Sabotaging your Keto Diet: Friday drinking and Sunday dinners.

Most people have no problem adhering to a healthy eating plan during the week. It is the weekend that sees them undoing all the good they did during the week. It’s understandable though. During the week most of us are on a set schedule with very little down time. So we get up, drop kids to school, go to work, work, pick up kids, head home, deal with our other job at home, rinse, repeat. We’re busy and so we eat set meals that we prepare and carry or order and we’re occupied with things other than eating. Did you get that? “We’re occupied with things other than eating.”  Boredom and inactivity and the absence of a plan lead to picking around and indulging and getting fat! Now I don’t know about you, but I HATE having my time wasted. I can’t imagine anything worse than making an effort all week, eating salads, exercising portion control, drinking up my water, consuming all the good fats and protein, pretending that carbs don’t even exist for goodness’ sake and then wiping out all that gain over two days. Ugh.

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Starting the Keto Diet: Tips for Success!

So you’ve seen the weight loss transformations. You’ve read the testimonials about improved overall health and quality of life. You’ve seen pictures of the food. You can’t believe this is real, but so many people can’t be wrong. You want to try it for yourself. You are ready to try keto! You want to start the ketogenic diet but you’re not quite sure where to start. I’ll share what I did and offer some tips to set you up for success once you think you want to go keto. Still not sure what keto is and isn’t? I break down the keto diet here. I address 15 of the toughest questions about keto that I’ve received, questions about fruit and keto, alcohol and keto, eating fat to lose fat and so on.

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Keto, diabetes and cholesterol: Beyond weight loss.

What if I told you diabetes could be reversed without drugs? What if I told you cholesterol could come down without drugs? Well there are living, breathing examples on the planet where this has happened. And it hasn’t happened at the expense of their general well-being and feelings of being satisfied either. Eschew all thoughts of strict, painful eating regimes where you are relegated to bowls of undressed lettuce leaves and gallons of almond milk (I happen to like lettuce and almond milk, but I like them with my steak and cheese and coffee and butter). These people are adherents to the keto (short for ketogenic) diet and not only have they have lost weight, but they’ve had some pretty awesome changes in other areas of their lives. Serious chronic illnesses have totally disappeared in some instances!

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Lose Weight and Gain a Life: Keto helped me do it.

It’s more about the life you gain than the weight you lose.

I promise not to be preachy. There’s nothing more annoying that someone who’s lost 3 lbs preaching all chirpily about the benefits of weight loss from a lofty place on high. “You can do it! Yes you can!” As if we don’t know when we’ve gained a few…or a lot… I mean WTF!

I’m fat. So what? Leave me alone.

Of course I know I’ve gotten bigger.

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15 QUESTIONS ABOUT THE KETO DIET ANSWERED

“Keto” is short for “ketogenic”. The ketogenic diet flips conventional nutritional wisdom on its head and advocates reducing carbohydrate intake to less than 20g carbs per day and promotes consumption of higher than normal levels of GOOD fats and moderate amounts of protein! When you reduce carbs so drastically, your body is forced to burn fat for fuel, instead of the conventional glucose or carbohydrate metabolic pathway. The by-products of burning fats for energy are called “ketones”. Fun fact: the ketogenic diet was first developed in the 1920’s for people living with epilepsy. The keto diet is similar to low-carb diets like Atkins which became popular in the 1980’s. Low-carb diets typically allow for consumption of more than 20g carbs per day, even up to 100g carbs. I’ve been doing the keto diet for over a year now and I couldn’t be happier! I’ve compiled answers to the questions I’m most frequently asked.  Continue reading 15 QUESTIONS ABOUT THE KETO DIET ANSWERED

How to do a Road Trip in Jamaica while Keto: My adventure at Eggy’s

Road trips rock! And on an island like Jamaica, the options of where to go and what to do are endless. What’s not to like about a road trip? The open road (and we have highways that take us from north to south and back again with ease and breathtaking vistas, as well as from central out west), good company, the prospect of an adventure or two, the certain knowledge that you’ll meet memorable characters along the way and the promise of food! And even if you’re keto like me, there’s no reason why you can’t honour your keto way of eating while on a road trip in Jamaica. In fact, it’s easy! Here we go…

Continue reading How to do a Road Trip in Jamaica while Keto: My adventure at Eggy’s

My Jamaican Keto Journey AND Intermittent Fasting: A Weight Loss Success Story!

I love food. I had already started to change how I ate but weight loss was slow. I kept hearing about this “Intermittent Fasting” but didn’t pay it much mind. After all, I had given up rice, sugar, flour and all their relatives and now I was expected to go without food on top of all that? Hmmm…. Let me start at the beginning.

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How to Eat Keto in Jamaica: My Weight Loss Journey

Carbohydrates are a critical part of how we eat in Jamaica. Talk of giving them up leads to the inevitable: So what will I eat then? What are Jamaican keto foods and do they even exist? 

As a Jamaican living right here in Jamaica, I’m very happy to say that you can absolutely eat keto in Jamaica! What follows are some approaches and options that have been working for me on my own keto or low-carb journey.

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“I’m desperate to lose weight, but I have no willpower. Can Keto help?”

Since my last blog post where I outed myself formally as being on a Weight-Loss Journey, so many people have messaged me privately to share their own struggles with eating to lose weight. What we ALL have in common is a basic knowledge of what we need to be eating, but a struggle to do the right thing.

“I lack willpower” is the common refrain.

Willpower. What does that word conjure up for you? For me I have visions of stress, deprivation, sacrifice and a noble hero emerging triumphant out of the burning rubble. Sounds like a hell of a lot of drama and definitely not how I want to live my life daily. I had to find a more sustainable, enjoyable way to eat and win.

Continue reading “I’m desperate to lose weight, but I have no willpower. Can Keto help?”