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You are here: Home / Archives for cravings for sweets

Low carb: the solution for lasting weight loss & better health

February 17, 2016 by drchrista Leave a Comment

low carbLow carb diets seem to carry some sort of undeserved apprehension lately, so it was really great to see this article making the rounds on social media this week. Of course, this probably has to do with the fact that “low-carb” and Atkins have unfortunately become synonymous- like using a “Kleenex” instead of a tissue and “Chapstick” as opposed to lip balm. Let’s clear that up right here and now- Atkin’s is a type of low carb diet, but not all low carb diets are Atkin’s. My theory is that the apprehension comes about because most of us know someone who lost a ton of weight on Atkin’s- then gained it all back when they resumed eating “normally” again. The implied assumption then, is that Atkin’s (and by extension all low-carb diets) doesn’t work. This is a logical fallacy and is just plain wrong.

Let’s turn it around for a moment and make the opposite assumption. If eating “normally” is what caused a person to gain excess weight in the first place, doesn’t it make more sense that their return to “normal” eating after a low carb diet is a much better reason for why they gained that weight again?

Obesity rates decline with adoption of high fat, low carb diets

Emerging research is corroborating this assumption. The meteoric rise in obesity rates seems to originate in the late 70s- right around the time that policy recommendations were being implemented that vilified cholesterol, saturated foods and animal products. The 80s were the heyday of the low-fat craze, with new “fat-free” Frankenfoods being developed at an unprecedented rate. Obesity has continued to skyrocket despite our adoption of these policies and low-fat foods. Yet, in Sweden, up to 23% of the population embraces a high fat, low carb diet. And while obesity rates continue to climb steadily elsewhere in the world, Sweden is actual seeing a decline in their obesity rate.

High fat, low carb diets produce less insulin; body fat storage

What we know about the biochemical mechanism underlying this phenomenon also reinforces low carb diets as the answer to lasting weight loss and better overall health. Insulin is a hormone that is released in the presence of carbohydrate and to a lesser extent, protein. (Notice that fat does not provoke an insulin release.) Insulin’s job is to lower blood sugar. It does this in two ways. First, by triggering uptake of digested carbohydrates (glucose) into the cells to be made into energy to fuel them. But it also acts as a storage hormone, causing any excess sugars to be cleared from the blood and stored in the fat tissue as triglycerides for later use. This where many folks run into problems losing weight. They overeat carbohydrates, keeping insulin high and promoting storage of any excess carbohydrates and even calories, as fat. A high fat, low carb diet by contrast reduces the need for insulin. In the short term, this means less excess insulin to promote fat storage. Long-term, less insulin means less stimulus for the development of insulin resistance & type 2 diabetes.

Fat does not cause clogged arteries

The reputation of low carb diets also suffers from mistakenly assuming that saturated fats and cholesterol clog arteries. While it’s true that cholesterol is the main constituent of the arterial plaques, that doesn’t meant cholesterol causes the plaque. The analogy I use is of spackle. You don’t blame the hole in the wall on the spackle just because it is there plugging the hole. The same goes for cholesterol, which did not cause the “hole” in the artery. This damage is more likely to come from elevated blood sugar, elevated insulin or even turbulent blood flow in an area due to poor mobility and a sedentary lifestyle.

Low carb diets can be sustainable & healthy

We are left with the real culprit- the return to so-called “normal eating.” If people return to anything that approximates the Standard American Diet- they are likely returning to a diet full of bread, pasta, and other processed foods. I’ve worked with many patients who think they ‘eat healthy.’ When I investigate this further, they eat oatmeal for breakfast, a sandwich for lunch and often pasta for dinner. They’ve assumed that because their meals were “low-fat” they were healthy. Meanwhile, what they actually ate were carbs, carbs and more carbs. No vegetables, certainly nothing with much color, and they’ve insured that insulin level spiked several times throughout that day (with resultant plunges as well). The S.A.D. averages over 300g of carbohydrate per day. The health benefits of “low-carb” can start with carbohydrate levels as high as 100-150g/day. Atkin’s and ketogenic diets, also known as ‘very low carb’ are often under 75g of carbohydrate/day. If one’s primary carbohydrate sources are from vegetables instead of processed grain products, it can be very easy to sustain a healthy diet of 100-150g/day of carbohydrate. Some can even get by on less by including increased levels of high quality fats in their diet. By finding a healthy level of carbohydrates that works for you, you can achieve lasting weight loss while improving your health!

