Toughest thing to do is come off the bread. Well that seems to be the word from most people that I talk to about this stuff. 

Here are a few reasons I hear most often...

"If I don't have any carbs (carbs for them mean bread, pasta, pastries...), then my brain won't get enough glucose to function well."

Hmmm... yes your brain DOES need glucose to work and function well. We do however get PLENTY of glucose from eating foods other than bread. I'm sure you are getting plenty of glucose from drinks, packet stuff (loose term for anything in the middle aisles of the supermarket lol), cereal, and so on. If you are not eating that stuff then surely you will get the glucose your body requires from the other good carbs you DO eat - like vegetables! Yes vegetables are carbohydrates - seems many people think that carbs = only bread, pastries, lollies and so on...

Vegetables are great carbs - you get plenty of fibre and lots of other good stuff from them too! And you don't have to worry about calorie counting or anything - eat as much veges as you want! Go on I dare you. See if you can overeat on veges like people can with bags of chips, donuts, pastries and the like...

But can you can only eat vegetables for dinner right?

"What will we eat for breakfast?"

It's as if the breakfast people - whoever they are - have brainwashed us into thinking that we have to have some cereal and toast for breakfast. 

I remember we were ALWAYS having toast for breakfast. I would ALWAYS be starving by 10am when I was at school which meant getting something to eat for the tuck shop at interval - usually a pie - and then eating whatever lunch I had at lunchtime (sandwiches or fruit or something) and then still being hungry when we had rugby training after school. Good times..

Anyway toast seems to be something you have with every breakfast. Eggs on toast, bacon and eggs on toast, spaghetti on toast, whatever spread on toast, toast on toast...

YES there are other options!

We have found last night's dinner to be a great breakfast. So is avocado and eggs, bacon and eggs, omelets,  spinach, eggs and tomato; there are SO MANY options here using veges in the fridge (yes those ones that usually go from shopping day to shopping day and stay in there until you throw them out when you buy more of the same veges that you throw out after next shopping day!), and left overs from last night's dinner. Overeat on those veges! go on!!

I find this kind of breakfast lasts me a good 4 hours easy. In fact sometimes I don't even feel hungry at all.. I know the kids love a good breakfast too - they have slowly gone off the Weetbix, cornflakes and other cereals and enjoy wholesome full breakfasts before they take off to school! Which leads to the next question...

"What will the kids take to school for lunch?"

Well, they can actually survive quite well on a range of other foods that do not include wheat based products. In fact it did take a while for our own kids to change to having chicken and roast veges (in coconut oil of course!) for lunch in their little lunch boxes. Other kids would tease them about their funny looking lunch that doesn't have white bread wrapped around it. 

However we told our kids to just be happy that they are eating REAL food and that their bodies and minds would do better with this better food. Funny thing was our daughter started telling all those cheeky ones that they would be the ones getting sick when they are older hahaha...

Mind you, it would have been easy for us to just say "OK take your sandwiches to school" cause what parent wants their kids to get teased? In fact ALOT easier cause we wouldn't have to spend so much more time cooking their lunches in the morning or the night before. And it would have been alot cheaper too (at the moment the kids are eating lots of chicken!). 

While it is more effort, I do believe the better health outcomes for the kids in the future is worth it. Stuff that is worth it is always more effort - that's just the way it is.

Tune in next week as I blog about our eating adventures in the States - should be interesting...

Wheat book!

SO I REMEMBER saying that I was going to start telling you all about some bits of info I get from reading 'Wheat Belly'.

Been an awesome book to get into - probably a bit geeky with the sciency type stuff and probably why alot of people I know wouldn't read it. Gets a bit too in depth with that stuff - not that it's a bad thing cause I like to know exactly why and how things work in the body and all the biochem and sciency terms are familiar to me..
However for most people that stuff is straight up boring or just frustrating cause they get lost in it - unless they already have some background in it.
So what I have thought about doing is trying to put some of the principles into some more easily understandable terms....

So here a a few things I have learnt so far...

