“I was watching some doctors on TV recently where a couple of overweight people with diabetes had three months to see whether they could reduce their weight through good nutrition and exercise,” Gita in Australia emailed me this week. “These people achieved their goals and in describing the results, the doctors made the comment that, ‘They didn’t have diabetes any more.’”
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Many people go into denial when they get the news. Not Barry, who immediately took control of his condition with a low-carb diet, stepped up exercise, and the medication that his doctor prescribed.
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Fun exercise is not a contradiction in terms. It’s not an oxymoron, which means sharp dull. So the word oxymoron is itself an oxymoron. But fun exercise isn’t.It might seem like that at first. It sure was for me, the original couch potato. Even bending over to pick up the daily newspaper was too difficult for me without a tool that grabbed it for me. My legs were so weak that I had to use my hands to get up from my easy chair or to get off the pot.

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Dirk Baeuerle has a nice desk job in Alabama working for an architect. It doesn’t require much physical effort and he hadn’t been getting much exercise.

He also ate too much. When he weighted himself in January 1, 2006, he was shocked to see that the scales told him that he weighed 375 pounds. Even though he’s 6′ 1″ tall he knew this was far too much.
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The raw food people tell us that cooking food destroys its enzymes. “Raw food is better for you,” they say.

Maybe sometimes. But now scientists have learned that cooking can make at least some vegetables better. This is something of great importance to everyone who has diabetes — even those of us who are following a low-carb diet.

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Omega-3 fatty acids are all around us. Yet few of us get enough of them.

Even those people who think that fats are bad make an exception for the omega-3s. These polyunsaturated fats are essential to our good heart health, something that everyone with diabetes needs to take seriously. The most important of the omega-3s are eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA), docosahexaenoic acid (DHA), and alpha-linolenic acid (ALA).

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When I began to eat a very low-carb diet in December, I was in for several surprises. The biggie was how easy low-carb eating is for me. I had long thought — and written — that it was hard to be satisfied without a heavy load of carbs. Experience taught me otherwise.

Another surprise was how many veggies I eat now. Like most folks, I assumed that a low-carb diet meant going veggie-less.

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When I hike in the mountains, I prefer the sounds of nature to those coming from my iPod. But for the past month it’s been too cold and windy for me to enjoy the mountains. Not even snowshoeing. [Read more →]