Here is a Low Carb Recipe that you have to try. These Coconut Herb buns are extremely light and yummy. They also contain flax and from what I have read the oils in the flax do not get destroyed when baked.

These buns go great with tomato and cheese.

Low Carb Coconut Herb Buns

1/2 cup of dessicated unsweetened coconut

2 tablespoons of golden flax

3 eggs

1/2 teaspoon of garlic powder

1/2 teaspoon of dill

1/2 teaspoon oregano

1/2 teaspoon thyme

1/2 teaspoon basil

1/2 teaspoon tarragon

1/4 teaspoon of baking powder

1/4 teaspoon of bakins soda

1/4 teaspoon salt

1/4 cup of melted butter or coconut oil

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Mix together coconut and golden flax in a coffee grinder until the mixture is well mixed and finely ground. Put the coconut/flax mixture into a bowl. Add the herbs (garlic, dill, oregano, thyme, basil, tarragon). Add salt, baking powder and baking soda to the dry ingredients. Mix well. Add melted butter and eggs to the dry ingredients. Mix well again. Grease a muffin top pan or a muffin pan. I used a muffin top pan that I got at the grocery store. Place about a tablespoon and a half of mixture into each cup.

Place in the oven and bake for 17 min or until a knife inserted comes out clean.

Let me know what you think! This post was submitted to the Real Food Wednesday Blog Carnival hosted by Anne Marie aka CHEESESLAVE. To get more real food recipes check out her blog.

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So it has seemed that in the last week that I have gotten some flak for posting this series. I will address some concerns. Like I have reiterated in my previous blog posts about the veggie diet is that this series is inspired by health problems I have seen in my own daughter and the same problems I see in other vegetarian children. These children have no choice in being vegetarian even though it is their health that is at stake.

The Low Carb Fibre issue

The Low Carb diet is not deficient in fibre. Actually fibre reduces net carb counts and you can get plenty of fibre from ground flax seeds, coconut, nuts, seeds and vegetables.

Saturated Fats And Cholesterol

The comments that I received about saturated fats and cholesterol were that they are not healthy, that the low carb movement is a fad and “plain out of style”. All of this is false. Saturated fats are very healthy and cholesterol may actually be an anti-oxidant.

As for the low carb diet being a fad, Gary Taubes writes in his book Good Calories, Bad Calories that the Low Carb diets can be traced all the way to the 1800’s and they are still around to this day in many different forms:

The Mercola Diet, Susan Sommers diet, The Paleo Diet, The South Beach Diet, Protein Power Diet, Dr. Atkins Diet, The Leptin Diet, Dr. Richard Bernstein Diabetes Solution, Dr. Al Sears the Author of “The Doctor’s Heart Cure” and many more… All of these except the Susan Sommers diet have medical doctors who stand behind them. I believe Susan Sommers referred to nutritionists and dieticians to help her outline the principles of Sommercising.

So if you still think that these diets are “fads” let me refer to this study that was performed for 12 months (which is one of the longest and largest studies performed) and found that the Atkins Diet was the healthiest.

The results of the study:

At the end of a year, the 77 women assigned to the Atkins group had lost an average of 10.4 pounds. Those assigned to LEARN lost 5.7 pounds, the Ornish followers lost 4.8 pounds and women on the Zone lost 3.5 pounds, on average. In all four groups, however, some participants lost up to 30 pounds.

After 12 months, women following the Atkins diet, relative to at least one of the other groups, had larger decreases in body mass index, triglycerides and blood pressure; their high-density lipoprotein, the good kind of cholesterol, increased more than the women on the other diets.

The Atkin’s Diet is a High Fat, medium protein, low carb

The Ornish Diet is a Low Fat, vegetarian diet, high carb

This study is comparing the Low Carb Atkins diet and the High Carb Vegetarian diet together. And as you can see it is the Atkins diet that turned out to be healthier. This study was published in the March 7, 2007 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Saturated Fats are traditional fats and have been used since the times of Jacob, Issac and Moses.

In previous generations we have never had so much heart disease. But now we have introduced a lot of vegetable oils into our diets and guess what?? Heart disease has skyrocketed! Why? Because saturated fats are stable fats, they don’t oxidize and vegetable fats are easily oxidized.

Polyunsaturated vegetable fats are one of the greatest contributors of heart disease. Not only that but they also greatly contribute to increased cancer, immune system dysfunction, damage to the liver, reproductive organs and lungs, digestive disorders, depressed learning ability, impaired growth and weight gain. Source: Nourishing Traditions, Pg 10

I did call this article Low Carb Diet Vs. The Vegetarian Diet so I will give you another example…

Many people would say that Dr. Atkins died from eating a low carb diet which caused heart disease. But actually he died because he slipped and fell on some ice and hit his head.

