Healthy Dieting

The dry-frying technique

`How do I fry without fat?’ is one of the most common questions my patients ask me. Let me introduce you to the concept or dry-frying, which is used in many of the recipes. Dry-frying is a method of sautéing -rood without using oil or butter. There is no difference in the flavour or the final dish, although the preparation takes a little longer.

Hoff fill a teacup with boiling water and add a teaspoon of’ stock powder. Stir until dissolved, then fill the cup to the top with red or white wine – any cheap plonk will do! CIF you don’t drink alcohol, use apple juice instead.) Read the rest of this entry »

Read the nutritional content tables

These tables, printed on the labels of many foods, offer consumers a quick and easy way of detecting fats in food, and are probably your most powerful tool in the quest for fat-free eating! Unfortunately, only some local manufacturers and two major supermarket chains (Woolworths and Pick ‘n Pay) include these tables on their products.

These tables usually show the nutritional breakdown of the food per 100 g of product, showing the proportion of carbohydrates, proteins, sugar, fats, and so on. For the purposes of the X Diet, you can ignore all the food groups except the fats. Read the rest of this entry »

To save me having to make endless lists of other foods that contain fats, I’m going to show you how to become a ‘fat sleuth’ — in other words, to empower yourself as a consumer so that you are easily able to detect hidden fat. And how do you do this? By reading the label of everything — and I mean everything — you buy. Here are some important steps:

Analyze the list of ingredients

Recently, it’s become law that manufacturers of food products have to list ingredients on the label. These should be listed in descending order from the largest ingredient to the smallest (although, at present, only some manufacturers and two large supermarket chains fully comply with this requirement). Read the rest of this entry »

`Why, for so many years,’ I hear you ask, ‘have I been told that too much sugar and carbohydrates make you fat?’ This is a reasonable question, given the huge proliferation of fad diets over the last few decades.

There are two answers. First, in years gone by, foods were not considered interesting enough to warrant in-depth research, so many diets involved plain guess-work. Second, those responsibl_e for formulating traditional calorie-cutting diets noticed that people who ate a lot of carbohydrates got fatter. It was thus quite logical to assume that carbohydrates were the culprits. Read the rest of this entry »

Your pancreas releases insulin

Let’s go back to your blood. Your blood-sugar level has doubled since you ate the wholewheat toast, and your brain is buzzing happily. Not only that, but the ‘flood’ of glucose in your blood has stimulated your pancreas to produce insulin. Think of insulin as an army of soldiers embarking on a mopping-up operation. If there is a large flood of glucose into the bloodstream (caused by eating high-GI foods), the pancreas releases many insulin soldiers into the blood. Read the rest of this entry »

Imagine that your stomach is empty. You have not eaten during the night, and you are ready for breakfast. Your blood already has a certain concentration of sugar (glucose) flowing through it. This has an approximate value of 5. To simplify matters drastically, this means there are five ‘bits’ of sugar in each sample of blood, and that this concentration is constant throughout the body. Read the rest of this entry »

As I reveal this information, I can imagine women readers squirming uneasily at the mention of building muscle. Rest assured that when I speak of muscle building by eating carbohydrates I do not mean muscle bulking. Even if you were to eat two whole loaves of bread a day, you would not turn into the Incredible Hulk. It’s entirely feasible that a man will become more impressively muscular on such a regime, but a woman will not. Read the rest of this entry »

Imagine it’s now late afternoon and you haven’t eaten for quite a while. You decide, this time, to eat a low-GI food (a reminder: these are foods that have low scores on the Glycaemic Index, because they dissolve into their component sugars much more slowly than high-GI foods).

You decide to eat a plain bowl of pasta. Pasta cooked for a short time (say 10 minutes) has a GI of about 45, which is very low indeed. Because the carbohydrates in pasta break down into sugars very slowly, the sugar is released bit by bit into the blood over a long period of time. The blood sugar therefore rises gradually, say to 6. It certainly doesn’t shoot straight up to 10, as would be the case if you had eaten a slice of bread or a baked potato. Read the rest of this entry »

The discovery of leptin has prompted a gold rush of further hormone discovery around appetite. For instance, how does your body know when to stop eating because you are full up? An obvious mechanism is via nerves that run from the gut to the brain which are fired by physical distension of the gut — that too-stuffed-tomove feeling. The problem with this theory, although there are nerves that undoubtedly do this, is that a meal of boiled cabbage can still leave you feeling hungry, even though you feel completely bloated. Nor does putting 600 calories in through a line intravenously make you feel full the way that a 600-cal0rie Big Mac does. Read the rest of this entry »

So, at one extreme, we have genetically determined problems with hormones or their pathways as a cause of gross obesity, mostly commencing in childhood. Then there is the middle ground as it were, where the response of our hormones to the things that we do (or don’t do), like exercise and overeat, makes us fat — and sometimes very, very fat. There are relatively small numbers of people in the first category — possibly 5 per cent of those who are obese — but the numbers in the second category run to tens of millions. Knowing this has drug companies rubbing their hands in glee. For if hormones make you fat, can they not also be used to make you thin? Read the rest of this entry »

The ‘detoxifying’ diets and fasts so popular these days can actually harm your metabolism. Let me introduce you now to a food that truly earns its status as the ultimate `detoxifies’ — water!

