Lean and Hard

With my new slow carb way of eating, over a couple of weeks, I noticed myself feeling stronger and less hungry. What the heck was going on?

I don't know if this theory is correct, but there are those who say that a diet high in simple carbs and processed foods causes yeast to flourish in the body. They say that there can be an overgrowth of these organisms that live in all of us but can grow out of control due to high sugar concentrations in the blood.

What's more, people who have a history of taking antibiotics in abundance, like me in earlier years, can kill off many other species of good bacteria, thereby inadvertently allowing the yeast to proliferate freely. The over-abundance of yeast then supposedly causes fatigue and irresistible cravings for more processed foods.

Was this what had happened to me? I know for certain that I craved pizza, pastries, rice, pasta, bread, potatoes, etc. If I tried going to bed without my fix I would be unable to go to sleep without satisfying my cravings. I used to have two dinners every night.

But now, I found that I had more energy, and I could say no to more food! Guess what time it was? Time for exercise and some cutting calories!

See what came next in my next post!

As I've alluded to earlier, I suffered from several health challenges, starting with chronic fatigue that was sporadic but eventually became constant, and ending with morbid obesity and it's attendant complications. My life expectancy was not known to me (I didn't want to know!), but was surely not very long.

It's important to me to explain to you here that I was always receptive to and even looking for answers, even though I didn't think there was anything new under the sun that might prove helpful. The fad diets and miracle cures had become an annoyance years ago. But I understood my predicament and never ever accepted it. So when my oldest mentioned a diet he had been trying called "slow carb," I asked him to explain.

What it boiled down to was this: substitute complex carbohydrates for simple ones. This means getting rid of highly processed carbs like pasta, white bread, potatoes and white rice, as well as sweets obviously, and replacing them with foods that are more "whole," like beans, yams, sweet potatoes and whole grains.