There is even an online copy of his death certificate which states his death as a “blunt impact injury of head with epidural hematoma.”

As many people have vilified Dr. Atkins as having heart failure, I do have to mention the death of Jay Dinshah who was the founder of the American Vegan Society in 1960. He was born to a vegetarian family and had become vegan. His parents had congenital heart problems and he died of a heart attack at the age of 66.

It makes me question if these heart problems in the family could have been caused by oxidized polyunsaturated vegetable fats???

There is a lot of disagreement and just pure lies about what is healthy and what is not healthy. It is your choice what you feed your family. But our children need the best nutrition to thrive.

My daughter was not thriving on a vegetarian/vegan diet. We were able to heal her cavities, uncontrollable crying, and failure to thrive by following the dietary principles founded by Weston A. Price and written in Nourishing Traditions.

To your health and wellness,

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When it comes to weight loss there are so many products to choose from. There seems to be a food to fill any kind of need that we have. These franken foods come as…

Low Carb Tortilla’s, Low Carb Bread, Low Carb Chocolate, Low Carb Desserts, Low Carb Syrups, Low Carb Sweeteners and Low Carb Countdown Milk.

These foods all have artificial or modified ingredients in them. When I was vegetarian I ate plenty of fake meats, cheeses and sauces with horrible ingredients thinking they were healthy. I did not see any bad health problems until I was eating them for over a decade!

I now prefer to eat REAL food that my grandparents would recognize. So even if I am feeling emotional and want to sink my teeth into an apple or banana to get my sugar fix – I will. I will eat REAL honey. I will eat sprouted whole grain bread. It will cause my cravings to skyrocket and it will cause me to overeat. It may also cause a Candida Yeast outbreak.

But real food has real nutrition. Fake processed foods cause the real damage to your body (How else did I get insulin resistant!). Think about what happens every time man tries to interfere with food…

• Turning away from butter to margarine… we have created trans fats and a heart disease catastrophe!
• Turning away from raw milk/eggs to pasteurization… this has allowed for the industrialization and factory farming of animals and getting away from the traditional family farm.
• Turning away from whole grains to bleached and processed grains… These grains are so nutrient deficient that they need to ADD vitamins back into them.
• Turning away from nutrient dense spices to artificial flavours… These flavours are so dangerous that they kill brain cells.
• Turning to Genetically Modified Foods to mass produce food.
• Turning to fast food junk rather than slowly cooked nutrient dense traditional food.
• Turning to mass pesticide/fertilizer use and poisoning of our food, soil, water and air and abandoning traditional biodynamic organic ways.

There are still probably many ways that we alter food and in turn poison ourselves that I have not thought off.

Is it any wonder why we are sick?

Am I supposed to trust these people that put this junk on the market? I don’t think so.

All of this is done for one reason – For profit!

Don’t feel bad about cheating on your low carb diet with real food. Do it occasionally if it does not cause to much health and weight issues.

To your health and wellness,

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Today I wanted to update you on my Candida Healing.

It has been ten months that I have been following the High Fat Low Carb Diet. It all started because of systemic Candida Yeast Infection that I have suffered with for 16 years. I never knew what it was in my early teens and college days. So with my ignorance I ate a high sugar, grain and alcohol diet for many years. I did eventually realize what was causing the huge discomfort and irritation and it was Candida Yeast.

I could not give up eating fruits and grains. I just could not imagine that natural foods could be harming my health. But they did. I was miserable for many years because of this thought.

Ten months ago I was suffering from yet another yeast infection and I had finally had enough. Diet was one of the only ways to get rid of this stubborn yeast. I had read online that the Atkins diet was a solution for Candida. I was yet again horrified that I would have to give up my beloved fruits.

Anyways… For the most part I eat low carb with a few slip ups here and there. The slip ups usually last a day. During more emotional times and New Year’s holiday it lasted several days. I eat very clean. I don’t keep a lot of junk food in the house, but my kids eat fruit and my husband likes his white bread. The sweetener for my kid’s food is honey. So that is the extent of my bad eating. There are no chocolate bars, cakes or candy in my house.

My last slip up (last week) I noticed when I had some honey on Ezekiel Sprouted Bread that I did not get a yeast infection. I normally get a reaction within hours of eating sweet food. That day I had bananas, sweet grapes, honey on Sprouted Ezekiel Bread (3 pieces) and very little reaction. The next day I ate similar food and very little reaction. The day after was my dad’s birthday and I had some alcohol. It was the alcohol that finally triggered the yeast and it was the third day of eating sweet things!