Filed Under: Nutrition, Weight loss Tagged With: carbohydrates, cravings for sweets, fat loss, obesity, weight loss

Fat Loss Simplified!

December 28, 2015 by drchrista Leave a Comment

fat loss simplified

This time of year, many people aspire to lose weight and get in shape in the coming year. When they say “lose weight,” almost all of us mean fat loss. Unfortunately, there is so much conflicting and just plain wrong information out there, that most people will start a program, see little if any results, and give up before February rolls around. So how do you break the cycle and find a leaner, fitter you?

  1. Fat loss is 80% diet. If you’re killing yourself with an hour a day on the treadmill or elliptical, then coming home and diving into pile of junk food because ‘you earned it,’ then the point is being missed. You’ve probably seen the popular meme “you can’t out run a bad diet.” It’s true. You can drop 10 or 15 pounds and still have terrible blood lipid or sugar numbers because of what you are eating. Isn’t the whole point of doing all that exercise in the first place to be healthier?
  2. Instead of calories in, think about calories stored. This is a concept Mark Sisson talks about on his blog, Mark’s Daily Apple. Part of the problem with trying to increase your caloric expenditure (exercising) while simultaneously decreasing your caloric intake (dieting) is that this sends signals to the body that it is in danger. In the interest of your survival, several hormonal mechanisms are activated. First, cortisol is raised to increase your blood sugar levels. If you don’t immediately use this sugar for energy, it’s then stored as fat, under the influence of insulin. The hypothalamus, a control center in your brain, will send out signals to down-regulate (decrease) your metabolism, while simultaneously increasing your appetite in order to save energy and ensure your continued survival. So instead of trying to decrease your calories, to optimize for fat loss, focus on feeding your body high quality, nutrient dense foods like meat, fish, fowl, eggs, plenty of vegetables, a few fruits, nuts and seeds. (They contain fewer calories then processed foods anyway.) Also, make sure you get plenty of high quality fat in your diet. Fat DOES NOT make you fat! Repeat after me: FAT DOES NOT MAKE YOU FAT! Fat is the only macronutrient that does not provoke an insulin release when digested. Carbohydrates do (and proteins to a lesser extent) and the more processed the carbohydrates, the more insulin is secreted. Under the influence of insulin, any excess carbohydrates in the body are stored for later use as fat. This was a very handy adaptation when our species was evolving and living as hunter-gatherers. It helped us survive in times of famine and food scarcity. Unfortunately, these days, with food always being plentiful, we just keep eating- particularly carbs and processed foods- and never signal to our bodies to dip into those stored fats. So, if you are currently overweight and trying to lose fat, you will have better success by limiting carbohydrate intake to just vegetables and increasing your intake of high-quality dietary fats in order to encourage your body to use fat as its primary fuel source. (High quality fats include coconut oil, grass-fed butter and ghee, animal fats from pastured & grassfed animals, occasional use of pure extra virgin olive oil, avocado or walnut oils. Do NOT increase consumption of processed trans and polyunsaturated fats like corn, soybean, canola or vegetable oils. These introduce dangerous free radicals into the body that actually make atherosclerosis worse! Eliminate them at all costs!)
  3. Focus on aerobic exercise. During aerobic exercise, we are able to take in enough oxygen to preferentially burn fat for fuel, the holy grail for fat loss. This discovery is what lead to the ‘aerobics’ craze in the 80s. (Remember Jane Fonda and all that Lyrca?) The thing is, we’ve gotten so focused now on “burning off” all those offending calories that we’ve missed what constitutes ‘aerobic exercise.’ We think “no pain, no gain” (another terrible T-shirt from the 80s) and work harder. Except once you’re working at pace where you can no longer breath through your nose easily, you’ve exceeded this aerobic threshold. Said another way, you are no longer burning fat. Regular old walking is great aerobic exercise for fat loss. If you’re an endurance athlete, get a heart rate monitor and use the Maffetone method to calculate your aerobic threshold and then train only below that heart rate until you see fat loss.
  4. Strength train. The rate of your metabolism is primarily determined by the amount of lean muscle mass you have. More lean muscle tissue = a speeder metabolism. Also, we have some good data that shows that strength training and building muscle helps ‘partition’ your weight loss to make sure that it comes preferentially from fat tissue instead of muscle tissue. If you’ve experienced the pain of yo-yo dieting- where you lost the weight only to gain it back and again (and then some) this is your best strategy to prevent this from ever happening again! By strength training, you will keep your lean muscle tissue and therefore keep your metabolism revved up while getting rid of excess fat tissue. The best strength training to do is to lift heavy a couple of times a week in the big compound lifts like the squat, deadlift, press and pull-up. If you don’t know how to do these lifts safely, please seek qualified instruction from a certified and credential trainer or strength coach. For women, please do not worry about getting bulky from lifting heavy. If you lift heavy, for a short set of 4-6 reps and then give yourself a rest of 3-5 minutes between sets, you will signal increased strength without increased bulk (hypertrophy). Conversely, the best way to increase the size of the muscle is to do light weight and high reps. Also for the ladies, it is so empowering to lift heavy and see how strong and capable your body is! Strength training is a veritable fountain of youth for both men and women as its keeps joints strong and healthy while keeping metabolism high so as to prevent those extra pounds from creeping on each year.
  5. Exercise really hard on occasion. Once you’ve got all that down- eating an appropriate diet, walking or slow running (or whatever exercise method floats your boat) and strength training, then its time to add in a few bouts of sprinting. This only needs to be and should only be done 1-2 times a week and doesn’t have to be very long. One study found that women who sprinted hard on a bicycle for 8 seconds, followed by 12 seconds of rest for a total of 20 minutes, over 15 weeks, had lost 3 times as much body fat as their counterparts who cycled at a steady pace for 40 minutes. (Most of this fat was from their thighs and buttocks too!) Research shows that high intensity interval training has the ability to decrease insulin signaling (decrease fat storage), decrease blood glucose and increase fat oxidation- all in way less time than steady-state cardio. And it doesn’t take much. One or two, short high-intensity session as week is all you need.

