Entry 1/24/09

Breakfast: Cup of Raisin Bran 6 oz. skim milk, 2 cups of coffee, sweetener and creamer. Only 1 fish oil capsule because I had no fat to eat. Forgot to take my Resvinatrol (antioxidnat) Joint Care

Snack: 2 walnuts

Lunch: Chicken breast Dijon, 1/2 cup of mushrooms, grean beans, Lipton Diet Citrus Flavored Green Tea.

Snack; 3 walnuts, Medium Fuji apple. I use to think a crisp Red Delicious apple was the best but they have really created some good apples, Braebuan, Honey Crisp, and others but I like Fuji the best. The produce manager at Thom Thumb told me they are coming from Chilli and South Mexico now. Thanks to the jet age we can have good fruit year round now.

Dinner: Pigged out. Went to Mexican restaurant, ordered some corn tortillas to eat with the salsa (a better bad choice), but I ate half bowl of chips with salsa (a bad choice) before the tortillas got to the table, Ordered Fajita for two (yes my wife was with me..you don't think I would eat all that by myself do you?), ate them with flour tortillas, sour cream, cheese, Pica de Gallo, salsa. Margarita on the rocks.

If you read through my blogs you'll no doubt notice that I don't eat a lot of carbohydrates. I try to stay away from anything white such as white bread potatoes, rice etc. While I don't eactly follow the Atkins diet I have used it from time to time to jump start my weight loss. I usually eat more carbs than the Atkin plan allows and I don't eat as much fat as the diet allows. Low carb is the best way for me to lose weight these days. Here's another study supporting Low Carb eating:

A low-carbohydrate diet may help treat obesity and diabetes say researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center. A clinical study found that people on low-carbohydrate diets burn more liver fat than those on low-calorie diets, therefore fighting diseases such as diabetes, insulin resistance and nonalcoholic fatty liver disease.

“Instead of looking at drugs to combat obesity and the diseases that stem from it, maybe optimizing diet can not only manage and treat these diseases, but also prevent them,” said Dr. Jeffrey Browning, assistant professor in the UT Southwestern Advanced Imaging Research Center and of internal medicine at the medical center.

Glucose (a form of sugar) and fat are sources of energy that are metabolized in the liver and used as energy by the body. Glucose can be made from lactate, amino acids or glycerol. Too much fat in the liver can lead to nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) a condition that may affect as many as a third of all American adults. NAFLD is linked to metabolic disorders such as insulin resistance and diabetes. It can also lead to inflammation of the liver, cirrhosis and liver cancer.

Researchers gave overweight or obese patients either a low-calorie or low-carbohydrate diet. After two weeks, they used imaging techniques to analyze what techniques the body used to make glucose.

“We saw a dramatic change in where and how the liver was producing glucose, depending on diet,” said Dr. Browning, the study’s lead author. Those on the low-carbohydrate diet produced more glucose from lactate or amino acids than those on a low-calorie diet. Those on low-calorie diets got about 40 percent of their glucose from glycogen, but those on low-carbohydrate diets got only about 20 percent of their glucose from glycogen. Instead, low-carb dieters burned liver fat for energy.

“Energy production is expensive for the liver,” said Dr. Browning. “It appears that for the people on a low-carbohydrate diet, in order to meet that expense, their livers have to burn excess fat.

Results also indicate that those on low-carbohydrate diets increased the amount of fat burned throughout their entire bodies.

Even though the study wasn’t designed to determine which diets worked best to control weight, patients on the low-carb diet lost almost twice as much weight as those on a low- calorie diet.