After 10 months of Low Carb dieting, I can finally have a small amount of naturally sweet foods without worrying about yeast. Even though I love eating the Low Carb Way, it is a relief to know that I am on the road to healing after suffering from yeast for half my life.

My Candida Treatment is…

• Eating No Grains
• Eating No Fruit (except lemon juice, or half a grapefruit occasionally about once a week)
• Eating No Berries (some Candida diets allow this but in my personal experience these feed the yeast)
• I eat probiotic foods such as yogurt, kefir, sauerkraut, natural pickles (Bubbies)
• I eat two heaping teaspoons of coconut oil every day
• I still eat dairy products (some Candida diets don’t allow this)
• I take Cod Liver Oil every day (fall and winter months) and get 45 minutes of sunshine everyday for Vitamin D. Vitamin D is essential for immune health.
• All my meat that I eat is local and organic. Conventional meats have undesirable medicines and antibiotic residuals.

That’s it! I do not take any Probiotic powders anymore. I prefer to get my nutrition from foods.

To your health and wellness,

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One of my good friends was hospitalized for high blood pressure. An ambulance had picked him up at home thinking that he might be suffering a stroke.  This friend is young. He is under the age of forty and is a father of four kids.

He had several symptoms of suffering a stroke: He felt dizzy, nausea, and headache. In his past history he has also had partial blindness where he was only able to see the top part of his vision and not the bottom.

At the hospital they did some tests and gave him some medication to lower his blood pressure. He got tested to see if he had had a stroke. When the tests concluded that he had not suffered a stroke they released him and sent him home.

How scary is that!

One of the major causes of high blood pressure is diet. He eats a standard american diet. Margarine, hot dogs, canned food, lots of refined carbohydrates and sugary foods. It is these horrible foods that cause so much trouble for the heart. High blood pressure is a better indicator for heart disease than cholesterol levels.

Trans fats are very dangerous and are found in margarines and many processed foods. If you are eating foods that come out of a package you should still be checking the ingredient list. If that ingredient list contains any partially hydrogenated oils or hydrogenated oils than that certainly means that the product has trans fats. If the nutrition label says ZERO for trans fats and the product contains these kinds of hydrogenated oils than the label is lying to you. The safe limit for trans fats is a big fat zero. And yet if the product contains less than 0.5 grams per serving size than manufacturers can say it is trans fat free. Zero on the label does not really mean zero. The serving size can be altered so that the trans fat grams per serving size will fall under the 0.5 grams.

Studies have shown that people on the Atkins diet have dramatically improved their blood pressure and heart health. There are many factors that contribute to high blood pressure like stress, weight and exercise but consistently it is the Atkins Diet that comes out to be heart healthy.

Dr. Atkins was a cardiologist and repeatedly saw these kinds of results in his patients.

I write this blog to share the message of health and wellness. I have not found a graceful way of sharing this message face to face. Food is a personal choice. But it can have dreadful consequences. Stroke under the age of forty is scary. Losing a young father of four can be potentially devastating for the family and friends.

Health is something to be cherished. If you need a reminder, visit and volunteer at a hospital near you for a day.

I will keep writing!

To your health and wellness,

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For the past nine days I have been taking Coconut Oil on a daily basis. The dosage I have been taking is 2-3 heaping teaspoons. I have gained a few pounds from doing this! Yikers! I will continue taking it to see if this is just my initial reaction to it and see if there will be any other changes. Coconut Oil is just too healthy and after trying for a long time to find a tasty way of supplementing it into my diet, I have finally found a way that could eat it every day!

I am also experiencing a mild Candida die off. My tummy has been sensitive for the past 4-5 days. I am glad that it is not as severe as when I initially started the Atkins Low Carb diet. The first Candida die off lasted about a week and a half and I could not leave the house or eat anything because the food would just go right through me.

My weight now is 120 – 122lbs. It was 117lbs a few weeks ago. Maybe I should just throw out my scale.  My goal is just to get rid of belly fat. But instead of losing weight I have stalled and gained.

Exercise Update…

I have not been good this past week. My youngest daughter is sick with a nasty fever and cough and I have not gone running outside. It has been cold here but the sun has been shining and I have been itching to just go running. Since my schedule has been a bit off I have not done my regular Unstoppable Fat Loss Workouts either.

I have no idea if I will be able to reach my goal to lose my belly fat by April 25. There is only two short months left to go.

One thing that I love is blogging about my weight! It holds me accountable and keeps me on track so I can reach my goals. I may also start a food log and log my daily food intake. This is highly recommended by lots of “experts” but I have always found it tedious. I may have to control my meal portion sizes (Gasp!) and write down what I eat.

