We’re three months into the new year. If you were off plan a bit during the holidays, have you gotten back to following your low-carb or keto diet yet?
If you want to change your health, you have to change what you put on your plate. It’s that simple.
If yes, great! Keep going!
If not, start now. Today.
What is one small thing you can do, one small action you can take, that will be the catalyst?
Do you need to do some grocery shopping?
Should you do some protein and vegetable prep so there’s a variety of keto-friendly foods for you to grab in a pinch?
What about doing a pantry purge? Are there some high-carb foods lingering in the cupboards that you’d be better served by putting in the trash insted of eating them? (You’re not “wasting food” or wasting money by doing this. The money is already spent. You eating foods that move you further from your goals won’t put it back in your pocket.)
Don’t wait another day to get back to low-carb keto. And don’t leave things to chance. Stock your kitchen with low-carb keto foods you enjoy. Remind yourself of how much better you feel physically and psychologically – when you feel yourself well.
‘Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food’, a familiar phrase from Hippocrates dating back to around 400 BC. While a few things may have changed in the world since then, this statement has never been more relevant. There is a rising ‘ tsunami’ of chronic condition diagnoses, both physical and mental. Along with these, an increasing reliance on prescription medications like Ozempic to treat and manage them. This is a distinct shift away from lifestyle medicine of old.
While medication can be life-changing and life saving it is not without it’s downsides. This is true in terms of side-effects and costs. Yet the lure of a quick fix very often outweighs these. And speaking of weight, this is where the need for a quick fix is most prevalent. In 2022 the global weight loss and weight managment market size was valued at US$ 224.27 billion. It is predicted to grow to around US$ 405.4 billion by 2030. It’s no surprise then that weight loss or anti-obesity medications, like Ozempic, have taken their place at the top of prescription pads around the world.
How does it work?
Ozempic is prescription medication traditionally used to manage blood glucose control in type 2 diabetics. The medication mimics a natural hormone in the body known as glucagon-peptide 1. (GLP-1) This is secreted in the intestine in response to the intake of food. This sets in motion a hormone-driven process that stimulates the increased production of insulin, a reduction in the amount of glucose produced by the liver and an overall slowing of digestion. Finally GLP-1 travels to the brain and activates the area that regulates fullness and hunger; essentially telling you to stop eating before you have even done so. By doing this, the medication doesn’t just lower your appetite. It affects the signalling between your gut and your brain, ultimately changing how your body responds to food.
The upside
The positive impact on insulin response and glucose control makes Ozempic a critical part of diabetes management. Poorly regulated blood glucose has several complications, including heart disease, kidney disease and stroke. Weight loss in itself supports overall metabolic health and improves numerous health markers including inflammation and blood pressure.
The downside of Ozempic
With the increased off-label use of Ozempic due to it’s newfound fame, supply issues have arisen making availability increasingly difficult for those who really need it. In addition, it’s a costly exercise with monthly dosages ranging in price from R1600 – R3000, and no associated reductions in general healthcare costs.
Coast and availability aside, side effects and sustainability are growing concerns. Early side effects may include nausea and vomiting together with heartburn and bloating. More serious side effects may include pancreatitis, gallstones, kidney issues and thyroid tumours or cancer. Studies investigating the sustainability of these medications have shown that the majority of users (68%) discontinued treatment within the first year. With the discontinuation comes weight regain, similar to the original weight lost.
The alternative to Ozempic
Since the medication works by mimicking natural hormones, it makes sense that there is natural option: real food. Food not only provides your body with energy, but it also provides it with instruction. Your body has multiple hormone pathways that respond differently to different types of food. Making the right food choices goes beyond satiating you – it literally changes how your body responds. So choosing the right foods means giving your body the right instructions.
There have been major changes in the global consumer environments over the past 40 years. The typical diet now widely adopted is low in fruit and vegetables and high in refined grains, isolated sugars and ultra-processed foods. Together, these dietary factors can alter the gut’s composition and function , essentially overriding the body’s natural hormone response to food and almost having the opposite effect to Ozempic: a blunted insulin resonse, and a poorly regulated mechanism of telling you when to stop eating.
A study done by Virta Health in the US found that people with type 2 diabetes who stop using drugs like Ozempic can avoid regaining the lost weight if they adopt a ketogenic diet. These results together with the successful weight loss and management experienced with a low carbohydrate, high fat diet suggests that reverting back to a diet more similar to our ancestors may be the quick fix we have been looking for all along.
