Skip to main content

Sustained Energy with More Iodine; Nuts and Cheese FAIL

Some weeks ago, I boosted my iodine dose to 1,000 micrograms a day (over Dr. Davis's program recommendation), and for the first time in several years, I've sustained a workout program. I'm back to lifting weights a few times a week and found a dance exercise channel on YouTube I like. I even overdid my workout one day--I had a pounding heart that night and felt jittery--but you don't know your limits unless you push yourself. 

As most readers know, iodine is needed for thyroid function; without enough of it, you can suffer from fatigue, cold, depression, mental fog and weight gain.

Meals will be looking a lot more like this. Photo from Unsplash.

Despite the extra iodine, I gained some weight. Last week when my pants were uncomfortably tight, I had acid reflux, and my face looked like the moon, I stopped ignoring the fact that nuts and cheese put weight on me. I'd been eating biscuits and gravy and an apple-cranberry tart. These were made using compliant recipes...but they're full of nuts and cheese. I went back to bunless hamburgers, salad, sausage, eggs, coleslaw, etc. instead--and dropped three pounds in two days. The acid reflux is gone.

I'm also a lot less hungry. Ricotta cheese (a major ingredient in the tart) contains a lot of whey, which provokes insulin in some people. Insulin lowers your blood sugar, making you hungry. Nuts have a lot of omega 6 fats, which is inflammatory in too-high amounts. The combination was a recipe for puffing me up like a dinner roll. So it's back to a more caveman style diet of mainly meat, eggs and vegetables, with lard, bacon grease and olive oil for my main fats. Hard cheeses and butter have little to no whey, and I'll probably use them in small amounts. I'll still eat the yogurt and prebiotic fibers like green bananas and inulin too, of course. But I really need to leave the nut-flour goodies for special occasions. 

I have a new video, too, this one on forum tips and tricks. It's really a template for finding out anything: 

  1. Read the directions.
  2. Search for an answer.
  3. Then ask for help. 
  4. Make it easy for people to help you instead of communicating in dribs and drabs or expecting them to do detective work. And read their responses. 

Dr. Davis's forum is better than most. Elsewhere, people will supposedly ask for help, but really want justification for choices they've already made. People at Dr. Davis's actually want to get better. 



Comments

Popular posts from this blog

1972: Carole King, M*A*S*H and...Food for 2014?

I feel well enough to try Atkins induction again. The palpitations are gone, even without taking potassium. My energy level is back to normal--no more trucking on the treadmill early in the morning  to burn off nervous energy or emergency meat, cheese and mineral water stops after yoga. It's back to lounging around to Chopin and Debussy in the morning and stopping at the wine bar for pleasure. I'm using the original Atkins book: Dr. Atkins' Diet Revolution from 1972. While looking in the book for a way to make gelatin (which is allowed on induction, but Jello(TM) and products like it have questionable ingredients), I felt the earth move under my feet : those recipes from 42 years ago look delicious and they're mostly real food. It makes sense, though: the cooks who wrote the recipes probably didn't have had a palette used to low-fat food full of added sugar or a bag of tricks to make low-fat food edible. Anyone who writes a recipe called "Cottage Cheese and...

In Defense of Fast Food

Another modern trend - healthy food should be expensive, not nutrients-dense and preferably exotic, or you would be eating like plebs who live on a dollar McD menu. --Galina L. I don't try to jump over seven-foot hurdles, I look for one-foot hurdles I can step over. --Warren Buffett, pleb who eats at McDonald's Despite all the talk about wild-caught v. farmed, grass-fed v. CAFO and the vilification of fast food, a lot of us plebs benefit simply from carbohydrate restriction. But even though diabetes and obesity are rampant, and carb restriction alone would help millions of people, the impression is out there that you need to eat in a very specific way, far beyond just watching the carbs. Following a low-carb diet is already a high hurdle for many people. If some people want or need to raise the bar for themselves, that's fine with me, but there's no need to turn low-carb into a hurdle that a lot of people can't jump over. Organic produce and grass-fed or p...

Mince Meat Pie Recipe, low carb

The star of Christmas dinner this year was made of unlikely ingredients. Fruit and beef tongue sound high carb or unpalatable, but mince meat pie was so popular 250 years ago that it was in many cookbooks from the time--and it wasn't just for Christmas. My version cuts the carbs by using tart cooking apples, cranberries, monk fruit sweetener and a nut flour crust. The main flavors are orange and slightly tart fruit; the meat and fat make it filling. Have it for dessert or with coffee or tea for breakfast. Make some soup with the collagen-filled broth and discover how tender and tasty the rest of the beef tongue is. Worth the time and effort. IMPORTANT--start this recipe the day before. Links in the recipe go to hard-to-find ingredients and directly to the cookbook with the recipe for the pie crust. (I made the almond flour variation of the crust.) Recipe 1 beef tongue (I get mine here ; look for farms or ranches in your area that sell directly to consumers) 2 Granny Smith apples 1 ...

My New Favorite Sweetener

If you're looking for a low-carb sweetener with no aftertaste, no franken-ingredients, and that doesn't upset your stomach, try monk fruit (also known as luo han guo). This is what Quest bars were sweetened with when they first came out. Monk fruit is Dr. Davis approved. You can buy monk fruit in powdered or liquid form; both are super-concentrated. They might seem expensive, but you use the powder by the spoonful (even in baking recipes) and the liquid by the drop. The baking recipes I've made with the powder have turned out well. Available from Amazon . Beware monk fruit sweeteners with erythritol.  The package of powdered monk fruit sweetener I bought says, "Use 1/8 teaspoon to create the same sweet taste as 1 teaspoon of sugar." But it's so sweet that I use 1/10 the amount. To replace a cup of sugar, I would use 5 teaspoons of monk fruit sweetener. Tip: hand-stir this in before using the beaters. It's such a fine powder that it flies up and out of the ...

Carrageenan: A Sickening Thickener. Is it a Migraine Menace?

Let me tell you about my ride in an ambulance last night. I woke up at six o'clock from a nap with a mild headache. I ate dinner and took my vitamins, along with a couple of extra magnesium pills. Since magnesium helps my TMJ flare-ups, I thought it might help my headache. Then I went to see my mother. A few hours later, I had a severe headache, sinus pain and nausea. During a brief respite from the pain, I left for home, but less than a mile later, I got out of my car and threw up. A cop, Officer Fisher, pulled up behind me and asked if I was okay. He believed me when he said I hadn't been drinking, but he said I seemed lethargic and he wanted the paramedics to see me. (Later he mentioned that a man he'd recently stopped was having a stroke.) Thinking I had a migraine headache, the paramedics wanted to take me to the hospital. But since I knew that doctors don't know what causes migraine headaches, and I didn't know what effect their medicine would have on m...