Healthy Dieting

To obesity drugs, fenfluramine and dexfenfluramine, promised to revolutionize weight loss when either was prescribed with another drug, phentermine. Instead, the combination, known as Fen-Phen, ended up terrifying thousands of users when their potential for causing serious, even life-threatening, heart defects was revealed. Approximately 30 per cent of users were shown to have abnormal echocardiograms. Read the rest of this entry »

Losing weight is easy. A lot of people do it every day. What’s tough is keeping it off. Restrictive diets may work in the short term. So may some diet aids. But soonthe weight returns.

There is only one proven way to lose weight and keep it off: make basic, simple changes in what you eat, how much you eat and how much you exercise. These changes should become part of your everyday life, so think ahead: Could you take a walk and eat an apple daily for the next year? Yes? Read the rest of this entry »

Take a look at a typical Westernized diet—-you’d swear we needed to get a megadose daily allowance of cholesterol. Well we don’t. Our liver makes most of the cholesterol we need; the substance is in all of our tissues and is a component of cell membranes and nerves. Raising cholesterol levels through diet increases the risk of heart disease and stroke. With cholesterol, less is better. Read the rest of this entry »

Five million years ago, the ancestors of the first hominids lived in the rainforests of Africa. Their diet was based on fruits, nuts, berries and insects and supplemented with animal food. Although the tables turned and animal food began to dominate as humans evolved, we have inherited the requirements for a substantial intake of the substances found in fruit and vegetables. Read the rest of this entry »

If you can face it, a full-protein breakfast — eggs, bacon, sausages, hash browns and the like— is a tried and tested hangover cure that many hangover sufferers swear by. Read the rest of this entry »

If your ‘craving menu’ revolves mainly around sugar, salt and fat or any combination of them, start practising behaviour modification. For instance, if you usually crave crisps, start eating less of them and replace some with (say) low-salt, low-fat pretzels. If you like creamy dips with your crispy starches, start using fat-free cottage cheese and yoghurt to prepare the dip, instead of cream cheese and cream. Reduce the usual (salty) brown onion soup powder in your dip and start livening up your dip with things that are much nicer anyway: herbs, garlic, chilli, tomato paste and gherkins, to name but a few. Read the rest of this entry »

You must have heard of doctors, naturopaths and other health workers who claim that wheat or milk is bad for your health. If you haven’t heard this yet, you are going to read about it now — not about how they are bad for you but about how they can make you ill. Read the rest of this entry »

Promoters of weight-loss gimmicks have learned one thing in recent times: to sell the most of an unproven product you need to do it quickly. And to sell lots of product quickly, you needs lots of distributors with a multi-level marketing format. Read the rest of this entry »

Fibre is the part of carbohydrate that resists breakdown by enzymes in the intestine. Most fibre passes straight through to the large bowel ready for excretion in the faeces. Thus you can eat fibre without absorbing the energy from it. Read the rest of this entry »

Before you embark on your low-dieting weight-loss program, you need to know that some medical conditions could prevent or stall your progress. If any of these apply to you, be sure to check with your doctor for advice.

Medications

Some prescription and over-the-counter medications can prevent or stall weight loss. They increase a person’s metabolic resistance. These include the following: Read the rest of this entry »

Thick Artery Walls

Elevated insulin levels cause the artery walls to grow thicker, which in effect narrows the diameter of the passageway. This makes it more likely that cholesterol will adhere inside the walls and lead to blocked arteries and heart disease. As the passageways of the arteries get narrower, blood pressure increases. Alas, insulin also has other ways of increasing a person’s blood pressure. Read the rest of this entry »

Open Carb. Now it gets really easy. American restaurants always have a variety of vegetables, potatoes, bread, salads, and desserts.

Open Protein. A big choice of unadulterated meats, fowl, and fish. Just make sure you eat right along with everyone else, and if you want three different items, you might want to select all of them or two of them from among the entrees. Read the rest of this entry »

Fat-free dairy products products, the second main component of the polish foods group, are a fabulous source of nutrients — calcium, potassium, phosphates, protein and many other vital vitamins and minerals. All too often these days, though, these important foods are left out of the diet. It’s very common to hear people — even doctors — claim that ‘milk is only for baby cows, not for humans’, or ‘dairy products are mucus-forming and cause sinusitis’.

I disagree with these sentiments entirely: read on, and you will soon see why. Read the rest of this entry »

Let me give you the bad news first: like red meat, chicken contains significant amounts of fat. The chicken skin is almost entirely composed of fat, and there is also fat hidden inside the flesh of the wing, the drumstick, the thigh and the neck. The only part of the chicken that is acceptable on the X Diet is the breast.

This may come as a surprise to ‘career dieters’, but even without its skin, a deboned chicken breast contains two teaspoons of fat. Read the rest of this entry »

Fish is a dichotomy, because broadly speaking there are two main categories of fish: fatty fish and non-fatty fish.

Fatty fish

I can almost hear you yelling, Tut fatty fish are supposed to be good for your heart!’ Yes, this much is true. Research has shown that the two main types of oils contained in fatty fish can lower cholesterol levels, protect you against heart disease and i_mprove blood fluidity. However, the idea that something is ‘healthy is, once again, disease-specific. The consumption of fish oils should certainly be encouraged in cholesterol patients who are lean, not over-fat. However, if you are over-fat and have high cholesterol levels, all types of fatty fish should be eliminated from the diet. Read the rest of this entry »

The fats that come from plants are called oils because they are fluid, not hard. In general, plant fats are better for your heart than animal fats because they are mostly unsaturated and barely contain cholesterol.

For the purposes of the X Diet, however, all oils are to be regarded as fats. The body, after all, does not distinguish between fats — it can’t tell whether the fat comes from a pig or a plant, and frankly it doesn’t care. A fat is a fat, and the body reacts to plant fats in the same way as it does to animal fats — it deposits them on the belly and thighs. Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

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 »