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New Year, Same You?…..

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A new year and as usual a mad frenzy of media, TV and articles on the latest must-do extreme diets; extreme exercise regimes; dubious explanations of what works, what doesn’t, ugghh! I find it so wearing and can only imagine that most other people do too? It is no wonder that this overwhelm of largely contradictory information leaves people so frustrated that they give up by mid-Jan and go straight back to previous habits, good or bad.

So I feel now is the time to remind you of my 4 Fundamentals to Good Health which, if you manage to address over time, your body will give back with bountiful energy, stabilized weight, optimal body fat levels and great balance of brain chemistry and hormones – what more could you ask for? Also, if you create the habit of these principles, whether it’s Christmas, Easter, birthday celebrations or commiserations, there will never be a need to ‘blow it’ and then have to claw back your ‘good habits’ and have that gut-clenching feeling of ‘oh no, why I did I do that to myself … here we go again’…..

So here goes with a pared down super-simple reminder of what it takes to help your body help itself and a few new little gems that I have come across since I wrote the book: ….

1/ Keep you blood glucose (the sugar in your blood) under control: You can achieve this by greatly reducing your GPS foods Grains, Potatoes / Parsnips Sugars / Sweet Foods.

Understand the significance of eating foods that significantly increase blood glucose levels:high blood glucose = insulin response = turning on your fat storage system and turning off your fat burning capacity. Depending on how many diets you’ve tried and failed on; how much greater your waist measurement is to your hip measurement; how long you have been eating GPS foods on a daily basis; how long you’ve been on a low fat diet – then you may have a degree of insulin resistance, meaning you are in a high insulin and therefore fat storage state for hours at a time. But this is not only an issue of fat burning, or not, high blood glucose levels are highly inflammatory, trigger issues throughout the body, including in the brain – hence Alzheimer’s being spoken of as type three diabetes.

2/ Nurture & nourish your beneficial gut bacteria on a daily basis: do not underestimate the power and importance of having healthy gut bacteria. From enhanced mood, sustained concentration, reduction in anxiety and better capacity to cope with stress, through to improving insulin sensitivity and fat burning, increasing energy, enhanced digestion and better balanced immune system. Our gut bacteria influence every system in the body, If you look after them, they will look after you.

This means avoiding or greatly limiting the foods that preferentially feed the nasties that are inevitably living in your gut, which funnily enough are largely GPS foods and meanwhile super-charge your beneficial bacteria by following the 3Fs:

F no.1 is Fibre-rich food for their PRE-biotic content:
Plenty of pre-biotic foods to improve the good gut cultures. Prebiotics are fibres that your good bacteria feed and thrive on and in return they produce wonderfully beneficial by-products. Diversity is key, so go for a wide range of fibre-rich foods rather than just lots of one of two kinds.

Prebiotic foods include
• A rainbow of vegetables i.e. a wide range of colours and textures. Different veg have different types of fibre that offer arrange of benefits.

• Nuts and seeds of all kinds contain lovely fibre. To super-charge the power of the fibre, soak nuts and seeds overnight inn water at room temperature with a spritz of lemon or lime juice. In soaking, you are not only make the nuts & seeds more digestible with fewer anti-nutrients, you also have swollen fibres, full of water that goes to the gut to feed your bacteria. Chia and flax seeds are especially good to soak. They attract a lot of water and then create mucilage, a lovey gloop full of gel water – highly hydrating and soothing for the gut.

• Pulses – known to be windy because of the high fiber content that can be challenging digestively if the balance of your gut bacteria favours the less than good. Some people have to limit pulses while some gut restoration goes on, but once assuming beans and lentils do not cause uncomfortable bloating or reactive bowel function, they provide great prebiotic fibres. Make sure they are really well cooked.

• Inulin-rich foods – inulin is a well researched highly soluble fibre that has many gut health benefits. Again, it can be challenging with those with IBS-type issues, so use with caution. Rich in leeks, onions & garlic, under-ripe bananas, plantain, asparagus and Jerusalem artichokes.