After listening to yesterday’s livin lavida low carb podcast about sleep, my intentions were to go to bed by ten pm.  Well that did not happen (laundry was calling me!), but I did lower the lights and took some Valerian Root. I had no trouble falling asleep and I slept deeply. Tonight I will again aim to go to bed by ten and do the same thing, lower the lights and take Valerian Root. Hopefully I will be able to wean off Valerian and adjust to this routine.

Sleeping better will reduce my dependence on caffeine which can release an insulin response and inhibit low carb fat loss. And of course if I reduce my caffeine I will have to replace it with water therefore increasing my over all water intake.

Break through the stall steps:

1.    Log food
2.    Log beverages
3.    Sleep – get to bed by ten pm.
4.    Keep taking coconut oil

The focus: Get healthy, get fit, and get lean!

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Researchers from Tufts University performed a three week study were they took nine women and placed them on a very low carbohydrate diet. They took another 10 women and placed them on a low fat, low calorie diet that is recommended by the American Dietetic Association.  These researches wanted to find out how diet and cognitive performance would be related. They tested for mood, memory and attention span. The tests were performed 72 hours before beginning their assigned diet, at 48 hrs after starting the diet, then again at week 1, 2 and 3 during the diet.

The amount of carbohydrates that the low carb group were able to eat the first week were ZERO and then the second week they were able to add 5-8gm of carbs per day. Then the third week they were able to eat 10-16gm of carbs per day.

Memory impairments occurred in the low carb group when the available glycogen would be at their lowest. But during this time the low carb group had less confusion, and response was quicker during vigilance tasks then the low fat group. Memory improved in the low carb group after reintroducing carbohydrates in the diet.

The brain can run on two fuels – glucose and ketones. When you limit your carbohydrate intake you switch the fuel that the body/brain can run on. Instead of running on glucose it will run on ketones. The body releases ketones on a low carb diet when it starts burning body fat as fuel.

This study shows us a few things. It was a very short study so it would only show us the how the body reacts during the process of change from burning glucose to burning ketones.  It is an unfair to claim that low carb is bad for the memory when it is the changing of the fuels that is shown in this study. The participant ate a NO CARB diet. That is very different from low carb diet. Even during Atkins strictest induction phase the carb limit is 20gm, which is still higher then what the study participants ate. Memory improved when carbs where added to the diet. So even when you are eating 16grams of carbohydrates your memory is ok! That just shows how little carbohydrate our brains need to use for fuel. At 16 gms carbs the primary fuel would be ketones not glucose.

There are many forms of low carb diets – going strictly no carb by eating meat and eggs (this is more restrictive than Atkins), to Atkins induction (20 gm. carbs per day), all the way to eating up to 100 gm. carbs a day.

For low carb fat loss maintenance most people stay within the 35-100 gm. of carbs per day.

This study is not representative or a normal low carb dieter!

The real culprit for memory loss may be high blood sugar which is caused by eating carbs and sweets!

This study was published in December issue of Annals of Neurology and was performed by researchers at Columbia University Medical Center. Their recommendation is to increase exercise to regulate blood glucose levels.

“By improving glucose metabolism, physical exercise also reduces blood glucose. It is therefore possible that the cognitive enhancing effects of physical exercise are mediated, at least in part, by the beneficial effect of lower glucose on the dentate gyrus. Whether with physical exercise, diet or through the development of potential pharmacological interventions, our research suggests that improving glucose metabolism could be a clinically viable approach for improving the cognitive slide that occurs in many of us as we age,” concluded Dr. Small.

Dr. Scott Small is the associate professor of neurology at Columbia University Medical Center and lead researcher of the study.

The dentate gyrus is an area of the brain within the hippocampus. This is the part of the brain that we use for memory.

Eating a healthy low carb diet and exercise can protect you from memory loss related to aging.

To your health and wellness,

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I started to follow the Low Carb diet when I read an article that recommended the Atkins diet for Candida Yeast. My initial reaction was rejection but the more I learned and saw positive results in other people the more I warmed up to actually trying the diet. The first week of eating low carb was great. Digestion and bloating improved and I lost weight. Hunger and cravings disappeared and so on. The Candida Yeast symptoms gradually reduced and I did experience a yeast die off. And the best thing was is that I got to eat yummy food.

