Refined carbohydrates are even linked to infertility, not just because all the pesticides and chemicals in refined white flour are so disruptive to your body (as are the trans fats used in baked goods and convenience food) but also because polycystic ovary syndrome, which is a common cause of infertility and irregular and painful periods, is caused by insulin resistance or pre diabetes. You may be able to reverse polycystic ovary syndrome by eliminating refined carbs from your diet. Remember Karen, the little girl in Step Three who suffered from epilepsy and had to choose not to eat foods that made her fits worse? In an experiment at Great Ormond Street Hospital, a group of epileptic children who were having up to eighty seizures a day were put on a high-fat and low-carbohydrate diet. When all bread, cereals, rice, potatoes and snack foods were banned, the diet proved to have dramatic results. Within days the fits were reduced to between two and twelve per day. The results showed that after three months many of the children had a 75 per cent reduction in seizures, 50 per cent were able to reduce medication dramatically. Some came off medication altogether and the children showed a 75 per cent improvement in alertness, awareness and responsiveness. The tests showed that the low-carbohydrate diet changed the metabolism of these children for the better.
These children had baked goods made out of almond flour and all of their parents reported that the effort involved in changing their diet was absolutely worth it as the results were profound. The diet and test results are available from
www.gosh.nhs.uk
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No one fully understands why epileptic children cannot metabolise refined carbohydrates but these tests do prove that for some people starchy and refined carbohydrates have a destructive effect on their metabolism. Researchers are beginning to link the rise in violent crime, mental disorders, ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder) and other children’s ailments to the West’s growing consumption of processed foods and refined carbohydrates.
I have been telling my clients for twenty years to avoid refined flour, and whenever anyone says to me, ‘How come you are so slim yet you eat a lot?’ I always reply, ‘I don’t eat flour’. You don’t have to give it up completely but you can choose to limit its intake. More and more doctors and dieticians are coming to the same conclusion and I believe that soon the link between refined flour and obesity will be proved. We can already see it works by looking at Thai, Japanese and Chinese people where they have a very low percentage of overweight people. An Asian diet does not include flour, they do not eat bread or pasta and many of the noodles they eat are rice noodles. Yet Thai, Japanese and Chinese people who live in America and eat an American diet do have weight problems. The most overweight Americans are African Americans but Africans are not fat and they don’t eat wheat flour only maize. African Americans are the poorest Americans and eat a diet that is often 80 per cent wheat products. To me that is heartbreaking and so unnecessary. Most people who are overweight eat 80 per cent of their daily food intake in the form of refined flour of which 50 per cent is bread alone, the other 30 per cent comes from pasta, cakes, biscuits, crackers, noodles, pastry and snacks. Imagine that, eating 80 per cent of your daily food from a source that was not even put on the planet for you but exists as a food source for cattle. Half of the world eats 50 per cent of its calories every day from bread, and 70 per cent of the food we eat today is food our ancestors never ate.
In our grandparents’ day most people ate about thirteen different food types in one day, the variety came from fruits, vegetables, proteins and starches. Today we eat only six to eight different types of food but the majority of these come from one food group; refined carbohydrates and primarily white bread, cakes, biscuits and sugary snacks.
Something to stick in your mind!
To get an idea of what bread is like in your body, take some bread or flour, put it in a big mixing or salad bowl, add some water and mix it all up with your hands until it resembles a paste. Really play with it and feel the texture and consistency, eat a little of it if you can bear to then leave it in the bowl on your kitchen counter for about two weeks and watch what happens to it as this will help put you off wheat.
Every day imagine that sticky mass in your stomach and intestines, imagine what it is doing to your body. Don’t wash it off your hands completely and you will notice it sets like concrete. That is just how it is in your body. Have you ever left half-finished cereal bowls until you come back from work in the evening and noticed how the residue of cereal has set like cement? Well, imagine if that’s what it was like in your body.