Conclusion
Ultimately there is no doubt that the short-term weight loss associated with Ozempic is powerful and significant, but it’s not a lifelong solution for your weight or your health. For this you need to adopt a sustainable approach that trains your body to appreciate the fuel you’re providing it. This is what will set you up for a lifetime of healthy weight.
Credit:
Karen Heath, PhD, health advocate and researcher at The Noakes Foundation.
Sugar addiction can hold people back from achieving optimal health. Sugar Addiction – My Journey is Roxana Soetebeer’sketo journey which began in 2019 after her blood sugars skyrocketed.
Dr. Stephen Phinney
Looking for help, a friend recommended she look into Dr. Stephen Phinney. Once she watched his videos, the decision was made, and she took her first step on her new path to break the sugar addiction and experience improved health. In the past 28 months, Roxana has learned a lot about the science behind keto and why it’s the best option for her to improve all her metabolic markers (A1c, weight, blood pressure, liver enzymes, kidney levels). She is now off most meds, including insulin and immune suppressants for RA, feeling the best she has felt in decades, and enjoying life again. Roxana will never look back.
What Roxana Says
I am a health coach and use keto with my clients. I do this because keto helped me lose over 100 pounds. With keto, I am never hungry, dropped all that weight and even reversed T2 diabetes. I found that most people stop a diet because they are always hungry. On keto, they don’t have to starve. They eat delicious foods and get healthier at the same time. Oh, keto has been around for over 200 years as a diet, but actually, since the dawn of mankind.
Bitten Jonsson, RN, is a US-trained expert on food addiction, who specializes in helping people to break free of unhealthy attachments to foods, such as sugar and processed carbohydrates.
She recommends the following action steps to support sugar addiction remission:
100 % Abstinence from all drug foods and trigger foods.
Conscious breathing techniques for overall wellbeing.
Focus on sleep improvement with tools like going to bed earlier and creating a conducive sleep environment.
Ensure exposure to sunlight, especially in the morning, for overall health benefits.
Consider supplements like amino acids, vitamins (B3 and C), fish oil, fermented foods or probiotics to boost energy and support the body.
Adopt a real food ketogenic diet for a comprehensive treatment plan. A knowledgeable dietician can help you with this.
Foster internal motivation for long-term success. Work with a coach or psychologist on this.
Create a new daily structure/routine to break old habits.
Commit to one small improvement/action each day.
Take one day at a time.
Join support groups of like-minded individuals.
Get professional support from a mulit-disciplinary team.
Become educated about your condition and its treatment methods. Aim to truly understand. Your healthcare team can help you with this.
Remember you know more about your disease than anyone!
Ozempic is a weekly injection that helps lower blood sugar by helping the pancreas make more insulin. It is not approved for weight loss, but some physicians prescribe it to be used for weight loss.
Ozempic works by mimicking a naturally occurring hormone. As those hormone levels rise, the molecules go to your brain, telling it you’re full. It also slows digestion by increasing the time it takes for food to leave the body. This is similar to the effect of bariatric surgery.
When using Ozempic to treat diabetes, weight loss is a common side effect. It is designed to be taken long-term.
Ozempic and other GLP-1s weight loss drugs are said by some health professionals to be effective as a tool to help patients with carb addiction. They also help people who are having significant cravings and hunger due to hyperinsulinemia.. However, these must be combined with a low carbohydrate diet or it could worsen hyperinsulinemia. It could also lead to loss of muscle mass and bone density.
Maria Emmerich presents the ideal diet for women in this video. Maria Emmerich is a health and wellness coach, and the founder of Maria Mind Body Health. She lost 80 pounds and reversed her PCOS, IBS regaining her health. 20 years ago Maria started writing books about the Keto lifestyle .
Published Books on The Ideal Diet For Women
With over 20 published books and more coming soon Maria has helped millions of people around the world lose weight and gain health.
Maria Emmerich is a wellness expert and best selling author. She has authored several books. The latest edition of her book “Secrets to a Healthy Metabolism” has the foreword written by New York Times #1 Best Selling author of “Wheat Belly” Dr William Davis. She has a passion for helping people start a healthier lifestyle. Weight loss is often a side effect of helping treat any number of problems including diabetes, cholesterol issues, alopecia, hashimoto’s, autoimmune diseases and much more.
Halle Berry
She is Halle Berry’s favorite author and has done cooking videos with Halle on her Instagram. Other readers of her books include Valerie Bertinelli and Al Roker who has made her recipes on the Today Show! She is an International Best Selling Author and her new book “Sugar Free Kids” with a forward written by Halle Berry!