So there you have it- 5 simple steps toward obtainable and sustainable fat loss that will also help you become healthier in the process. Sure, there are other ways to lose fat- like crash dieting or becoming a cardio junkie, but those methods ruin your hormone balance and/or increase your level of inflammation and chronic disease risk.  And if you’re just going to ruin your health in the end, what’s the point of doing all that hard work in the first place?

If you’d like to start a journey towards losing fat and getting healthier in the coming year, but are unsure about how to start or need help staying on track, you may want to check out the New Year, New You! whole-food based cleanse that I am offering starting in January. You can learn more about the program here. 

Filed Under: Weight loss Tagged With: calories in=calories out, carbohydrates, cortisol, cravings for sweets, fat loss, hormones, obesity, weight loss

Making your resolutions stick! Part 1- The Mind

December 12, 2013 by drchrista Leave a Comment

We are coming up to that time of year when most people like to make New Year’s resolutions, but 95% of people will have given up on those resolutions before the end of January. Its to the point where gyms count on you buying that full-year membership on January 1 and then not using it for the majority of the year!

What is perhaps most sad about this state of affairs is that the most common things people resolve to do in the coming year revolve around their health- giving up smoking, losing weight and exercising more are the most common. So as a HEALTHcare provider, I feel that this an important part of my job to help people keep their positive, health-related resolutions.

To this end, for the month of December, I am going to do a series of posts about how to go about successfully implementing long-term changes that will help you achieve your health goals.

Let’s start here: Your mind. 

Did you know that when you have an emotion, receptors on the cell surface get ‘locked’ into a specific shape that fits that neurotransmitter? It’s true and if you want to know more, I encourage to explore neurobiologist Candice Pert’s seminole work on the subject, “Molecules of Emotion.” The point is, there is a biochemical mechanism for how our thoughts create our reality and can either create or destroy our health.

So how can we use this knowledge in the achievement of our health goals?

