What Should We Eat?

So once we realize that the food pyramid has been upside-down our whole lives, what do we eat? We pretty much have to re-think everything that goes in our mouths. They have literally turned the truth completely upside-down on us! They tell us that sugar is innocent and that animal fat is killing us, and the exact opposite is true. Sugar and grains are killing us and animal fat is the healthiest food we can eat. Saturated fat is absolute health food! The Inuit (Eskimos) are the healthiest people we've ever found and they eat 80% animal fat. There is an amazing researcher responsible for this discovery, Vilhjalmer Steffansson. You can read his book, My Life With the Eskimo, on google books.

Basically this man went to live with the Inuit mulitple times for months or years at a time, spending more than 5 years of his life living with them. He adopted their diet and then studied himself and brought Inuit people into the lab as well, taking blood samples and measuring all kinds of disease parameters and nutrient levels. Off the chart healthy. They eat nothing but animal foods for almost 9 months of the year, and show no deficiencies, no disease. They do have some health problems, like high infection rates, which is attributed to their close living conditions and the unsanitary nature of living in a small ice house with many people.

The question people most often ask me is, What should I eat? So here is a list of meal and snack ideas.

Breakfast: easy peasy, as long as you love eggs and bacon. If you don't, it's time to learn. After a couple days of eggs for breakfast, you will start to crave them right when you wake up. Eggs have an amino acid profile of 100. They essentially set the standard for all other proteins. Plus they are full of extremely healthy cholesterol (doesn't cause heart disease, that is a huge myth), other healthy fats, and vitamins. For some reason, I just love pork products in the morning. Beef, chicken, or fish for breakfast just seems gross, but bring on the bacon, sausage, and ham for breakfast! Then eat beef and fish for lunch and dinner, since they are healthier than pork. I also have a quarter or half of a grapefruit most mornings, or some berries with yogurt, or maybe a piece of grain-free toast (the gluten-free bread from the Wedge makes better toast than any wheat bread) if I want a carb serving in the morning, which lately I usually don't.

Frittata: 8 eggs, 1 cup of cheddar cheese, half cup cream, 10 pieces of bacon or sausage or both, any other ingredients you want like mushrooms, scallions, tomato, garlic, onion, spinach. Fry up the meat and veggies in some butter or bacon fat, then stir in the beaten eggs, cream, and cheese, then bake in the oven for 20-30 mins at 350 degrees until cooked through. Delish.

Another amazing breakfast recipe that can be premade and frozen to have something quick to grab in the morning: Bacon Muffins! These are fabulous.
http://www.cheeseslave.com/2009/01/06/low-carb-bacon-egg-cheese-muffins/

Lunch or dinner ideas:
Wild caught salmon burger (frozen), on a bed of greens with melted cheese, dill, and lemon

Pizza toast - Gluten free bread with pizza sauce, pepperoni, sausage, and mozzarella in the oven for 10 minutes. Great for kids.

Brats with kim chi or sauerkraut and mustard, with cheese melted on top

Grilled summer sausage and cheese sandwich on GF bread.

Coconut curry -  soup or stirfry with any veggies or meat you want, fish sauce, ginger, garlic

Shepard's Pie, heavy on the meat and non-root vegetables and light on the potatoes

No pasta lasagna - julienned zucchini, artichoke hearts, olives, diced tomatoes and spinach instead of pasta with the usual meat sauce, ricotta, parmesan and mozzarella layers

Spaghetti with meat sauce and spaghetti squash instead of noodles - just cut the spag squash in half, rub with olive oil and bake cut-side down for 20 mins in the oven at 350 or so. Then scrape with a fork and instant spaghetti noodles!

Any big piece of meat like a steak or some oven baked chicken, with a green vegetable side like asparagus, broccoli, brussel sprouts, swiss chard, kale, etc. My favorite new way to cook green veggies is sprinkled with o.o. and salt/pepper, then baked in the oven. They get all crispy, like green potato chips. Yum. Baked chicken is really good with herbs, garlic, and butter smeared on it before you bake it.