This is the first of the weight loss myths. Unless it is combined with carbs. Low fat products will actually thwart your weight loss attempts.
Exercise doesn’t help much with weight loss
As it makes you hungrier. It’s still very beneficial for health and body composition though! But the adage, “You can’t outrun a bad diet” is true after all.
Eating more frequently may make you fatter rather than thinner
Eating and metabolising food takes energy, and as such the motivation for eating more frequently was based on keepin the body burning more all the time. But it turns out that the fat storing signals related to constantly eating, outweight the slight increase in energy burning which it elicits.
All calories are NOT created equal
Quick steps to a healthy body weightto counteract weight loss myths
Avoid refined factory-produced vegetable and seed oils. (poly-unsaturated fatty acids)
Fill up on unprocessed animal proteins and fats, as well as non-starchy (above the ground) vegetables.
Eat less frequently.
Summary and Solution
To turn the tide on the scourge of the obesity epidemic, we need to dig deep below the surface and get back to our roots. Say no to modern factory-produced foods, that are full of refined carbohydrates. Rather eat what humans were made to eat, what our great, great, great grandparents ate before the world became fat and sick.
The multi-billion dollar question is “What is making us fat?” Obesity awareness will help us to identiy the culprit so that we can begin by starting to eat low carbohydrate real foods.
There are two main theories (5):
The Calories-In-Calories-Out (CICO) model. This model states that we get fat because we eat more calories (energy) than we burn. This is based on the first law of thermodynamics which states that the energy in a closed system cannot be created or lost but rather only transferred from one form to another. Based on this, the energy from all types of food and nutrients (fat, protein, or carbohydrate) can be quantified and will be processed similarly within the body, irrespective of their source.
Expend more energy
And the only way to lose or burn this energy is by expending more energy for example by exercising more). Indeed, people do lose weight when starved of calories, or when exercising excessively while concurrently reducing food intake. But these situations aren’t sustainable.
The trouble with the CICO model
The trouble with the CICO model is that 1.) As humans are not closed systems because energy can be sequestered into embargoed compartments (e.g. adipose tissue [body fat]) or dissipated variably, and importantly, 2.) Because the body regulates the fate of the nutrients that come in, by choosing whether they should be stored as fat or make us hungry or full, or make us want to move or exercise (expend energy) more or less.
Nutrients are not created equal
Therefore the types of nutrients (or sources of calories) affect how they are processed (metabolised). As such, nutrients, and the calories they contain, are not created equal, and this model fails, as the body’s drives eventually beat the sheer willpower exerted to get us to simply eat less (limit calories). The result means that we just regain any weight lost.
This model proposes that obesity is caused by a diet that promotes a fat-storing hormonal environment. In other words eat low carbohydrate real foods as science journalist and researcher, Gary Taubes explains:
“carbohydrates are singularly responsible for prompting insulin secretion; 2)because insulin is singularly responsible for inducing fat accumulation; 3) and dietary carbohydrates are required for excess fat accumulation; and 4) both type 2 diabetics and the higher-weightperson have abnormally elevated concentrations of circulating insulin.”
What this means is that eating less carbohydrate lowers the fat-storage-promoting hormone, insulin, thereby allowing the body to mobilise and burn stored fat for energy, thereby promoting weight loss/normalisation. It also means we eat less, because we’re less hungry; as previously embargoed fat stores are now accessible for burning and we don’t have to rely on diet for immediate energy (6). So, when we eat low carbohydrate real foods, we eat less and experience less hunger, which assists with body weight.
Eat lowcarbohydrate real foods
Over the past few decades, alongside getting fatter and eating more carbohydrate and less fat, we’re eating more processed food. Processed food is particularly good at promoting weight gain because it contains the most fattening forms of carbohydrates, often combined with the most fattening forms or fat:
Processed food contains more refined carbohydrate and sugar, with less fibre
This is a particularly obesogenic combination, boosting insulin and (addictive) reward signals in the brain to get both the body and mind to eat more. (7)
The carbohydrate is usually combined with fat
Such as ice cream, chocolates, and doughnuts. This combination is more rewarding (addictive) and prone to overeating (8). So that the fat-storing from the carbs (insulin) result in both the carbs and fat being directed into fat storage rather than being burned for energy (9).
The type of fat in processed food is particularly fattening (10)
Processed seed and vegetable oil, like sunflower, soybean, and canola oils, that are rich in the omega-6 fat called linoleic acid (LA), promote fat storage more than naturally occurring or cold-extracted oils and fats with lower LA content (e.g. tallow, lard, butter, coconut, olive, avocado, and macadamis nut oils.)
