Switch Your Metabolism Class: set for Mondays: Oct 7,14,21, 6 – 7:30pm; and Wednesdays: Oct 9,16,23, 1 – 2:30. The goal: to teach you how to be a Fat Burner and not a Sugar Burner. We’ll cover the Paleo Diet, Digestion, Blood Sugar (you HAVE to understand your biology to lose weight and get healthy), Ketosis, Power Cooking, Compliance Strategies and much more. The class will be held at the Marshall Community Center (4133A Rectortown Rd, Marshall Va), which is right off Rt 17 and Rt 66 – it’s easy to get to. The total cost: $100. My goal: to help you understand that your weight and your health are a matter of your Biology, not a low cal/low fat diet that never works, ever; and that you have the Power to change yourself. Email me if you can attend, or just show up at the door. Phone and Skype sessions are available if you’re long distance.
Grain Brain!! It’s the title of the latest book I’m reading by neurologist Dr. David Perlmutter, MD. You should read it if you’re worried about your brain health, but if you don’t have time, let me condense the message for you. I’m going to use a bunch of quotes from his book: “We have a habit of categorizing brain ailments separately from the other afflictions we attribute to bad habits. …..I believe that the shift in our diet that has occurred over the past century – from high fat, low carb to today’s low-fat, high carb diet, fundamentally consisting of grains and other damaging carbohydrates – is the origin of many of our modern scourges linked to the brain, including chronic headaches, insomnia, anxiety, depression, epilepsy, ADHD, cognitive decline, and full-blown, irreversible, untreatable, incurable, brain disease.”
He says that carbohydrates from grains along with processed polyunsaturated vegetable oils 
(canola, corn, soy, peanut, safflower, etc), have replaced the diet that’s HEALTHY for the brain and the body: high fat/high cholesterol containing, traditional foods.
He says that diabetes and brain disease are this country’s costliest diseases, yet they are PREVENTABLE and uniquely tied together: having diabetes more than doubles your risk for Alzheimer’s disease. He uses research showing that gluten, and a high-carb diet are among the most prominent stimulators of inflammatory pathways that reach the brain. ”
“This whole grain goodness, as the US Department of Agriculture is trying to convince us we should focus on in terms of our dietary choices, is the cornerstone of our most devastating diseases. I mean, brain diseases like Alzheimer’s, cardiovascular disease, and obviously, what leads to them, diabetes, which is so prevalent in Western societies. Again, it’s the getting away from fat and the substitution with wheat- and corn-based carbohydrate (high-fructose corn syrup) that really, in my opinion, explains this huge explosion of degenerative conditions that are crippling us medically and crippling us economically as well,” he says.
“But the quality of the fat that we consume is absolutely fundamental. When we’re saying high-fat diet, we’re not talking about prepared foods on the Twinkie aisle at the grocery store that contain modified trans fats; hydrogenated fats that are clearly coffin nails. They’re a great risk for brain disorders, heart disorders, diabetes, etc. We’re talking about these beautiful, natural fats that we have been consuming for more than two million years.”
That’s enough quotes for now. I get questions all the time, “how can healthy whole grains be bad for me??” My own husband was recently told by his doctor how good whole grains are, and that he himself eats them all the time. LISTEN TO ME: WHEN DOCTORS SAY THAT, OR MAGAZINES SAY THAT, THEY’RE WRONG. The evidence and research piling up against whole grains isn’t small and it isn’t new. Between the high blood sugar and high insulin they instigate, and/or the proteins they contain that are extremely difficult to digest ( gluten is one example) causing permeable/leaky gut, Grains Cause Inflammation To The Whole Body. Inflammation is the root of all disease, whether it’s in the body or the brain.
We’ll be thoroughly discussing this in my Metabolism Class. If you want to be healthy, and achieve a healthy weight, you need to understand how your body works. Decades of being told to eat a low fat, high carb diet have had DEVESTATING consequences on us. Again: the link between high blood sugar and Alzheimer’s, heart disease, and just about every single disease condition out there is very, very strong.
Interested in hearing a great podcast with Dr. Perlmutter? Listen here. The more you know, the more you learn about your body, the easier it becomes to say NO to foods that call you. What are foods that call you? Refined and processed foods containing sugar, flours, vegetable oils and chemicals that are created in a laboratory to stimulate the addiction centers of your brain. They’re pretty powerful, aren’t they. You can break the addiction. You can change your life, you can change your weight, you can change your health. What can’t you change? Established neurological brain conditions. There’s drugs that might prolong the 
condition, but there are NO drugs to END Alzheimer’s or dementia. None, zero, nada. The only solution is to not let it happen. You can do this. You have power over the state of your body and your mind; you just need to exercise that power. Hope to see you at my classes; if you can’t make them, contact me and we’ll work one on one.
This last pic is one of my four daughters getting together yesterday in Richmond, Va. Moms, you can raise a family without refined, processed foods. We have the opportunity to turn the Health Crisis around; let’s use our power to reverse the direction our Nation’s youth are heading. Eat Well.