Pot roast. So easy and so good. Brown the roast in a hot pan with some bacon fat or o.o. in it, then pour broth over the top, add celery, onion, garlic, and a couple carrots and cook on low heat for many hours. Maybe add some baby portobellos toward the end for the last half hour or so.

Three awesome dessert ideas:
These first two can be made with stevia, and hardly anyone could tell it wasn't made with sugar. I especially like the Sweetleaf Stevia, although it has inulin in it, so don't eat it if you struggle with candida.
Panna Cotta. The best recipe is Giada's, just use 1/4 of the sugar she calls for (a good rule of thumb for any dessert recipe, if you get your tolerance down, you won't even notice after a short adjustment time) or a little stevia. No, honey, maple syrup, and agave are not better for you than sugar. Just the same, or even higher in fructose, which is worse for you than glucose.
http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/giada-de-laurentiis/panna-cotta-with-fresh-berries-recipe/index.html

Egg Custard. So good and so easy, I could make it in my sleep. I eat this constantly. You can use 4 cups of cream instead of the cream and milk if you are trying to lose weight. Milk has lactose - milk sugar which is half glucose and will cause a insulin release, which causes fat storage.
8 eggs, 2 cups cream, 2 cups whole milk, a little bit of some sweetener (or better yet, a teaspoon of stevia), 1 t vanilla, couple dashes of nutmeg (I like to add some before mixing and also dust some on top) and a dash of fine salt. Wisk or hand-mix, then set your custard cups or large glass bowl in a slightly larger cake pan and pour an inch of hot water in the bottom, and place the whole thing in the oven at 325 degrees (not above 350 so the water doesn't boil much) for about 35-40 mins.

Best cookies ever, and they are gluten-free. No one will ever know. So yummy. Just skip the weird grapeseed oil and use room temp butter, and you can go easy on the raisins, or even better, use dark chocolate chips instead! And you don't even need the full quarter cup of sugar - I usually aim for less than 5 grams of sugar per cookie. Stevia doesn't work so well with chocolate, almond flour, or other flours. Stevia is best with dairy and eggs. Best to just use a little sugar here and skip your fruit or other carbs for today.
http://www.elanaspantry.com/dinas-delightful-cookies/

Hope that gives you some good ideas to get you started! Remember calories don't exist, they only truly measure carbohydrates. Keep your carbohydrates below 50-80 grams/day for weight loss - about 2 or 3 small servings, spaced throughout the day. Then eat all the beef, bacon, sausage, chicken, cream, yogurt, eggs, and fish that you desire and watch the pounds fall away! Happy eating!

How Can I Lose Weight?

A full two-thirds of Americans are overweight or obese. Another two-thirds will eventually die from a “metabolic” disease, caused by diet. The American government has been telling us to eat a high-carbohydrate, low-fat diet for the last 50 years, but in spite of this, disease rates are climbing astronomically. How is this possible?

It is an established fact in nutrition and physiology that there are many hormones that cause lipolysis (fat breakdown) in fat tissue, but only ONE hormone that causes triglyceride formation (fat storage) and that hormone is insulin. It is also an established fact that the only food source that causes insulin to be released by the pancreas is carbohydrates. (Amino acids also cause a small amount of insulin release, perhaps because the body can create glucose from amino acids if there is no glucose present in the diet.)

So, only carbohydrates cause insulin release, and only insulin causes fat storage. It blows my mind in my nutrition classes every day that these two facts are so well known, yet the connection is never made that only the consumption of carbohydrates causes fat storage. The body is literally unable to store fat without the presence of carbohydrates in the diet. There are studies done where people ate an excess of 3,000-4,000 calories a day of only animal foods and STILL LOST WEIGHT.

