. I've since regained all that weight but still remember how I felt. The difficulty has been to do it again, but I've been working on it.

My experience was exactly like Woo's and I wasn't even at my ideal weight. Heat and sunlight didn't bother me, I didn't need sunglasses, I slept well, nothing hurt, no migraines, I felt euphoric all the time, happy, energetic. I ate once a day usually. No cravings.

I know what happened to make me fall off the wagon which I have not been able to securely get back on. Food allergies are my nemesis and even though I was on a meat only diet I made the mistake of making beanless  all meat chili. The chili powder and spices were the culprits. Plus my lack of willpower to immediately get back on track after. But I'm still working on it and thinking about how great I felt, being reminded is helping.

This really must stop

A study recently updated with material analyzed  recently (data lost for over 40 years) is discussed here on Fat Head's site and here on Dr. Briffa's site. I am amazed that no main stream media picked up on this, as I check CBC and BBC news on the net several times a day. Nowhere have I seen this information except on low carbish/paleoish blogs. Now why is that? This is earth shattering news that should be broadcast from all media outlets. Of course we already know all this as we have been swimming upstream for quite some time but the people who should immediately have this information are those who need it the most: doctors, dieticians, nutritionists, the Heart Association, etc. Yet there is this wall of silence out there. Some vegan has a thought that "red meat kills" and it's plastered everywhere you look. This really must stop.