F No. 2 is for Fermented Foods:
Certain foods contain PRObiotic i.e. live, beneficial bacteria. The devil is in the details here, so look at labels to check for unpasteurized and raw. A live food, is a fermented food and if it is still live, it will have to be in the chiller cabinet of a shop, so anything on a shelf with a long shelf life will not be live. All fermented foods should also taste sour as the fermentation removes the natural sugars in the food. Fermented food include:

• Organic natural live yogurt
• Dairy kefir (a potent fermented dairy drink)
• Coconut Kefir -a non-dairy version of the above
• Fermented raw veg like sauerkraut, Kimchi and these days there are some
fabulous raw slaws becoming more readily available.
• Kombucha -a fermented tea (watch for the sugar content)
• Mature cheeses, esp. if made from unpasteurized milk.

F No. 3 is Fasting:
By eat less, or less often, the gut bacteria get a chance to a bit of super-charging and regenerating. The power of intermittent fasting is so significant and far-reaching that it is the third of my Four Fundamentals:

3/ Regular Intermittent Fasting
Allow your body to rest and renew by regularly practicing intermittent fasting:
Throughout all of history there is evidence of peoples all around the world fasting. It may have been for religious reasons, as part of significant ceremonies, to help purify and cleanse. Today many scientific studies have shown multiple and significant health benefits to fasting on a regular basis.

Benefits are very far-reaching if practiced on a long-term, regular basis. They include:

• Helps to heal the gut wall / ‘cleans-up’ mucus lining improving absorption of
nutrients and the environment for the beneficial gut bacteria to thrive.
• Down regulates inflammation
• Encourages better immune function
• Improves hormone sensitivity esp. insulin, leptin & ghrelin
• Increases autophagy activity (the body’s cells dying off once damaged – this is
highly desirable)
• Increases production of growth hormone
• Improves ability to burn fat
• Offers many cognitive benefits including some protection from neuro-degenerative
diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease.

Intermittent fasting is a way of initiating all of the health benefits of fasting using various short-term fasting techniques that makes the process practical for the long-term. One of the most well-known the 5:2 protocol where 2, non-consecutive days a week, you eat about a quarter of your normal food intake. Based on the average female daily consumption of 2000 calories and men, 2,500 then women should aim to eat no more than 500 calories on a fasting day and 600 calories for men. The calories can be split throughout the day or eaten as one meal.

The 5:2 protocol allows your gut to rest 2 days a week as you are putting relatively little load through your system on a regular basis. Having bone broth on these days is highly recommended on fasting days as it is highly nourishing but low in calories.

The 16:8 protocol is what is known as time-restricted fasting. You do not reduce the amount you eat necessarily, but you restrict the time in which you eat. The 8 hour window when you can eat, allows for 2 good meals and a snack in the middle if necessary. The longer you practice this system of intermittent fasting, the less likely you are to need to snack in between, which will further enhance the benefits. If you feel you can exercise towards the end of your fasting period you will also enhance the benefits. Once you get good at this, try for 18:6 a couple of days a week for added benefit.

4/ Move more, exercise less:
Moving regularly, limiting long periods of sitting to no longer than 50 – 60 minutes without getting up and moving around a little. Doing some structured exercise is key, but doing lots and lots of something that is not very demanding has limited benefit.

Short intense and muscularly demanding of big muscle groups is the way to go for triggering the fat burning switch, building muscle and improving overall health. This is known as High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT). There are many ways to do it, but classic HIIT exercise include the good but grim Burpees, squat jumps, high knee sprints etc. So much good info on-line about this type of training now, but something that is key to remember is to do short, hard bursts to trigger a metabolic response that goes on for hours and days. It’s the after-effect that counts, the post-training response is where the magic happens, so doing more, more often is not the answer.

So there you go – take it gradually, work through these points and make them part of your life, not something to do like crazy and then stop and once you are comfortable and familiar with each change, then get going on something new.

Getting good sleep, managing stress and improving the quality of your down-time are also massively key to long-term good health, I’ll write more on these soon – here’s to your very best and prolonged health in 2018 onwards.

Phenomenal Ferments

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Fermenting is quite a thing these days. Kefir has been a big topic on The Archers for months now, so clearly the time has arrived to embrace the world of fermented foods. You can see my own dairy kefir here in my YouTube series ‘What’s In This’.

This very ancient process of preserving foods is now well established to be astonishingly beneficial for our health. Many things, be it milk, vegetables, tea or even water can be transformed in to highly functional foods teaming with beneficial, health-enhancing bacteria.