A.
Wheat (the kind of wheat we have today which has been changed from days of old remember) spikes your blood glucose more than table sugar does! All of you current diabetics could try it for yourself by taking your blood glucose before and then 10-15 minutes after eating a couple of slices of bread.
How is that you say? Well wheat is really fast at breaking down into glucose. Wheat is made of lots of glucose bits stuck together like any other carbohydrate but has an amazing ability to break down to the glucose molecule - and so can do it faster than other carbohydrate foods.


B.
The constant high spikes in the blood glucose levels in your blood (from always eating those foods that break down really quickly into glucose), causes all kinds of problems with your arteries and that means heart disease.

You may well think "how can foods that have virtually no triglycerides (fat) in them, make me fat?"

Well, for those of you that really want to know, this is how.

1. Foods that cause high spikes in blood glucose trigger insulin the most.

2. High insulin levels in the blood triggers your liver to convert sugars into triglycerides and then packs heaps of those triglycerides into VLDLs (very low density lipoprotein). By the way that is how things are intended to work because it is how we would store away excess calories to use later (when food was not so abundant as it is now).


3. These big VLDLs start bumping into stuff along the bloodstream journey and can become small LDLs or large LDLs. So the more VLDL in your blood means lots of small LDL particles too since VLDL is like the parent of these large and small LDLs.


4. Lots of small LDL particles cause heart disease because they are what contribute to clogged arteries. These are the main cause of heart disease, NOT cholesterol! In fact cholesterol is what your body is using to try and repair the artery damage being done by these small LDLs.

C.
The 'heart healthy' carbohydrates are actually bad guys undercover. They have been given the healthy heart tick and we might think they are good for us because of the fibre in it or the omega-3/flax oil fats or the vitamin enriched products they make now BUT none of these can erase the adverse effects of the wheat - the main ingredient in these products. It will still trigger the high blood sugar and the rest of the story above through to the increased small LDLs which cause heart disease - not to mention the exorphin release and inflammatory responses our bodies have to wheat and its products. But that is another story - maybe next week...

OK I'm off to eat some real food at Sunday Roast!
PS. and so are the kids lol -I'm sure it will be their favourite place soon too!!

Feelin' so sick right now!!

Man it's been over 6 months since I have eaten any rice, wheat, pasta or anything like that... but....

Tonight we had my son's birthday as he turned 6 years old. This meant he was able to choose where we go for dinner tonight. I even limited his options by saying "we aint goin to any McDs, KFC or BKs". I even tried to suggest this nice place called Sunday Roast down Broadway Ave where they have nice as roast meals. He loves chicken but this time didn't go for it.

Instead he chose Indian and said he wanted chicken and rice with the yellow sauce on the chicken (which we discovered was chicken korma once we got into the plaza). He had been there before with his Nana so knew exactly where he wanted to go.

Anyway after all that we ended up eating there - I had the mango chicken option with rice and even with naan bread. Normally I would forego the rice and naan but thought what the hey let's go with the birthday. Bad mistake. Since eating that my body has been telling me all about how stupid that was in the form of stomach cramps, bloating, headaches for the last 3 hours. And then to top it all off (since it was all over anyway) we had chocolate cake that my wife made. She had made it as healthily as possible of course (with dark chocolate, half almond flour and so on), but that only served to make us feel even worse.

So here we are sitting in the kitchen feeling sorry for ourselves and feeling so sick. I guess it is a lesson learnt again. We already knew the consequences of eating that food yet fell into the trap again. How stupid are we? No, not stupid. Just really wanted to make sure that it WAS that food that was making us feel sick lol. Isn't it funny how even though we know what these foods are doing to us - like the blood glucose spikes and so on and all the stuff about the wheat and the effects that has too - and still we manage to eat those foods we know are just not good for us.

I'm sure that is enough moaning for now - I'm gonna hit the sack and get some sleep and hopefully wake up feeling much better!

Next week I will post some stuff from the Wheat book I have been reading. By the way all these awesome talks (including one from the guy who wrote the Wheat book) are at the following website. There are some cool as pieces of info here so check them out on this paleo summit thing Sean Croxton has going on this week.

OK until next week!