Yes. Not even talking about weight loss though. Just doing it. Conscious eating is a good way to put it.

Sorry to hear about your ordeal with your knees and overall health!!!

I'm not quite where you are yet but was well on my way, with a damaged knee, unable to continue being active, and the downward spiral of weight gain and joint pain combined with a brutal carb addiction!

I found a diet that works for me and is gaining a huge following in America at the moment. It's essentially low carb but it's got some twists. I found it to be immensely more sustainable than "portion control" like weight watchers or ketosis diets like Atkins or any shakes or juice diets or fasting (yes, tried them all!). The twist is that it's a bit "hard" to follow from the cognitive point of view (ie complicated) but it's also the easiest healthy eating plan I've ever done from a willpower point of view. And this I don't feel deprived, my carb addiction no longer co tells my thoughts all day long, and I'm not hungry or feeling like I'm on a diet! I've been slacking on it - not even following it really hard core or being super careful with everything, and I've lost 45lbs since April. So 20kg. And there are bread recipes that are low carb, by the way. Sprouted grains are huge now in America, because they don't spike blood sugar like normal grains. But sourdough and rye can also work, although I'm not diabetic so I would double check if they are ok in your specific situation.

In any case, if you just want recipes there are loads and loads that I use from Gwen's Nest, and All Day I Dream About Food, and if you search for "THM" or "Trim Healthy Mama" on Pinterest you can find hundreds if not thousands.

The "diet" is called THM if you are interested in more than recipes, there are two books you can get from Amazon. The cookbook and the plan book with all the science and the complicated stuff :-)

There's a Facebook group with 11,000+ members and I see lots of people swearing it cured their type 2 diabetes, fibromyalgia, PCOS, other infertility issues, migraines, arthritis, you name it! I have no first had knowledge if it's true or not, but I can tell you my aches and pains have improved a lot (I have numerous joint problems!) and I just feel younger and healthier and a million times more energetic and less foggy/sluggish.

I do use stevia, erithyritol, and xylitol as sweeteners. I also use almond flour, coconut flour, ground flax, and oat bran (hard to find but Amazon.de has it) to replace regular flour for baking. And there are thickeners like gluccomanan (sp?) which can replace corn starch.

One of the main tenets of THM is that you need protein always, to keep blood sugar steady. So if I eat oatmeal, I add some skyr or lowfat Greek yoghurt or protein powder. Every meal or snack needs protein. I eat loads of bacon and eggs, rye wasa crackers with lean turkey breast and veggies, meat and cauliflower (fake potatoes), fondue and cauliflower, and sweet potatoes, and I also use zucchini or spaghetti squash (hard to find here though!) or also Konjak noodles (based on seaweed I think) instead of regular pasta.

Desserts can be yoghurt or cottage cheese with xucker chocolate chips and some sweetener and orange or mint extract, of a baked treat, or 85% chocolate, or chocolate mouse using sweetener, or cheesecake with berries. I also make lots of milkshakes, berries are great: sweet like other fruit, without the carbs (although blueberries in moderation).

Anyways I hope you find what you need amid this onslaught of info :-) and I wish you the best of luck in your journey back to health!!! If you want to chat more, PM me anytime!
Cheers!
Kyla

Quinoa pilaf is delicious


1 tsbp oil (any kind)
Once it is hot enough add the following
1 bay leaf
2 cloves
small bit of cinnamon
Cumin if you have some
Let them sizzle a bit
Add some chopped onions
crushed garlic/ginger
some mint leaves
cut veggies (let your imagination go wild)
sauté a bit and add quinoa
and boiling water as per the package instructions
let the water absorb and close the pan with a lid and turn the heat down to min for 10 mins
Open fluff, add some chopped coriander and eat with yogurt


Jazz up the yogurt with harissa/grated cucumber /coriander/parsley -minced garlic

Agreed as one will lead to t'other. However, in some instances, as for me preparing for drastic knee surgery, weight loss is very much on my mind (and on my surgeon's and physio's too).

It's working, 3.5kg so far. Got weights for arms and been using x-trainer with low resistance to protect knee/s.

If you're doing it for weight loss, then by all means, but I think the people that do sustained ketosis do it in order to keep health problems in check. Food is nowhere near as important as not having migraines or suffering from a chronic illness. I simply am not going to risk a relapse to eat a plate of pasta (even if I didn't have celiac disease).

I also know someone doing it to keep their fibromyalgia symptoms in check since medicine is pretty helpless on that one. And there's also a few oncologists that recommend it for cancer prevention once in remission (along with protein restriction since Gluconeogenisis works just too well with protein and low insulin levels and low glucose levels tend to be better for keeping most cancers in remission) from what I've read, they recommend lowcarb as low as the patient can tolerate

As for the person that mentioned pizza, there's a ton of Almond crust pizza recipes. I've made it a few times, but honestly, there are more interesting foods than pizza.

Agreed. I understand it also helps with inflammations. I noticed when I've lowered by carb intake, I don't break out with pimples anymore. I also have less digestive problems. I think it does clean out how your system works, and keeps the liver healthy. But I'll leave the discovery of those up to the individuals.

Actually, the liver works a bit more with ketosis since your liver can produce more glycogen than before (depending on how low your carbs are.)

And since I can't really stop myself, here's another paper:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4197426/

This researcher actually claims that being on a ketogenic diet along with standard treatment can increase the rate of remission in neck and head cancers since tumours feed off of glucose far more than ketones, they don't have the switch to start using ketone bodies..