Judging people based on higher body weight awareness is misinformed and skin deep because higher body weight is not a matter of aesthetics. Rather, it’s concerning as an indicator of what’s happening deep beneath the surface; to our metabolic health. Metabolic health is based on blood levels of triglycerides (fats), glucose (sugar), HDL cholesterol, and blood pressure, as well as fat accumulation in and around the organs (i.e. belly fat) – all of which are risk factors for some of the biggest killers: heart disease, diabetes, and stroke.
80% of higher body weight people are metabolically unhealthy, as are 40% of normal-weight individuals (1). This shows that a higher bodyweight is not the cause of chronic lifestyle-related disease, but it is an indicator in many people.
Dr. Andrea Salcedo DO, MPH, FACOG, shares her dissappointment with routine gynecologic care.
In this video, Dr Andrea Salcedo talks about her personal struggles through endometriosis, gestational diabetes and infertility. She shares how insulin resistance and body inflammation contributed to her gynecologic problems, and that birth control pills or surgery couldn’t treat the cause.
Endomitriosis
Endometriosis is a chronic condition where tissue similar to the uterine lining grows outside the uterus, leading to pain, inflammation, and potential fertility issues. Commonly affected areas include the ovaries, fallopian tubes, and pelvic lining, though it can also impact the bladder, bowel, and, in rare cases, the lungs or other organs.
Symptoms vary but often involve severe menstrual cramps (dysmenorrhea), chronic pelvic pain, painful intercourse (dyspareunia), and gastrointestinal issues like diarrhea or constipation. Fatigue, heavy or irregular periods, and urinary discomfort are also frequent. The severity of symptoms doesn’t always correlate with the extent of the disease; some individuals with minimal tissue growth experience intense pain, while others with extensive growth may have mild symptoms.
The exact cause remains unclear, but theories include retrograde menstruation, genetic predisposition, hormonal imbalances, and immune system dysfunction. Genetics play a significant role, with individuals having a first-degree relative with endometriosis facing a six-fold increased risk. Environmental factors and estrogen exposure also contribute to disease development.
Diagnosis is challenging, often delayed by years due to symptom overlap with other conditions and the need for surgical confirmation via laparoscopy. Non-invasive imaging like transvaginal ultrasound and MRI can aid in detection, especially for deep infiltrating endometriosis.
While there’s no cure, management focuses on symptom relief and fertility preservation. Treatment options include pain relievers, hormonal therapies to suppress estrogen production, and surgical interventions to remove endometrial-like tissue. In severe cases, hysterectomy may be considered.
Globally, endometriosis affects approximately 10% of women of reproductive age, equating to around 190 million individuals. The condition imposes significant economic burdens due to healthcare costs and lost productivity. Public awareness and early diagnosis are crucial for effective management and improving quality of life for those affected.
The problem of carbohydrate addiction as I see it, is that no one out there is effectively trained to help people recover from processed food addiction.
Food addiction is very much at the forefront of the thinking of health coaches like myself, as we learn more about this devastating condition and the insidious means that big food uses to keep us locked in to our addictions.
Please understand that your food cravings, carbohydrate addiction and resulting poor health are not your fault.
Previously the correct support has simply not been provided. Here is a list of the resources that have been offered to us, and the reasons why they simply do not work.
Have you tried any of the following? Did the outcomes dissappoint you?
Physicians are prescribing pharmaceuticals and diets. As a result, they’re blaming clients for failing to adhere to a plan.
Personal trainers offer extreme food and exercise plans. In fact, they’re missing the problem and setting their clients up for harmful self-comparison in gym environments.
Drug-like foods are recommended by dieticians who are trained by the processed food industry.
Nutritionists are trained in food plans and supplements but not in addictions.
Eating disorder specialists vehemently oppose food addiction. Surprisingly, they fight for their stance on the issue.
Therapists mistreat processed food addiction. They believe that the problems lie in past traumas. Therapists propose that the answer will be found in mindful eating. They miss the addicted brain.
Bariatric surgery leaves processed foods in the system. The procedure can result in replacing food addiction with addiction to alcohol or drugs. Sadly its often a temporary fix with weight regain or no weight lost.
Weight loss programs humiliate people about their weight. They blame the client and the shame can lead to eating disorders.
Residential programs miss the role of triggers in the home. Upon returning home the person reactivates the old triggers.
Support groups have addictive foods in their food plans. They have stressful and irrelevant requirements and a narrow focus. They also blame their members.
