LCHF for Weight Balance
Food is with us everywhere; we are bombarded by food stores and supermarkets of every stripe, restaurant deals, TV cooking shows, and inexhaustible sources of recipes. Social networks are flooded with albums, pages, and groups dedicated to cooking and food. We love food, and yet, most of us are at war with weight – overweight, but also underweight.
We all want to be healthy, slender and beautiful, but it is important to remember that the beauty ideal changes over time in accordance with fashion, and usually it is not suitable for us or our physical characteristics. This is a common problem both for people who need to gain weight and people who need to lose weight; for a person who wants to gain weight it is not enough to eat everything in sight and flood the body with empty calories that would indeed add the desired kilos, but damage health on the way. While weight gain can be seen, many health problems are frequently hidden and we are not aware that we need to deal with them. On the other hand, a person who wants to lose weight immediately gives up just from the thought of counting calories and believing that strenuous exercise is inevitable as well as giving up favorite foods.
And yet we are not satisfied. We should ask ourselves: Do I want my body to look as good as possible? Do I want to bring my body to its optimum condition? What does that mean? Do I want to be healthy and energetic? How do I go about it?
The LCHF diet will help you reach your ideal weight as well as attain optimal health – to get rid of excess weight, or gain weight, as needed.
Why is it important to reach optimal weight?
We live in a time where food is available in abundance, and yet most people are in a state of malnutrition – even overweight persons. Highly processed foods (e.g. fast food, packaged prepared food – canned or frozen, etc.) contain, among other things, white flour, sugars, refined oils, artificial sweeteners, stabilizers, thickeners and so on, and do not provide the body with essential nutrients, such as vitamins and minerals. Instead, they generously provide empty calories that do not contribute to our health but do lead to weight imbalance.
The Western world, as well as the developing world, encounters symptoms of obesity. Low-fat diets do not really help reduce excess weight, which might bring about other diseases, such as high blood pressure, diabetes, knee problems, and more. But not all overweight people are necessarily sick! Overweight, however, is most often a sign that something else in the body is not functioning as it should. There are many reasons for being overweight: poor diet, taking medications that cause obesity, hormonal imbalance, constant stress, and so on. You should look for the source of the problem, deal with it and then you will find that the weight will balance itself.
How can LCHF help you achieve balanced weight?
It is important to remember that everybody is created different, so I do not talk about “weight loss diet” but rather about balanced weight and reaching your body’s optimal condition.
LCHF provides you with good nutrition and is suitable for treatment of both overweight and underweight.
Our DNA is the basis of our weight parameters. It is obvious that genetics and heredity affect weight, but it is also affected by external factors, such as the food we eat, levels of pressure and stress in our lives, our hormonal balance, and more.
In many cases overweight is due to excess insulin in the body – I call it “carbohydrate sensitivity”. When we eat large amounts of carbohydrates, our blood sugar rises and consequently we get higher levels of insulin. Insulin has many roles in the body, including conversion of sugar to readily available energy. (That’s why we get sated quickly when we eat carbohydrates.) Another function of insulin is storing excess energy that food provides for future needs (by converting the sugar into fat and storing it in the body). The problem is that we live in a time when food is plentiful, and we have no real need for emergency fat reserves – the body will never use them as we continue to feed ourselves regularly -and the reserves continue to accumulate, making us fat. Another problem is that high insulin levels (which we can get from high sugar consumption but not only) “lock” the accumulated energy in the body, so that the body cannot use it in case of need. Among other things, that makes us hungry and prone to overeating.
Underweight is mostly due to hormonal imbalances in the body.
The LCHF lifestyle reduces the amount of carbohydrates we eat and balances the hormone production in the body, thus promoting optimum health and weight.