I'm diabetic since about 10 years now and the idea you shouldn't eat carbs as a diabetic is totally wrong. We all need carbs, they're what keeps the engine running, the source of energy. So no carbs is going to send you into hypos all the time.
What you need are controlled quantities (i.e. not too much) of "slow" carbs or whatever you want to call them - whole-grain bread, whole-wheat pasta (yes pasta!), potatoes. Pretty much unlimited amounts of veggies.
Keep away from (or cut down significantly) high sugar carbs, in particular fruit juices (think how many oranges go into a glass of orange juice).
Most nutritionists won't forbid anything to a diabetic, but tell you to consume "naughty" things, such as chocolate, as rare, occasional treats. Depriving yourself of them completely often makes things worse as you end up on binges.

I eat a low gi diet and get most of my inspiration from both Instagram and Pinterest. If you haven't used them, check them out, amazing resources for recipe ideas.

https://www.pinterest.com/missamylin...ipes-low-carb/

One of my favouite breakfast recipes is banana pancakes with just egg and banana!!

1 Ripe Banana
2 Eggs
a dash of Baking Powder
Cinnamon

Mash the Banana, add the eggs and whisk together. Add in the baking powder and cinnamon, whisk again adding air. Heat a pan with oil in it over a medium heat and cook mini pancakes. Once finished, serve with either honey or maple syrup.

Enjoy!

I will respectfully disagree with your opinion and fall back on the science in actual scientific journal vs. what nutritionists and doctors are finally turning back on. (btw, both are open access)

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25287761
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18609058

Seriously, people need to read the actual science instead of repeating dogma on this one. People actually die of diabetes.

To be honest, I don't think you disagree with each other all that much. A low-carb diet doesn't mean a no-carb diet. No two human beings are exactly the same, so it doesn't make sense to say only one approach is correct for every person.

As for dogma, some of today's dogma is yesterday's "hard science" in actual scientific journals... Here are a few older pubmed links, when at least some scientists thought high carb could be good for certain populations:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2830768
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9094889
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9805219

Correction

It's ironic, if you go further back in time before the discovery of insulin... before Banting and Best, diabetes was only treated with a no-carb diet. Most patients were doomed, but those without a completely loss of insulin managed to survive a couple of decade this way. It's really amazing that they managed this with pure guesswork and observations. I really have a lot of respect for the scientists of this era that managed to cure things like TB with sunlight (vitamin D) and the such.

I'm with 3Wishes there. Nowhere in these publications they say no-carb. And I also disagree with the statement that doctors and nutrionists are vs. actual science. First hand experience: The first thing my doctors and nutrionists told me was to reduce carbs. I fully agree with what is published in the two articles, again based on my experience and hundreds of measurements of my blood sugar, daily and long term. As a diabetic it is most important to exactly now how your body deals with different foods, also carbs. This will be different from one person to the other. I eat carbs! My hba1c is now indistinguishable from a healthy person, my postprandial results are rarely over the normal values and I know when and why. And I can prove my points with hard data...

__________________
Guns don't kill people, George R.R. Martin kills people.

Odile, you might like to try my Christmas salad recipe.

Serves 4 as a main course, 8 as an accompaniment to cold meats

175g Red or white cabbage
2 Large carrots peeled and grated
2 Dessert apples cored and chopped
2 Celery sticks, chopped
100g Dates, stoned and chopped
50g Sultanas
100g Shelled nuts of your choice, chopped if large
2 Tangerines or oranges, peeled, pith removed and divided into segments
100g Stilton cheese
150ml Dressing of your choice

Just put it all in a big bowl and stir well. Just leave out any ingredients you don't want to eat.

If you'd bothered reading what I wrote, I talked about managed quantities of high quality carbs. Anyone not eating any carbs at all is going to make themselves ill in the long term. That is not just science, it's common sense.

First of all, ketogenic is not no-carb. It's maintaining carbs to under 50g per day.

Secondly, "common sense" is not actually "common sense." Scientifically speaking, when "common sense" ideals are tested, half the time, they turn out false, because humans live off confirmation bias. Evolutionarily speaking, we're trigger happy to see patterns where none exist, because having a false positive keeps us alive longer than a false negative.

Thirdly, please show me a study that demonstrates what you're claiming about long-term ketogenic diets causing illness, and what type of illness as well. Will the ketogenic diet cause inflammatory illnesses, auto-immune, cardiovascular, neurological?

I've read a few studies linking it to elevated TSH levels (possibly indicating Graves' disease) in women in menopause, but the studies were not very concrete and women tend to have an increase in graves' disease at that age anyhow. I also have read anecdotal n=1 write-up where it's claimed to cause electrolyte imbalances, but again, the recommendation was to just eat more sodium and potassium.

I would very much appreciate it if you could bother reading what I wrote: "managed quantities of high-quality carbs". I don't believe exact values of 50 g, because the amount will depend on the person, and they will have to determine the amounts themselves.
As it happens I am diabetic, I inject myself with insulin and if for some reason I don't take in any carbs (I try to avoid such situations, but they do occur), I will predictably end up with a hypo. This isn't a situation which requires panic, I feel and recognize hypos and wake up at night when they occur, and I just treat them.
The most frequest occasion is when I've travelled over a pile of time zones and although I've adjusted insulin intake, my body's metabolic rate presumably hasn't adjusted. I've learned to keep a closer eye on my values at those times and keep a small stock of cereal bars just in case.

Maybe you're injecting too much insulin?

I'm not really sure what high quality carbs are, because that seems to be a way for people to tell me to eat something that makes people ill. A piece of bread déstabilisés blood sugar more than the same amount of sugar for many people. We still don't know for whom before the fact. I suspect people gaining weight are the ones following "common sense" recommendations with the reactions that don't jive with the recommendations.

Just eat a normal diet and stop acting like if you were a physician. Perhaps if you follow a normal diet like most other girls of your age, you won't need to spend half your time in hospital suffering from all kind of different diseases I think you
are harming yourself by trusting all those medical papers.