The process of natural fermentation encourages the growth of beneficial bacteria and yeast to eat up the natural sugars in foods and in the process of the bacteria and yeast breaking down the sugars, they produce really beneficial microbes that support our gut health. Good gut health equals good health throughout the body, esp. important for strong digestion, well balanced immune system and brain health.

Pictured here are the 2 ferments I make every day. There’s dairy kefir – a highly complex sour yogurt-type drink that is teaming not only in very high numbers of probiotic bacteria but importantly, dairy kefir has a wide range of beneficial bacteria too. Your standard shop-bought yogurt will have 2 – 3 strains of bacteria. Dairy kefir can have more than 20!

Kefir, as with ANY and ALL fermented foods should be SOUR. Through the process of the fermentation, sugars are eaten up. I am somewhat dismayed that the push for fermented foods commercially has resulted in bottles of dairy kefir now being readily available, but due to the challenging nature of dairy kefir i.e. a very sour, slightly fizzy, thin yogurt-style drink, this is quite a hard sell, so many commercial makers are not leaving the process of fermentation long enough for the sugars to be eaten up. This not only leaves way too much lactose (milk sugar) present, but more importantly, means that the beneficial bacteria count will be very poor. Ironically kefir means ‘pleasure drink’, but due to our modern palettes being so used to sweetness, the sourness of real kefir can be more challenging than pleasurable.

If you have been buying kefir, merrily swigging away a delicious, creamy buttermilk type drink, you really are not getting the benefits of true dairy kefir.

It is extremely simple to make. Those odd little slimy white balls in the photo are dairy kefir grains (I got mine from Happy Kombucha. This specific SCOBY – symbiotic combination of bacteria and yeast, are what eat up milk sugar. Therefore, you put these little magical bundles in some organic full fat milk, preferably non-homogenized, leave at room temperature for a couple of days and the job’s done. Strain off the kefir, put more milk in with the kefir and off you go again.

These are living, breathing organisms that need to be fed. If they are not kept in milk, they will die. And once they have consumed all the milk sugar, they will need to be re-homed in new milk fairly quickly. What is so staggering about making true milk kefir with these grains, is that you can’t create the dairy kefir. These bacterial bundles are ancient are believed to have originated many centuries ago in the Caucasus Mountains. Every dairy kefir colony today has to have originated from the ferments from way back then. This makes sense as the kefir grains quickly grow through the process of eating up the lactose. This means that anyone making kefir with grains (rather than the powder) very quickly find they have too many grains to cope with, so pass on thier kefir grains to friends and family and so it keeps on going.

Just 120ml a day of a good dairy kefir is enough for a therapeutic dose of beneficial bugs. You can use it in smoothies, add to yogurt, and blend up with berries or just drink. Your taste buds will quickly adjust. If buying commercially, look on the back of the bottle and see how much sugar is in the drink. The sugar content per 100ml should be below 1 gram. This is quite hard to find. For a really good product, try Chucking Goat – extremely therapeutic.

The other kefir in my picture is water kefir. This has a similar taste to Kombucha, which is fermented tea, but a different SCOBY and I think easier to make. Kombucha is also gaining popularity and again, often has way too much sugar in it. To make Kombucha, sugar is added to tea and the Kombucha SCOBY, a big slimy disc, eats up the sugar and leaves fizzy, live tea. But as with dairy kefir, to make it more commercial timing wise and taste wise, there is way too much sugar remaining.

Water kefir is also easy to make at home. You have to buy the water kefir grains, these are like little jelly crystals, and they eat up sucrose (sugar) rather than lactose. So to make water kefir, I put the grains in a glass jar with water and raw Muscovado sugar (this contains minerals as well as sugar) and the kefir grains eat up the sugar and thrive on the minerals and in the process, burp out lots of fabulous beneficial bacteria. The water becomes fizzy, sour and so, so delicious.

As above, after a couple of days at room temperature, the kefir is drained off, the grains are put back in a clean jar, more water, more sugar and off you go again. I like to add lime or lemon juice to mine, which provides more fuel for the kefir to feed on and adds flavour and nutrients.

The other well-known and now readily available ferments are live yogurts, both organic dairy and coconut are good, but check for no added sugars. Then there are the fermented veggies – sauerkraut, fermented cabbage; Kimchi, a spicy fermented Korean dish and variations on these such a my favourite, Beet Kraut made by Laurie’s Foods – so tasty, so live and fizzing, you just know it’s doing you good – but don’t heat, you don’t want to kill off those beneficial bacteria.