My main reason for sticking to the Low Carb diet is to get rid of yeast. It is not the weight loss or the other benefits that I described above. It is a physical discomfort and a constant reminder when I cheat. The foods that I am cheating with are small amounts of fruit and mostly berries. Fruit like berries, grapefruit, lemons, limes and cantaloupe are allowed while low carbing. But they still cause a Candida reaction in me. They may not cause my eating to get out of control but they are still sugar and my body is telling me that it does not like it. The reason I allow myself to eat these foods is because they are allowed even though it is not good for me.

Our minds desire things that create pleasure for us and stay away from things that cause us pain. Candida causes me pain so I stick to the diet. I don’t want Candida anymore. I will have to get my mind around the fact that even low sugar fruit causes me pain.

The immediate pleasure that we get from eating junk food is often much more powerful than the pain that we feel after we eat it. But if the food makes us physically sick after we eat it we are more likely to stay away from it.

Remorse, guilt, bloating, just overall bad feelings are not enough to stop us from raiding the cupboards. There has to be something more. On the weight loss show “The Bulging Bride” and “The Last Ten Pounds” they have the personal trainers come early in the morning and whip the poor participants out of bed and give them an extra gruelling workout to ensure that they will feel the pain for days to come. And this workout also involves the participant’s friends that allowed them to cheat. They also utilize the pleasure principle: at the end of the show they get to fit into their gorgeous wedding dress or in the case of The Last Ten Pounds they get to fit into a snazzy new outfit.

I am also creating more pain by setting exercise fitness goals for April 25. If I fail, then I fail publicly. I will have to find a nice new outfit that I can hang on my bedroom door to motivate me every morning when I get up.

Is there a way that you can implement these principles in your life?

What can you use for your pain and pain motivators?

To your health and wellness,

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Christopher Gardner, PhD. 25 year vegetarian and in his own words “had to swallow a bitter pill” and write a medical paper that was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association on how Atkins Low Carb is shown to be medically healthier way of eating.

They conducted a study with 311 pre-menepausal overweight women. The researchers took four popular diets including the National Dietary Recommendations for high carb and low fat, the Atkins diet, the Zone and the Ornish diet. They took these women and educated them on the diets and made sure that they understood them completely. They then asked them to follow a selected diet for a period of 12 months. They followed up with them periodically. The researchers wanted to know what the “real life” results would be so they did not interfere.

I find this study fascinating. This is a long video but I hope that this does not discourage you from watching it. I do have some highlighted points if you are short on time and want to jump to that part of the video.

• Weight Loss stats for all the groups  @ 20 min
• No other group that did better in health criteria than Atkins. @ 23min. They measured Weight, Systolic Blood Pressure, Diastolic Blood Pressure, Triglycerides, HDL Cholesterol, LDL Cholesterol, Insulin and Glucose.
• Health parameters improve on Atkins vs. all other diets @ 30:15 min.
• A controlled study that had participants lose the same amount of weight on different types of diets  had the low carb participants still have better blood chemistry. So this concludes that it was not the weight loss that made participants healthier -  It was the low carb diet @ 31:45 min.
• Low Carb and High Fat diet is more effective for insulin resistant people @ 41min. The more overweight you have then the more insulin resistant you are.  @ 44 -45 min
• My favourite nutritional advice is @ 47:55 – 52min

The Battle of the Diets: Is Anyone Winning (At Losing?)

What are your favourite points on this study? I would really love to know?

To your health and wellness,

Catherine Osthaus

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Food is a very personal issue and it affects us on so many levels. We have belief systems around food, emotional ties and physical addictions. It is hard to break through those to get to the underlying fat issues. I myself thought of myself as pretty knowledgeable about nutrition. It has always interested me and I read many books on it. But I was totally oblivious to how bad carbohydrates can be. I was struggling with weight issues but I thought that I only needed to control my calorie intake. But it was hard when I was constantly hungry. I ate a lot of fruit thinking that it was good low calorie snacks. But little did I know that it was only fuelling my hunger.

Late one night I stumbled onto this video that changed my view on the Atkins Diet. Like many people, my idea on Atkins was that it was pseudo science. It could not possibly be true!

I started to search and found more and more Atkins and Low Carb success stories. Stories of great weight losses and health gains. I read Dr. Atkins New Diet Revolution and was astounded at the research to back up the health benefits of Low Carb eating.

There are people that do not succeed at this diet. But there are many that do. It does not become a diet, but a way of living. It is a satisfying diet. The Atkins diet originally removes a lot of carbohydrates in the induction phase but then re-introduces them in stages. There are many recipes that can simulate foods like breads and desserts. It is a way of life.

Fat Loss Success Tip: Find someone who inspires you and follow what they are doing!

What about you?
Do you have anyone that inspires you?

To your Health and Wellness,

Catherine Osthaus

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