J Makes Waves

Here's your Low Carb 101, folks. If my posts have been making some decent sense and you're wanting to give this low carb thing a go, here's the place to begin. Photo by  Alex Munsell  on  Unsplash Are you one of those lovely people who likes meal plans and lists and recipes? If you are, you're very welcome here 💗 - please stick around for the entertainment and the information... and at the end of this post I'll give you a lovely list of resources that will float your boat. But I am not wired like this, sorry peeps - you'll find few recipes here, and even fewer meal plans - I'm just not that kinda gal.  I think everybody's different: some hate broccoli and others hate salmon - that's fine - we gotta work out how each of us can implement our own version of low carb - and prescriptive diets seem to miss this fact that we are all individuals with different lives, lifestyles and tastes. What I prefer is to just give some key concepts and just

Today I've hit a bit of a blogging wall. Maybe my brain's just a bit tired on this Friday night. Fair enough. But in the spirit of staying authentic, I'm just putting it right out there with all of you. That's cool, yeah? We all hit walls, don't we. I can't tell you the number of plateaus I've gotten stuck on during my weight loss journey. I remember being stuck around 94-96kg, and a biggie at 82-83 (I reckon that one lasted more than a year), and another really long one at 76-79. Bouncing around like a ping pong ball, I was, but not progressing for months and months. Gee it's so tempting to give up at those times. Here are a few of my top tips for continuing on the journey uphill, through the wilderness and surrounded by doughnuts. 1. Don't give up, even when it seems like you're failing. Speak words of life to yourself, eg. "This is a temporary struggle, I'll get through this" rather than words that kill off your hope:

Photo by  Matthieu Joannon  on  Unsplash A friend of mine has just asked me a very important question - one with a multitude of answers, and which baffles just about every person at some point or another. In a nutshell, it is this: what foods should I eat? Which foods are right and which are wrong for me? Well that all depends on who you ask. I started my food journey back in about 2011 with The China Study - a book on vegetarianism, and maybe at that time I would have preached the virtues of that lifestyle to you (even though I was still hecka overweight and struggling with food addiction). But the long and the short of it is: people are all different; they have different genetic and environmental factors which influence their body composition and their individual tendencies towards different diseases. This means that some folks do better on some diets than they do on others, and the natural tendency is to tell everyone what's been helpful. Oh, there are vested corporate in

Time went on after the hypo incident, and a meeker, more cautious Juliet continued offering low carb support to a small handful of carefully selected patients. They say that time heals all wounds, and sure enough, after a while I was ready to facilitate a short low carb course again (we had run two courses previously, but the setback had led me to stop and regroup for a while). My courage returning, I even rewrote the course booklet, producing what I thought was an awesome resource full of all the most important information I wanted to share with our patients. But right before launch of the third course, a curve ball came out of nowhere... The clinic's indemnity insurer said no - they weren't happy for anyone except a registered dietitian to provide education that differed from the Australian Dietary Guidelines. And not just no - it was HELL NO. We tried all the avenues we could think of - I sent through a record of all the extra training I'd done on the subject (I was al

When I was new to this low carb journey, I was full of excitement and zeal because I could see the positive results it was having with a handful of patients I was supporting. Life was technicolor - diabetes was being reversed before my eyes - something that was almost unheard of back in 2015. But then, as in all my fave chick-flicks, trouble struck. Two troubles, actually. First, a man who I'd very gently introduced the concept of carbohydrate reduction to received my suggestions with great joy and went home and promptly cut all carbs out of his diet ( Not what I was going for). Unfortunately he was on insulin, and had a hypo that night as a result. That was a huge wake-up call to me - even though I'd been careful with my language, it was not careful enough - I had not warned him to make adjustments slowly and beware of hypos. (For those who don't know, hypos are a drop in blood sugar. They can be mild and cause some symptoms like shakiness or sweating, or they may be se

So many of us girls have grown up with an inner pressure to be nice all the time. To get along with people and be helpful, even when it is to our own detriment. It's something I continue to struggle with on a daily basis. But something about the line in Steffany Gretzinger's song on my previous post gives me pause: Love doesn't hold its tongue. A few years ago while working as a nurse in general practice, a colleague told me about the positive changes her patients were having with low carb eating.  It was a pivotal point for me. In usual practice, we health professionals typically tell people to cut out sugar in their diets (especially if they have diabetes or pre-diabetes), but we tend to forget that carbohydrates are made up of long chains of sugar (glucose) molecules. This means we only give them a half truth - we tell them to cut out sugar, but don't really discuss carbs. Sometimes patients see an initial improvement from cutting out the sugar, but ultimate

Everyone knows that I was the good girl I did my best to make everyone happy with me But then I found out that It was impossible to please the whole crowd So I spoke up and I spoke out I learned that love don't hold its tongue And passion doesn't bow to what they think ~ Steffany Gretzinger, I Spoke Up Hello world, Here I am, to make waves. It'll take a little while to come out of hiding, But there is a roar in me that needs to be heard. So just you wait. It won't be long. - Juliet .