Weight Loss As a Side Effect of Healthy Eating
How Your Mitochondria Mind Your Metabolism
“The Inner Figure” © D. Yael Bernhard
Happiness is always the happy result
of something more fundamental.
– Zen proverb
Like many children of the 1960s and 70s, I grew up on the most popular junk food. Post-war parents didn’t know how harmful all those colorfully-packaged products were. Addicted to sugar at an early age, I ate Lucky Charms, Captain Crunch, and Cocoa Puffs for breakfast – colorful confections that would make better material for an art project with a hot glue gun than food for a growing child (wouldn’t that make a neat “trick” for Halloween – to make art from candy corns and jellybeans, rather than eating these artificial “treats”). A processed peanut butter and grape jelly sandwich on Wonder Bread was a typical lunch, and Chips Ahoy cookies were my favorite dessert – which I ate by the hundreds, dumping them in a glass, pouring skim milk over the top, and gleefully fishing out the sugary sludge with a spoon.
It’s no wonder that by the age of 15, I was chubby and hypoglycemic, thus beginning a lifelong journey of trying to keep my blood sugar and body weight down. Giving up refined sugar and white flour was enough to solve the problem while I was young. But as I aged, my hypoglycemia came back to haunt me again, manifesting as new symptoms that took a decade to unravel. Finally, I was diagnosed with pre-diabetes.
I knew what I had to do. The many ramifications of type 2 diabetes motivated me to give up all sweeteners, all flour, all high-glycemic fruits, and many grains. To replace these carbohydrates, I increased my intake of both protein and fat, settling on a high fat, moderate protein, low carb diet. There was no separating protein and fat, as nearly all the protein I ate – nuts and seeds, cheese and yogurt, meat and fish – also contained fat. I also knew fat was necessary in order for my body to absorb the minerals in fruits and vegetables. There was no getting around it: a low carb diet was unavoidably high in fat.