Basically Atkins was right, he just didn’t have the science to back up his experience. He reported that his success rate with weight loss was about 99%. Most people that switch to a very-low-carbohydrate diet (VLCD) can expect to lose 10 pounds in the first week or two, which is initially mostly water weight. My physiology textbook tells us that the consumption of carbohydrates causes the retention of sodium and water. So most of us are carrying around an extra 10 pounds or so of extra water weight. After this water weight, depending on how much weight you have to lose, one can lose 5-10 pounds A WEEK by simply cutting carbohydrates.

Why can some people eat more food and stay thin? Why do some people struggle to keep weight on, while other people only need to smell food and they gain weight? Because obesity is a hormonal condition – and different people have varying abilities to digest carbohydrates and then use the glucose as fuel. Overweight people are simply storing their food as fat rather than using it as fuel. Its not that we eat too much and get fat, it is that WE STORE FAT, THEN WE EAT MORE FOOD. We have the cause and effect backwards, which is a common problem in medical and scientific theory. Ad hoc, ergo proctor hoc. Correlation does not infer causation – just because two things are related does not mean one causes the other, it is possible that they are both caused by another factor, which is the case here. The formation of fat tissue, and the increased eating that usually follows, are both caused by the excessive consumption of carbohydrates.

So there is nothing to feel guilty about. It is not a moral issue. Fat people usually eat less than thin people, but their bodies continually store the food rather than using it for activity. Studies have shown that thin people also have a slightly higher body temperature at times, indicating that their bodies simply release extra food energy as heat, or even create the motivation for increased activity – overweight people often report feeling lethargic, this is because their bodies are short on fuel because their food is being stored. 

And exercise? Well, it’s only effective because it burns off excess blood glucose or glycogen (stored glucose). You end up with the same exact effect if you don’t eat the carbs and don’t do the exercise.  In fact, there is pretty good evidence that cardio activity is actually hard on your heart and contributes to higher rates of heart problems. If you’re going to eat carbs, do it right before you exercise, and choose a low-impact activity like weight-lifting or yoga.

So what foods should I avoid? Anything that contains carbohydrates, including fruit (berries aren’t so bad, they’re pretty low in sugar), fruit juice, sugar, honey, agave, all foods that contain flour or grains like bread, pasta, cookies, cakes, crackers, etc. If you have a couple servings of carbohydrates a day the best ones are berries, a little white rice (rice crackers, rice pasta), a little potato, or a small amount of some sweetener. If you are already pre-diabetic, it is probably better to eat the carbs with some fat and protein in order to slow the increase in blood sugar, but if you are solely trying to lose a few pounds, it is better to eat the carbs on their own, preferably before getting some exercise.

And what else can I eat? Basically if it came from an animal, eat up. Bacon, eggs with yolks, cream, cheese, all meats – especially ruminents like cows and bison, full fat unsweetened yogurt, greens, and berries. I will explain in a future post why our medical community and government think that fat causes disease, but fat is not the problem. Carbohydrates are the sole cause of obesity and metabolic diseases that most people die from, so don’t worry that you are being unhealthy in anyway by eating loads of animal fat. I recommend 5 pieces of bacon a day, 3 or more eggs, lots of cheese and/or yogurt every day, meat at every meal, and heavy cream instead of milk.

Meal ideas: Taco salad with meat, cheese, sour cream, salsa, guacamole; meaty spaghetti with a few rice pasta noodles (they are even better than regular wheat pasta without the harmful gluten proteins) or even better, spaghetti squash baked in the oven; pot roast with celery, onion, garlic, and a couple potatoes; shepard’s pie heavy on the meat and cream, light on the mashed potatoes; sausage with sauerkraut and greens sauted in bacon fat. And for dessert – egg custard or panna cotta made with stevia, almond flour cookies, or a small amount of dark chocolate – really any flourless dessert can easily be made at home with stevia or else a quarter of the sugar that the recipe usually calls for. You will adjust to less sugar, and regular desserts will start to taste sickeningly sweet.

It’s so exciting to watch the pounds fall away! I couldn’t believe how easy it was.  You get to be full all the time and eat all day long! Fat doesn’t make you fat, carbohydrates do!