Open Future Health Blog

Your habits when you are in your 40's and 50's are the foundation for your good health and fitness at 85. Improved diet is the low cost alternative to extensive medical intervention later in life. The body has the ability to heal itself, if we treat it with respect. ANYBODY who adopts a healthy diet, at ANY AGE, will benefit, and as the months go by, those benefits will multiply.

Change Your Breakfast, the first step for Better Weight Control

Your body tries to maintain a stable state. Homeostasis is the name given to the series of set points the body tries to maintain, body temperature, blood pressure, weight, and blood sugar are good examples.

Blood sugar, should be constant, about 1.5 teaspoons (6gm) of glucose in your entire blood system. If you eat a high carbohydrate meal, potatoes, bread, and followed that with a desert, you can easily add the equivalent of 15 to 20 teaspoons of glucose to your system. That creates an emergency, and in healthy people, the hormone insulin, copes with the crisis, using glucose as energy, storing some of it as glycogen, and putting the rest on your hips as fat, crisis over.

When you wake in the morning after an overnight fast, your blood sugar should be normal, insulin will be "off" and you will be burning fatty-acids as fuel. The secret of a weight loss breakfast, is to keep that process running until at least lunch time.

One alternative is to skip breakfast, but if you eat a muffin at morning tea, or take sugar in your coffee, you've wasted the effort.

Breakfast Eggs

You MUST NOT, have porridge, weet-bix, toast, bagels, museli or any form of grain or sugar in your breakfast. If you do, you'll turn insulin "on" and for a time, fatty-acid burning will stop. In addition you'll be "hungry" again in less than two hours. There is no long lasting satiety in carbohydrate foods. No nutritional density, when compared with fats and proteins.

An easy breakfast is bacon and eggs. For variety you can dress that up in some way; adding spinach, or kale or silver-beet to the pan with the bacon, is a good idea. You can have tomatoes, or egg plant or zuchini for a change.

I like to eat more offal meats, so I might have black pudding, or chicken livers, lambs fry, or hearts, to make a change. When I first did this my meals were too big. Much more than I needed. One strip of bacon and one egg is enough for me, but I often have something else for variety like a tomato too. This is very nutriment dense food with high energy content. You will find that skipping morning tea is easy to do. Skipping meals is also easy, for instance it's now 1.30pm and I have not had lunch yet. I will have lunch, but I'm not hungry.

Don't add any sugar to your tea or coffee. If you are hungry, add a tablespoon of butter, or coconut oil to your hot drink. We call that saturated coffee, or sometimes bullet proof coffee.

That takes you to lunch time. Can you think of a lunch that does not involve eating bread, pastry, biscuits, and potatoes? Salad and a small tin of salmon for instance. Keep insulin "off" for as long as you can.

John Stephen Veitch