Intermittent Fasting is basically “not eating”.  It is not starving yourself.  It is choosing when you will eat.  You are omitting frequent meals and snacks.  It is actually extremely easy to follow.

A lot of times, people will complicate the concept and they have all types of questions.  They want to know if they can have their supplements, tea, coffee, water?

Yes, you can have these things but the point to a true fast is only water and nothing else.  If you add supplements or tea or coffee, you can still consider that fasting and it will not hurt your fast.

To help understand Intermittent Fasting and to make it easier to grasp, you actually want to allow your body to dictate when it wants to eat or “feed”.  You can also allow your body to dictate how long it is going to go without eating or “fasting”.  This means that the times may vary because the goal is to eat only when you are truly hungry and to fast when you are not hungry.

It might sound super simple but it needs to be explained in detail because at the first hint of slight hunger, people start eating.  This is not what we want to do.

Even in the morning at 8 am, you have a hormonal spike of cortisol.  That is an adrenal, stress hormone.  This will make you feel a little bit hungry.  You may find that you wake up feeling hungry but that passes and you suddenly don’t feel hungry any longer.

Slight hunger is normal and can be ignored.  A strong hunger will follow.  You will feel your stomach rumbling and a bit of light-headedness.  You may feel a bit grouchy and your head may be a bit sore.  This means that it’s time to eat and break your fast.

The more your body gets used to this, the more you are going to go from sugar burning to fat burning more efficiently.  This takes time to get accustomed to.

Another factor is the estimation of effort it takes to get into this hard-core.  When you are fully into a ketogenic diet, you are comfortable and you have cognitive benefits.  You feel focused. You have good concentration.  You have improved memory.  You can learn faster.  This happens over time.  For some people it can take three to four months.  It can also take this amount of time for weight loss to occur and blood sugars to drop back to normal.  It takes time because your whole life you have done it one way and now you are trying to undo the damage.

The idea is to turn to a ketogenic lifestyle and intermittent fasting for the long haul.  Allow it some time to see the desired benefits.

So how do we start a ketogenic lifestyle with intermittent fasting included?

The first step is to lower your carbs.  That is automatically going to help you be less hungry so you can go longer between meals and snacks.  Now you are able to go for three meals with no snacks.  This is the first goal.

It is really important to add enough healthy fat so you are able to go from one meal to the next.  It is also important to add enough vegetables to help you go from one meal to the next.  A big mistake that people make is to try to do this without enough vegetables.  You require vegetables for the potassium, magnesium and other minerals and vitamins which help heal insulin resistance as well as the fiber that eats the microbes in your gut.  This produces butyric acid which also helps heal insulin resistance, decreases hunger, decreases blood sugar, feeds the colon cells and helps the immune system.  

The combination of healthy fats and vegetables is going to help you go from one meal to the next and be better able to dictate when it’s time for you to eat.

I think that we all need to make an effort to follow a healthier diet and also to add a bit of intermittent fasting to our lives.  Once we give it a chance, we will be able to better understand the benefits that we can achieve with this way of eating and way of life.

We have all seen the advertisements for protein powder.  They talk about all the health benefits to adding protein powder to your lifestyle.  There are so many different protein powders to choose from also.  You can buy whey, hemp, rice, soy, pea and the list goes on and on.  

Are protein powders the solution to weight loss?  Do these mixtures promote good health and a lean body?  Let’s chat about how not all protein powders are created equal and some of them are just not as healthy as you would like to believe.

What goes into your protein powders?

Most of us actually have no idea what is a protein powder or what it consists of or how it got from a protein into a powder.  This powder that you purchase in a large tin or pre-mixed in a can is considered a dietary supplement that consists of dairy, peas, rice or a mixture of substances.  Protein manufactures sometimes add different vitamins and minerals to the powders depending on what their end goal is.

The bottom line is that your protein powder is still a processed food.  Sure, it may come from natural or real food sources but that doesn’t mean that protein powder is a real food itself.  In nature, you will never find protein powder which means it is not a naturally occurring food.  Nowhere will you find a protein powder plant or a protein powder flower.  Protein powders are created in labs and not in nature.

We need to consume protein almost every day but do we really need to consume protein powders to get that protein?  

The protein we ingest is required for building and repairing muscles and tissues.  Protein also has an important role in hair, fingernails, red blood cells and hormones.  Today the regular diet has more refined and processed carbohydrates.  This means that we need to eat more protein in general.

These protein powders get so popular because marketing companies and MLM companies would like to have us believe that we are all deficient in protein and offer us an easier way to consume it.  It is a BIG business.  

Protein powder contains different types of protein but when you drink a protein drink, it doesn’t work as well as eating the real protein food.  Our body is much better equipped to use protein in its natural form and not in the form of a processed powder.

I promote the use of protein powders two weeks prior to bariatric surgery during the pre.op diet phase and for one month to a maximum of six weeks post bariatric surgery.  It is always better to eat the food over taking the supplement.  We supplement as an insurance plan but we need to make the move over to real, live, fresh, good quality food.  The protein food over the protein powder will always be the better choice.

How harmful is sugar?  Is it okay to eat sugar in moderation? Is it really that bad for us?

Sugar has zero protein, zero nutrients, zero healthy fats and zero enzymes.  Sugar is not a food group.

I do understand that in today’s modern world, it can be nearly impossible to completely avoid sugar as it is in everything.  Because it is in everything, does not reduce the terrible effects that it has on our body.

Sugar is killing us.  All kinds of sugar related illnesses and diseases are on the rise.  It is giving us diabetes, heart disease and dementia.  Why do we continue eating more and more of it?  We can’t stop even though we know it is terrible for us.  

The numbers are insane.  American and Canadian women are eating the equivalent to 22 sugar cubes every 24 hours.  How is that possible?  This equals about 70 pounds of sugar each year.

This creates a lot of issues inside our bodies. We are sweetening ourselves until we are sick and we just continue to do so.  We can’t stop. Could it be that sweet foods are as addictive as hardcore drugs?

Our brain lights up like a light-bulb when we eat sugar.  Recent studies tell us that sugar treats are as addictive as cocaine.  Millions of us are strung out on sugar which is as dangerous as street drugs.  How is that even possible?

Sugar has many names.  We are consuming more sugar than ever before and sugar in all of its forms has negative effects.  Sugar is sugar is sugar.  It has other names like dextrose, fructose, glucose, disaccharide sucrose and high fructose corn syrup.

Sugar is not a food. It is a processed extract that comes from plants.  When we discuss “regular sugar” we are talking about a combination of glucose and fructose.  These are two simple sugars.  

Any form of sugar will stress the liver, increase our bad cholesterol and triglycerides, contribute to leptin resistance and create an addictive sugar response in the brain.  

We all know that when we choose to consume soda or candy or cake, we are choosing to consume sugar but there are lots of pre-packaged, pre-prepared food which are loaded with sugar and you may not even know it.

Sugar can be hidden under the names honey, agave syrup, molasses, glucose, fructose, high fructose corn syrup to name a few.  

Would you think that your common food items such as bread, soup, sushi, salad dressing or crackers are full of sugar?  These items don’t even taste sweet but they are loaded with different types of sugars.

So what can we do to get off the sugar merry-go-round?

Push sugar aside.  Stop eating it.  Check all your labels.  Throw out everything that contains sugar.  Start by preparing your food and snacks at home.  Stop purchasing packaged foods.  Limit the amount of food that you eat outside of the home.

If you want to protect yourself and also your family, educate yourself about how dangerous sugar is to health.  Knowledge is sweet!