Very few of us drink enough water. ‘I never get thirsty,’ some of my patients tell me. ‘I just don’t seem to need very much water.’ This is nothing to be proud of. Not drinking enough is a bad habit that many people drift into — and it’s exactly that, a habit. Read the rest of this entry »

What to drink when you’re not drinking

Instead of reaching for a second glass of wine, a beer or a brandy when you get home from work, try one of these tempting alternatives. All the following drinks are freely permitted on the  Diet:

• Iced cola poured over crushed ice with a twist of lemon and a dash of bitters.
• Indian tonic water with a tot of lime cordial.
• Ginger ale with lemonade and a dash of bitters.
• Appletiser with soda and ice.
• Passion fruit cordial and lemonade.
• Chilled tomato juice with Tabasco sauce, Worcester sauce and lemon.
• Non-alcoholic daiquiri made by blending crushed ice, fresh strawberries and grenadine.
• Chilled iced tea with a twist of lemon and a sprig of lemon balm.
• Lemonade made by mixing together fresh lemon juice, crushed ice, lots of fructose and a dash of grenadine.
• Non-alcoholic sparkling wines (for a delicious fizzy drink, try Woolworths’ new Elderflower champagne’).

A more efficient body

The real way to ‘cleanse’

I do not hold with fasts or ‘detoxifying’ diets. If you are feeling sluggish, run-down or ‘clogged up’, then the only way to remedy these sensations is to make your body work more quickly and more efficiently. Here are some tips:

• Try to empty your bowels at least twice a day. To do this, you need to eat large quantities of fresh fruit and vegetables. If you follow the X Diet to the letter, you will not have any difficulty achieving this goal! Read the rest of this entry »

How much water you need to drink every day depends on your individual metabolism and on your weight. Here is a handy formula for working out your estimated needs:

Take your body weight, round it off upwards to the nearest 10, divide by 10 and then add 2. This is the number of glasses (250 ml) of water you need to drink every day.

If, for example, you weigh 79 kg, you should drink ten glasses of water a day (80/10 +2 = 10). This is the amount of water you need to drink on an average day, but if you are exercising, you will need to add at least another three glasses of water. Read the rest of this entry »

Alcohol increases your sex hormones

A complication of this upset liver function is the production of more cholesterol-related triglycerides and sex hormones. In men, the levels of the sex hormone testosterone can begin to rise. Apart from many other important functions, testosterone controls the distribution of fat on the male body. Any extra fat that a drinker consumes (and it’s usually a lot) will be directed straight to the gut area, rather than spread evenly over the body, as would happen in a man with normal testosterone levels. Another function of excess testosterone is to speed up hair loss. This may give you a large fright, but the more alcohol you drink, the higher the risk of losing your hair more quickly! Read the rest of this entry »

Let me let you in on a couple of very sobering physiological truths. Here are some facts about alcohol that may come as a surprise:

Alcohol overloads the liver

Our bodies possess a huge and magnificent factory called the liver. When we don’t eat for a while and our blood-sugar levels become depleted, we begin to feel rather lightheaded. The liver, when it realises that there is a problem, is able to make its own sugar by drawing on any resources of the body it so chooses. It can draw fat from the body or proteins from muscles, and in an intricate cycle it uses these ‘raw materials’ to produce more sugar for the blood. This cycle is known as endogenous gluconeogenesis. Endogenous means ‘from our bodies’ (as opposed to from our diets), gluco means ‘sugar‘ and neogenesis means ‘making new’. Read the rest of this entry »

All calories are not equal. Some foods, such as fats, contain calories that are eminently ’storable’ — that is, the body doesn’t think twice about storing them as fat. Other calories, such as those in carbohydrates, are not so readily stored. This is because they are burnt by the body as fast as they are eaten. Read the rest of this entry »

Consider your average working person: let us call her Samantha. She is in a rush to get to an early meeting, so she doesn’t have breakfast. She drives through the smog of the early rush-hour traffic, fretting about being late. When she’s finished the meeting, she rushes out to lunch. She orders a toasted sandwich with smoked salmon, and finishes off with filter coffee that has been brewing on the stove for many hours. She eats her meal sitting in the sun. Then it’s back to the office for more coffee as she frantically races against a deadline. Read the rest of this entry »

Oxidant-induced hypercholesterolaemia

Oxidant-induced hypercholesterolaemia can present as a specific cholesterol problem all on its own, or can worsen an existing cholesterol disorder. In order to explain this problem, I need first to briefly discuss oxidants.

The effects of oxidants Very simply, oxidants (also called free radicals) are atoms and molecules that have become ‘burnt‘. An analogy would be a piece of boerewors that has been left on the braai for too long. It becomes blackened, tastes awful, and looks a bit toxic. Read the rest of this entry »

11 Eat high-GI carbohydrates to build muscle and speed metabolism

High-GI foods are those that dissolve into their component sugars fast. If your aim is to build muscle bulk and to speed your metabolism, eat plenty of high-GI carbohydrates, such as bread, potatoes, sugar, honey and cereals.

12 Eat low-GI foods to burn fat

If your main aim is to burn fat, eat plenty of low-GI carbohydrates. These are carbohydrates that dissolve slowly in the gut, releasing sugar into the blood.. stream gradually. They include beans, sweetcorn, white rice, pasta, lentils, barley, soya beans, soya mince, peas, fructose and oat bran. If you would like to speed up your metabolism at the same time, include some high-GI foodsin your diet. Read the rest of this entry »