Pain, Pain, Go Away!

My year-and-a-half-long love affair with take-out is over. It started when I was selling my house in Colorado: take-out kept the kitchen clean. After I got to Indiana, I started out working part-time and didn't have much human contact at work. Getting take-out brought me some human contact. I was tired of cooking, too. My weight crept up to the point on the scale where I don't let it go any higher. Even though I ordered food that sounded low-carb, the restaurant information showed 20, 30, or 40 grams of carbohydrate per dish. One Sunday night recently, I made too much chef's salad and took the rest to work the next day. I kept going--I brought my lunch to work every day for a week. Five pounds fell off. Packing my lunch hasn't been that hard--I was just tired of doing it and then fell into another habit. Now, I usually make a big dinner and take the leftovers to work, along with a low-carb dessert. What if I don't feel like packing a lunch (or making dinner)?

I'd been a die-hard fan of low carb for years when, two years ago, I had complications from an infected tooth and a lot of stress. I had no more appetite for fatty food than someone with seasickness.   For that reason, I started eating higher-carb, lower calorie. Results? I re-developed acid reflux (though not as severe as before) and got a cavity--my first one since starting low-carb. I also had sugar crashes where I could hardly stay awake. There seemed to be a feedback loop where stress caused me to eat badly, which worsened my stress, which caused me to eat badly. I took probiotics, since strong antibiotics for my infected tooth made me queasy in the first place, and gradually ate less and less carb and more fat. It's only been in the past few weeks that I've been able to eat sardines again. Results from lower carb and higher fat? More energy--I mowed my whole lawn in one day last weekend, and yesterday, mowed it all without a break after doing a lot of other yar

The British Medical Journal (not The Onion) reports that global warming is linked to type 2 diabetes, speculating that the mechanism is brown adipose fat, based on a few small association studies that sound like they didn't have a control group. The media are repeating the story without a hint a skepticism. What could possibly be wrong with a hypothesis that an imperceptible change in the climate could be causing high blood sugar levels? Human evolution began in equatorial Africa--a warm climate. According to migration maps, all of our ancestors were in warm climates until around 40,000 years ago. Comparing diabetes maps of the US and the world with average temperatures, diabetes doesn't look like it relates to hot regions. Most people are indoors most of the time--and almost all of us have air conditioning. In fact, the number of households with air conditioning has gone up in line with diabetes. Maybe that's the cause (not really). Stumped? Consider what d

Merry Christmas! It's the seventh anniversary of the blog. Just as I was seven years ago, I've had some health problems--but I know how to deal with them now. The past few years put me through the wringer mentally and physically: my parents' problems, being accused of elder abuse (without any basis), an infected tooth, my father dying and my mother moving, and then my own moving and working at five different jobs this year. The stress and illness made my stomach too sensitive for me to want to eat fat--but with my stress level cranked up, I lived on a higher-carb diet and still lost weight. I also had acne and scary palpitations. Last Christmas, fumes from wasabi nuts roasting in the oven made me so ill I spent the day in bed. This Christmas season, feasting at holiday parties kept me up those nights with an upset stomach. I've adopted a Midwestern niceness that makes it hard to say no to goodies. But the same kindness of the people around me has removed a layer of

Someone didn't get the memo that all the fuss about saturated fats is based on a bunch of debunked junk science. 23 and Me, the company that provides genetic information from a saliva sample, sent me this message: People with your genetic result tend to have a similar  BMI  on diets with greater or less than 22 grams of saturated fat per day, as long as they consume the same number of total calories. However, diets high in saturated fat have been associated with increased LDL (“bad”) cholesterol, which is a risk factor for heart disease. Limit your saturated fat intake. It may not have a large effect on your weight, but it’s important for reducing your risk of heart disease. Fats are an important part of a healthy diet: they give you energy, help build your  cells , and help you absorb certain vitamins. There are three main types of fats, but not all types are equally healthy. Saturated fats: Found primarily in red meat and dairy products, saturated fat has been linked

Processed foods have a bad rap these days. "Just eat real food," everyone says, and the real food will cure anything from arthritis to migraine headaches. The people who give this advice do tend to be in good health and do tend to eat real food. Well, except when they're eating dark chocolate, or sugary fruit that's only existed for a few hundred years, or drinking wine. The first and third foods are about as real and unprocessed as a Cadbury egg. But if we can wink at dark chocolate, bananas and wine, why not fake cheese? Real cheese and cream give me acne. Fake cheese, like Velveeta and American cheese, don't. For me, they're better than real cheese (and Velveeta melts better than real cheese, too). If you'd like to add fake cheese to your real foods list, here's a wonderful recipe I made (up) tonight. It would have been good with shiratake noodles. 1 pound grass-fed ground beef 1/2 cup spaghetti sauce made with local, vine-ripened tomatoes

The potato chips, the chocolate, the sweet potato fries--they finally caught up with me. I saw a doctor (!) the other day for a cough I'd had since Memorial Day weekend. We determined it probably wasn't allergies, asthma, or sinus drainage. With a temperature of 97 point something, I didn't have a cold. It was probably silent reflux, since I've had raging reflux before, which I fixed with a low-carb diet . My diet has been off-track for over a year: stress and anxiety over moving across the country (no permanent job waiting for me, buying a house from 1,000 miles away before selling my other house), complications from a root canal (re-infection requiring industrial strength antibiotics that messed up my stomach and skin). I think the only reason I didn't have silent reflux then was that I wasn't eating enough of anything to affect my stomach. Now that things are getting back to normal, my stress level is down and I'm eating more. And now the carbs are giv