  1.  Know where you want to go. When your goal is simply “to lose weight” or “eat better” its too vague. How much weight? What kind of time frame? What does ‘eating better’ mean to you? We’ve all had the experience of having a project to do. When there is a deadline for when that project needs to be done, its much more motivating then when there is no deadline. Set a deadline for your goal. Define specifics- i.e., ‘I’m going to eat at least 5 servings a veggies a day.’ If your goal is a big one, break it down into smaller, more realistic ones. ‘I’m going to lose 10 pounds in two months’ or ‘I’m going to start by eating 3 servings of veggies and day and drinking 2 glasses of water for the next three weeks. Then I will add two more servings of veggies a day, drink 3 glasses of water a day and cut sweets down to 3 treats a week.’ The other advantage of this is that it gives you clear measures of success along the way. When you succeed at the smaller goals, it creates a ‘motivation snowball’ that helps you keep the momentum and motivation up to continue moving forward.
  2. Know your why. What is your core motivation? Why do you want to achieve this goal? Do you want to be a better example to your kids? To your family? Are there activities you enjoy that you are not able to do because of your current health? Identifying your ‘why’ is what often separates people who succeed at their goals from those who don’t. The catch is this: your ‘why’ needs to be powerful and intrinsic. Saying ‘I want to lose weight so I look better in a bathing suit’ generally isn’t’ powerful enough for most people. Why? Because it is a temporary and external goal. Very few of us, when tempted with pizza or ice cream, can say,’ but that bathing suit….’ Most of us will think, ‘screw it, give me the pizza, I don’t really care that much about what other people think.’ So your why needs to be something that is more powerful then what you may want at the time. Suppose your goal is to exercise more. Your motivation needs to be stronger then the comfort you get from sitting on the couch. It also helps if this goal is for you. Losing weight because you want to feel better about yourself is generally more powerful then doing it to please someone else.
  3. “Fail to plan and you plan to fail.” This relates to knowing where you want to go. Once you know where you want to go and your why, break it down and make a plan for how you will arrive at that end destination. If your goal is to eat better, are you going to go Paleo, vegan, or follow some other diet? Do you know how to eat that way? Do you have cookbooks to give you recipe ideas when you’re not sure what to make for dinner? Have you cleaned out your cupboards so there are no unhealthy foods to tempt you in a moment of weakness? This is a really powerful and important step. For most people, making a resolution stick in not about having enough willpower, but having a detailed plan. We all have moments of weakness, moments where it is very tempting to give up and go back to the comfort of our old habits. Having a plan in place to deal with such moments is the key.
  4. Visualize your success. I mean really visualize. Before bed and first thing in the morning, close your eyes and visualize what achieving your goal will be like. Be as detailed as possible. How does it feel? How is your life improved? Feel the happiness of having achieved this goal. Be grateful for it in that moment, treat it like its already true in your life. This is a powerful exercise that begins to align all the cells of your body with your new reality and sets the stage for lasting change.

So spend some time really thinking what your health goals are this year and why. Write them down. Write down why you want to achieve and then write down a detailed plan for how you will go about achieving them. In the post of this series, I will talk more about the specific ACTIONS to take to be successful at your goals.

Filed Under: Motivation Tagged With: cravings for sweets, eating better, exercising more, health goals, losing weight, obesity, resolutions, weight gain

Up and at ’em with B vitamins

October 3, 2012 by drchrista Leave a Comment

Read below and see if any of these ring a bell:

heart disease
hypoglycemia (low blood sugar)
neuritis/neuralgia (nerve pain)
depression and/or anxiety
weakness & fatigue
exhaustion after eating a meal
poor or lack of appetite
cravings for sweets
headaches, noise sensitivity
insomnia
nervousness
forgetfulness
severe apprehension/uneasiness
unusual fear, rage, or hostility
hallucinations
a constant and almost debilitating fear that something terrible is going to happen

You may be asking what these things could possibly have in common. Well, I’ll tell you. They are all symptoms of B-complex deficiency syndrome (BCDS).

We take for granted that in our culture of abundance, people could suffer from such a seemingly archaic syndrome. Everything is fortified with B vitamins right??? But that is also the problem. B vitamins are co-factors (helpers) for many enzymes in the body. No B vitamins, no properly working enzymes. Highly processed foods often leave the body with a negative B vitamin balance because they require B vitamins to be digested, but then put nothing back in to your system. It’s like overdrawing your bank account. The chemically-synthesized versions that are added back into the food during the fortification process are not the same as the naturally occurring versions of these vitamins. In fact, some of the B vitamins, like B4, cannot be synthesized.

So if you ate a lot of junk food or drank a lot of alcohol this holiday season, that sluggish, anxious or depressed feeling you’re having may be more than just a case of the “Mondays.” That feeling may be your body’s way of saying “I need REAL food! I need REAL B vitamins- STAT!”

An interesting note here is the children are especially sensitive to insufficient amounts of B vitamins and it often shows up first as mental and emotional instability. If you have a teenager, you know this full well. So if your child starts to show symptoms like those above, good food and a quality B vitamin supplement, like that from Standard Process, may be warranted before a prescription for powerful psychoactive drugs.

The information in this article is intended for educational purposes only and is not meant to diagnose or treat any symptoms you may be having. Consult your physician before stopping or starting any medications or natural supplements.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anxiety, B vitamin deficiency, B vitamins, cravings for sweets, depression, fatigue, fearfulness, forgetfulness, heart disease, hypoglycemia, weakness

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Dr. Christa

I am a Chiropractor helping patients to have less pain, move with more freedom and ease, and have more energy for the things they love. More…

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