Carolyn was an interesting patient. She was in her early forties and at least fifty pounds overweight. She had been a child actress but never again achieved the success she had in her teens. This contributed to the emotional baggage she lugged around in regard to her weight issues.Yet now she wanted to revive her career, had an opportunity to star in a talk show, and didn't want to play the role of an aged housewife any longer. She knew she had to start with her weight. The other day in the office, I had an amazing revelation. I looked around and noticed that all of my patients were women.Then I realized that this very often was the case. At that moment, a light bulb went off in my head: Women are supposedly healthier than men, and they have longer life expectancies. No one really knows what to attribute this to, but it came to me that the reason women live longer is that they utilize the health-care system more than men do. Perhaps they get better taken care of not because they take better care of themselves, as is often theorized, but because they allow someone to take care of them. It's just a thought, but one I want to share with the guys out there in my audience.
Besides being overweight, Carolyn also had high cholesterol, mild hypertension, and elevated triglyceride levels in her blood. After getting her blood tests back from the lab, I diagnosed her with Syndrome X or metabolic syndrome - a common disease that affects about 70 million Americans. Fortunately, more physicians are beginning to understand the devastating impact of this combination of metabolic factors that leads to high incidences of heart disease and stroke, and some are even learning how to correct this condition. Since even modern science can't dispute that a low-carbohydrate diet would be appropriate to treat her condition, I started her on the "A" diet program, which I will outline for you shortly. In three months, all of her cardiac risk parameters had dramatically improved: Cholesterol dropped from 287 to 176; triglycerides from 335 to 56; homocysteine from 13.4 to 8.7; and C-reactive protein from 3.4 to 1.0. She also lost forty pounds in those three months, and her blood pressure returned to normal. She happily remarked that it was too easy - she should have had to suffer to get such dramatic results. No one has to suffer on the Hamptons Diet to achieve success. All anyone needs to do is follow the simple steps.
Carolyn's experience illustrates the tremendous benefits of combining a low-carbohydrate diet with a focus on monounsaturated– fat(s). Not only will you lose weight, you'll be healthier. One way that the Hamptons Diet accomplishes this is by lowering inflammation in the internal environment of your body through good, sound, scientific, and well-researched nutrition.We are about to embark on a nutritional journey that will show you exactly how to balance the omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids in your diet - the key to controlling inflammation. By using beneficial monounsaturated fats and cutting out sugar and simple carbohydrates, you will feel great and lose weight.
Many people still can't accept the fact that not all fats are unhealthful. Perhaps no one ever taught you the benefits of fat or showed you the type of fat that you need to eat to be healthy and lower your risk of heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, certain cancers, and one of the largest problems today - the metabolic syndrome. A monounsaturated- rich diet can do all of those things.The Hamptons Diet also emphasizes eating whole and real foods as much as possible.
Not too many years ago, no one thought twice about deep frying food or spreading what is now considered "sudden cardiac death"–size amounts of butter on vegetables or toast. Likewise, red meat was considered an essential part of the diet and eating it showed that you had arrived and were able to afford to eat costly meat. However, the twist is that despite these eating habits, fewer Americans were fat then. Sure, there were some overweight people - about 13 to 14 percent of the population, a level that stayed steady during the heady days of the 1960s and 1970s. During the 1980s, the number of overweight adults increased by 8 percent and by the end of the decade, nearly 1 in 4 Americans was overweight or obese. This steep rise continued through the 1990s to today. For children, the story is worse. During the same period, the number of overweight children tripled.
This epidemic started when the low-fat dogma took off in earnest, when the food pyramid began to be touted as a healthy eating model. People were told and believed: If you don't eat fat, you won't be fat. Fat causes heart disease. Eating cholesterol makes your cholesterol levels rise.These mantras, repeated over and over, were developed in the early 1980s - not very long ago.
In fact, until the 1970s, it was generally accepted that fat and protein protected us from overeating because these foods satisfied the appetite, leaving us less hungry.This belief, held for hundreds of years, was eliminated in the blink of an eye by a government and a food manufacturing industry mutually dependent on each other for revenue. The low-fat dogma basically arose from a myth about fat consumption. Only ambiguous science supports the claims that consuming dietary fat will cause any of the health problems plaguing our population. In the late 1970s, the government released a report advising people to significantly reduce their fat intake to achieve better health, and the food manufacturing industry took advantage of this change by marketing low-fat foods to consumers.
Soon, there was an abundance of foods being hailed as reducedfat, low-fat, or non-fat.The funniest one is milk.Whole milk is 4 percent fat. Low-fat milk is usually 2 percent.What is the difference? One of the most troubling aspects of the low-fat message was that people weren't encouraged to eat foods naturally low in fat; instead, we were advised to consume man-made foods, atrocities that should never have been allowed to be called food.When fat is removed from a food, something has to be added for it to have flavor or taste the way we think it should. Sugar, in the form of high fructose corn syrup or some other variation, is the usual substitute. This change in the makeup of processed food caused our per-capita consumption of sugar to rise dramatically. Cheap, over-refined oils and trans-fatty acids also pervade these foods.When you look at a package of low-fat cookies, for example, there is hardly anything that can be considered as real ingredients, not tampered with by man. The low-fat myth also encouraged unlimited consumption of foods as long as they didn't have any fat.The same is happening now with the low-carb message. Food manufacturing companies are rushing to produce foods that are low in carbohydrates, and these foods are flying off supermarket shelves. However, most of the packaging is misleading; consumers must learn to eat foods naturally low in carbohydrates, not man-made, chemically manipulated foods. If you are eating any low-carb packaged food products, please check the labels carefully and make sure you are eating foods naturally low in carbohydrate that do not contain man-made chemical enhancements.
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