I am a great believer that you don’t want to hear this you need to see it. You will believe it when you see it so take a lump of the paste you have made from water and bread or water and flour and stick some paper together with it then stick another piece of paper to the wall with this glue. It will stay stuck like this for weeks, even years. If you love to have bread and cereal for breakfast leave the paper stuck to you kitchen wall and leave the bowl of glue out on your kitchen worktop to remind you of what you have been eating.
If you always have sandwiches at work because it’s easy, remind yourself that it is not at all easy for your body to digest by having a bowl or container of this gluey mess on your desk or in your drawer to look at and remind you of what it really is. Use a lump of it to stick a piece of paper to your wall or filing cabinet to reinforce just how sticky it is. If you can’t do this, stick it to a book and keep it in your desk or locker or bag to jog your memory. I always do this at my seminars – make up a bowl of glue and stick some to the wall. At my last seminar one of the participants told me that when her mother was wallpapering she ran out of wallpaper paste so she improvised with flour and water and found it just as effective as, and much cheaper than, buying wallpaper paste. That really is food for thought.
Remembering what that gluey paste looks like, close your eyes and imagine you can see inside your body. Look at your stomach and intestines and imagine that paste coating everything. Look how hard your poor body is working to try to extract some form of nutrition from it and just when it might have made a bit of an inroad you put in some more and this goes on all day. No wonder your body protests with gas, distension heartburn and fatigue. Ask your body how it feels to be filled up with glue and to have to work so hard to try and digest it. When you get a message back from your body (and you will if you do this properly and stick with it for a few minutes) you can make a commitment to stop punishing your body this way and to respect it. So go ahead and memorise this then close your eyes and imagine it now.
If you have sugar cravings it is important to remember that highly refined sugar is not food at all, it is a chemical. Sugar creates an acidic environment in your body which then has to produce more fat cells to keep the acid away from your organs. Sugar makes you fat, rots your teeth, disrupts your digestion and is extremely addictive.
When you crave something sweet and sugary you can satisfy the craving with naturally sweet foods that won’t have this effect on your body: figs, dates, berries and other fruits, and with creamy soya yogurts and shakes and sugar-free nut, seed and hemp bars. Small grapes can stop a sugar craving and soaked blanched almonds are very sweet too. In addition, almonds and pumpkin seeds are full of B vitamins and zinc, which is a benefit since low levels of zinc are linked to depression which leads to comfort eating. Zinc supplements also help you keep off sugary foods. To increase your zinc levels you can eat more prawns as they are naturally rich in zinc. Another way to keep your sugar levels naturally balanced is to eat cinnamon – half a teaspoon a day of ground cinnamon reduces sugar levels in the blood, and you can add it to oats or soya milk, put it in fruit smoothies or stewed fruit or add it to curries.
Many people who crave sugar are low in magnesium, chromium and manganese, so take a combined calcium, magnesium and chromium supplement to better absorb the magnesium. Magnesium-rich foods will also lessen sugar cravings. These include dates, apples, avocados, Brazil nuts, almonds, celery, parsley and fish. A diet deficient in magnesium, calcium and potassium can cause weight gain as well as sugar cravings.
I am not a fan of salt but eating something salty can often end a carb and sugar craving. Roasted sunflower seeds with tamari sauce, tahini and sauerkraut are good healthy salty tastes. I used to eat masses of sweets and confectionery and would buy them every day. I would never have believed that fruit could replace chocolate and initially when I craved chocolate eating grapes was not the same. However, I made a decision to give up sugar and using the same methods I am teaching you I gave it up very easily for three months. I decided to eat it again on my birthday and was amazed to find that I didn’t like it in the same way I used to, it was no longer that enjoyable and I have never craved it since. I only wish I had done it years earlier.
Another factor to consider as a reason to give up refined sugar is that it seriously ages your skin. Sugar molecules attach themselves to collagen causing the fibres to become rigid, stiff and inflexible. This in turn increases wrinkles, particularly frown lines, laughter lines and nose-to-mouth lines, and makes them deeper and more pronounced. So sugar will make your face prematurely lined, saggy and jowly whereas a diet low in refined sugar will leave you with a more youthful and firm complexion.
