J Makes Waves

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 co...

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...

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...