Raw apple cider vinegar, another great way to get live bacteria in to the system, and even mature cheeses contain good bacteria. Get your taste buds tuned in to these foods. The benefits are truly staggering and something to be made a part of your daily meals where possible.

My sister’s zucchini bread – scrumptious!

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With Easter weekend upon us, I had some time to bake. I NEVER bake. Largely because I choose not to eat flours or sugars, so options are a little limited, although since the Paleo movement has taken off, there are a plethora of non-grain, low sugar recipes available online. Most of these Paleo recipes use almond flour (ground almonds) and coconut flour, this recipe is no exception. Don’t be tempted to replace wheat-flour with almond and coconut flours in a recipe that asks for normal flour as the non-grain fours absorb a lot more fluid so the recipe won’t work.
However, even a Paleo recipe rarely becomes a priority for me, but when I heard about this flour and sugar-free ‘bread’ from sister, I couldn’t wait to make it. She lives in the US, so the recipe is using cups for measuring. I like using measuring cups. They are so quick and easy and readily available in the UK.

In case you don’t know, zucchini is courgette. I imagine any number of other veg would also work, like carrot or beetroot, but I don’t want sweet bread, so courgette works for me. The original recipe also includes banana and some honey. I chose not to use either, so it’s more a savoury bread than a cake, but texture wise it is quite cakey, so up to you what you want to add in.

This is so good ‘naked’ or with lashings of grass-fed butter. It is very filling, nourishing, full of fibre and good fats – what’s not to love?!

Zucchini (courgette) Bread

Preheat oven to 180 C / 350 F.
Line a loaf pan with grease proof paper (I used one small loaf tin and 4 individual loaf tins).

1 cup zucchini grated
1 1/2 cups almond flour
1/4 cup coconut flour
1/3 cup pecans – roughly chopped
1/3 cup shredded (dessicated) unsweetened coconut
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
3 eggs
2 tbsp honey ( not really necessary – I use no sweetening agent)
1 banana mashed (leave it out if you like, or use a greenish / very pale yellow banana as this is low in sugar but high in resistant starch – great fuel for gut bacteria)
1/4 cup melted coconut oil
2 tbsp almond butter (I didn’t have any so I used Cashew Butter)
1/2 tsp cinnamon (optional )
Sprinkle the top with pumpkin seeds (my sister only mentioned this after I’d baked it, hence non in the photo, but toasted pumpkin seeds are so good, it’s a great idea).

Squeeze any excess moisture out of grated zucchini (I put it in a tea towel and squeeze).

Whisk together the almond flour, coconut flour, shredded coconut, pecans, baking soda and salt in a medium bowl.

In a separate bowl, add the eggs, honey, banana, coconut oil, almond butter and cinnamon. Use a hand blender to combine. Add the dry ingredients to the wet and stir to combine. Fold in the shredded zucchini.

Pour the batter into the loaf pan. My mix was very stiff, so I added a little coconut milk.
Bake for 40-50 minutes or until the loaf is set. My little tins took 25 minutes.

The joy of nuts!

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As Christmas approaches, the supermarkets and farmers markets are full of in-shell nuts. In shell as opposed to shelled are a good option for 2 very good reasons:
1. The very process of cracking a nut and fishing out the juicy fresh flesh from the shell, will greatly slow how quickly you eat and subsequently how many you eat. Whatever we’re eating we should eat slowly, chew well and focus on what we are eating rather than mindlessly stuffing, barely chewing and not paying attention to our food. Unconscious eating invariably leads to significant over eating but also greatly affects your whole digestive capacity. If you barely chew and are not connected with what you’re eating, the digestive system does not fully register, resulting in poor digestion and absorption of the nutrients in your food. It can also lead to irritation within the digestive tract that can eventually lead to irritable bowel syndrome.

2. Freshly cracked nuts ensures the healthy fats contained within nuts are in prime condition. Omega 6 and omega 3, the 2 essential fatty acids found in various foods and nuts in particular, are very volatile, meaning they spoil easily. Heat, light and oxygen will affect the quality and taste of these very beneficial fats, so the sooner they are eaten post-shelling, the better. Walnuts are especially high in the omega oils and subsequently go off very readily. When you eat some pre-shelled walnuts, give them a sniff. If they smell stale and sour, the fats have turned rancid and nasty and need to be disposed of. All nuts can go off like this, but walnuts are especially vulnerable.