How to End Crisp Cravings
We delude ourselves that crisps are healthy potatoes cooked in sunflower oil and a reasonable snack. The truth is most crisps are made up of trans fat and masses of chemicals. Many crisps are not made of real potatoes at all but of a reconstructed mashed potato mix and a cocktail of additives, there is nothing natural about them.
Fat burning!
If you want to put yourself off crisps for life take some regular potato crisps, get some matches and holding a crisp over a metal tray light one crisp at a time and watch how slowly it burns and how much fat drips off it. When the crisp is half burned place it on the tray until it burns out and watch the fat drip off, you can get a full teaspoon of fat from just one crisp. You would be unable to eat that fat from the teaspoon but you are eating it every time you eat crisps and your body has to deal with all that fat. The reason crisps burn so slowly is because they are pure fat and it takes that fat some time to burn. It would be incredibly difficult to set fire to a potato but you can light a crisp and watch it burn. It will go black and the smoke that comes off it is horrible because of all the fat and chemicals. Really focus on the smell, the fat dripping off the crisps and the smoke and you will feel different about crisps forever.
I was teaching this to some children and one little boy wrote to me to say he has never eaten crisps since. Obviously you must do this with your children – don’t let them do this alone and make sure you have a bowl of water to hand.
Next take a Pringle and place it in your mouth on your tongue, don’t bite into it just leave it there and you will feel all the fat and chemicals starting to saturate your mouth. If you leave it for a while it will literally stick to the roof of you mouth. Try it, it’s horrible and will change your concept of what crisps are, you will never look at them the same way again. Instead of crisps you can snack on olives, Japanese soy beans, seeds, fruit, nut and seed bars, vegetables with dips or hummus and unsalted nuts.
Don’t even think about replacing dairy products with margarine. Margarine is but ONE MOLECULE away from being PLASTIC. To prove this to yourself, buy a tub of margarine and leave it in your garage or a shaded area outside. Within a couple of days you will notice that no flies, rodents or insects will go near it (that should tell you something) and it doesn’t rot or smell because it has no nutritional value; nothing will grow on it. Even micro organisms won’t grow on trans fats. They don’t decompose – why?
Because it is nearly plastic, it’s what I call chemical, fake food or non-food. It’s about as real and healthy as the tub it came in and you wouldn’t melt and eat that, would you? Would you eat a food that rats and flies won’t touch? Of course not, so keep that in mind and it will help you to say no to it. It’s a good idea to let your children monitor the tub of plastic margarine in the garden as it will help them stop eating it too. You don’t need to feel any sense of shame about eating margarine prior to today, because you didn’t have this information before now. Food companies don’t exactly want you to know how unnatural and scarily unhealthy some of their foods are. I get so cross when diet experts try to shame people about their weight and make them feel humiliated about how they have been eating. You didn’t manufacture this non-food, spend a fortune advertising it and then place it in the shops and pretend it’s healthy, slimming and full of vitamins. You bought it because you got conned and brainwashed by the adverts just as they wanted you to be, and if anyone should feel a sense of shame it’s the companies that produce and market this stuff. Don’t beat yourself up – just stop buying it, and remember it isn’t just margarine, many other foods contain trans fats including fast food, junk food, snack food, biscuits, pies, pastries, cakes, crackers, chips, crisps, powdered hot drinks and ready meals.
Remind yourself that it’s almost plastic and if it’s unfit for rats and flies it has to be unfit for you and your family. Rats know that and now you know it too. It doesn’t stop you gaining weight, either; trans fats are linked to weight gain, cancer, diabetes and heart disease. So look at that untouched plastic in your garden and remind yourself it’s a chemical not a food and it can make you ill and fat. It belongs in the bin, not in your body. Your body cannot break down and digest plastic (instead it wraps it in fat and stores it in your body), so eating so-called slimming spreads and diet foods can make you fatter even if the calories are low. If you don’t have a garden or balcony you can put it by your front door or on a windowsill. Don’t worry, it won’t attract insects it will repel them and now you can be just as repelled. You can eat Pure, which is an organic soy spread, or organic olive-oil spread stocked by most supermarkets and health food shops.