Whole nuts are a really well-balanced food. They are highly nutritious, containing good levels of vitamins and minerals while also offering gut-friendly fibre, tissue building protein and brain-balancing healthful fats. There are some carbohydrates in most nuts, providing energy, but crucially, the impact on your blood sugar when eating nuts is minimal due to the fat, protein and fibre slowing the release of the carbohydrates hitting the bloodstream.

Chestnuts are by far the highest in carbohydrates and lowest in fat, so they do not fit the usual nutritional profile of nuts. Macadamia nuts have the highest fat and lowest carb content. Macadamias or choc-full of highly beneficial mono-unsaturated fats, making them a really healthy snack opinion –a few go a long way.

Brazil nuts are unique for their selenium content – a mineral generally lacking in our foods these days, and essential for a healthy immune system and for thyroid function.

Almonds are probably one of the most balanced and overall nutritious nuts, even better if soaked in water overnight at room temperature. This is true of all nuts and seeds as they are dehydrated before packaging to extend shelf life.
By soaking, you re-hydrate the nuts, making them gentler on digestion as the enzymes inside the nuts become active, making it far easier for your body to breakdown and absorb the nutrients in the nuts. This is true of seeds too.

Almond flour (ground almonds) is a common and very healthy substitute for flour (it will make a heavier, more moist bake, but far better for you) and nut butters (almond, cashew, hazelnuts) rather than peanut butter (a pulse not a nut), are a lovely addition to smoothies, to put on a piece of apple to make a very nutritious snack, or mix with coconut oil, cacao powder and dates for tasty energy bombs.

So dig out the nut cracker – or invest in a new, good one – a decent nut cracker greatly enhances the pleasure of freshly cracking your nuts.

Yay! My book is out this Thursday

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Great news! My book, “Why Eating Less & Exercising More Makes You Fat” is out this Thursday , Nov. 10th. You can pre-order from all the usual online stores and most book retailers (links below). If you would like a signed copy, contact me via the website and I’ll send you one directly.

This book will be really beneficial for anyone you know who has battled with their weight for years, diet after diet failing,
or simply people who are confused about what a healthy diet really looks like.

Pre-order on Apple ibooks; Amazon UK; Amazon USA.

Order your print copy from these retail outlets:

United States

My book is available from more than tens of thousands of retailers, libraries, schools, internet commerce companies, and other channel partners, including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Chapters/Indigo (Canada), and other well-known book retailers and wholesalers across North America. 

United Kingdom | Europe

• Adlibris
• Agapea
• Amazon.co.uk 
• Aphrohead
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• Blackwell
• Book Depository Ltd
• Books Express
• Coutts Information Services Ltd
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Australia & New Zealand

• Rainbow Book Agencies
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• ALS
• Peter Pal
• University Co-operative Bookshop

Order your online copy from these online retailers:

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Rapeseed (Canola) oil is NOT a healthy option

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I am so frustrated by the constant marketing-hype about the health benefits of rapeseed / Canola oil. It is not chemically possible to extract the oil from the seeds of a toxic plant like oil seed rape without doing so much damage in the process that the oil is rendered highly toxic and inflammatory. Rapeseed (Canola) oil is not high in healthy omega 3 as is widely promoted. Rather, this highly beneficial but volatile essential fatty acid is converted to damaging trans fats during processing. Sally Fallon from the Weston A Price Foundation, sums it up:

“Like all modern vegetable oils, canola oil goes through the process of refining, bleaching and de-gumming — all of which involve high temperatures or chemicals of questionable safety. And because canola oil is high in omega-3 fatty acids, which easily become rancid and foul-smelling when subjected to oxygen and high temperatures, it must be deodorized. The standard deodorization process removes a large portion of the omega-3 fatty acids by turning them into trans fatty acids. Although the Canadian government lists the trans content of canola at a minimal 0.2 percent, research at the University of Florida at Gainesville, found trans levels as high as 4.6 percent in commercial liquid oil. The consumer has no clue about the presence of trans fatty acids in canola oil because they are not listed on the label.”

For safe, healthy choices of fats to eat and cook with, that help you lose weight, and those to avoid that trigger inflammation and weight gain, read my chapter on Fats in my new book: “Why Eating Less & Exercising More Makes You Fat”. Out on November 10th.