The Importance of Putting the Right Fuel into Your Body

The Importance of Putting the Right Fuel into Your Body

In LML-SatPro we enjoy putting the right fuel into our bodies. In the Programme, we use the analogy of putting petrol into a diesel car to illustrate this.

We all intuitively know that if we put petrol into a diesel car it won’t run well.

Exactly the same is true of our bodies.

In the same way that you wouldn’t use questionable fuel, you didn’t understand to power your car (how many of us have used Google Translate when abroad to make absolutely certain we are using the correct fuel at a filling station) – exactly the same applies to the body.

Quite simply when we put the wrong fuel in the body doesn’t work well and responds with symptoms like acid reflux, headaches, fatigue, bloating, low mood and weight gain.

What people find so liberating about the LML Programme is in many ways its simplicity. Eating food usually has one ingredient in foods like strawberries, milk or chicken that the body likes to run off. And so the body works well and we feel good and lose weight.

If you find yourself in a dilemma about what to eat, remember the Google translate example and how we don’t take risks with the fuel we use in our car – let’s apply this now to the body – which is after all infinitely more precious.

Read “The Full Diet” Book Written by Dr Sara Hameed.

What the New UK Law on Stating Calories on Menus Means for You

What the New UK Law on Stating Calories on Menus Means for You

You might have seen in the news that larger establishments in the UK will now, by law, have to state the number of calories in a food on the menu. You might have seen calorie counts on menus if you’ve eaten out recently.

So you can imagine that a pot of boiled eggs and spinach might say 200 calories and a cookie might say 200 calories…

But here’s the thing – knowing the calorie content of a food tells us nothing about the quality of the food (boiled eggs are different from cookies even though they have the same calorie content) nor do the calories tell us anything about how the body will respond to that food.

If you eat the boiled eggs your gut will make lots of fullness hormones that go up to the brain giving the message – you’re full, you don’t need to eat anything more.

Fantastic, you’ve eaten something filling and can now move on with your day.

Whereas the cookie will lead to a large amount of sugar ending up in your blood and the hormone insulin (the fat-storage hormone) will push much of that sugar into fat storage.

The sugar will also target the reward centre in your brain – giving a pleasure hit or high that quickly disappears setting you up for cravings and seeking out more sugar.

Two foods with the same calorie content but one will keep you full and fat burning the other will put you into fat storage mode and trigger sweet cravings.

How liberating it is that the word calorie plays no part in our way of eating in LML-SatPro.

No counting, no apps, no food diaries.

Just eating real, delicious, filling food (no extra information on the menu required).

That’s the LML-SatPro way.

How the LML-SatPro way of eating can improve your health

One of the huge benefits of eating in the way that you do on the LML Programme is that Programme foods such as eggs, meat, fish, vegetables, nuts and seeds and full fat natural/Greek yogurt are not high sugar foods.

This means that when you eat Programme food – not very much sugar ends up in your blood, which means that your blood sugar levels stay nice and steady.

Eating in the LML-SatPro way, your blood sugar levels run nice and even all day. This makes your body feel good. This makes your brain feel good.

Compare this with eating a bowl of muesli and a glass of orange juice for breakfast.

After having this sort of breakfast – you would end up with the equivalent of 12 teaspoons of sugar in your blood.

You then produce the hormone insulin which pushes that excess sugar into fat storage (which isn’t good for weight control).

The second issue is that your body goes from having lots of sugar in the system (12 teaspoons after the muesli orange juice breakfast) to suddenly having much less sugar in the system – once insulin has swept the sugar into fat.

Going from having lots of sugar to relatively much less sugar in the system is not something that the body was designed to tolerate and one part of your body, in particular, finds the sudden sugar high followed by the crashing low really hard to deal with – your brain.

When you eat the muesli or orange juice for breakfast your brain has to suddenly adjust to a hit of 12 teaspoons of sugar.

But when insulin then sweeps that sugar into fat and there’s less sugar around, your brain suddenly has to deal with this sugar low.

This is a sugar crash – and how does it make you feel – well essentially this rollercoaster ride from high sugar levels to low sugar levels makes your brain twitch – so you feel grumpy, irritable, low, anxious, lethargic, and no energy.

Not a pleasant way to feel – your brain then drives you to seek out more sugar to counteract this so you eat 3 biscuits mid-morning – so the equivalent of 12 more teaspoons of sugar gets into your system.

Temporarily your brain feels a bit better, less twitched, but then suddenly insulin has once again swept that sugar into fat – blood sugar levels drop – your brain is twitched – you feel even worse than before. Even more tired. Even more low and fed-up. Even more likely to have a short fuse and fly off the handle.

So you decide to go for an early lunch of a sandwich, a packet of crisps and an apple juice – 14 more teaspoons of sugar…

And so the rollercoaster ride goes on.

All-day, with the old foods, your blood sugar was swinging wildly from high to low and all the time you were not only fat storing but your mood and energy were likely to have been absolutely lousy.

Not anymore.

The brilliant thing about this way of eating, the LML-SatPro way, is that you get off the blood sugar rollercoaster.

No more sugar highs followed by crashes.

On SatPro we eat real, delicious food. We have stable blood sugar. We have energy. We are happy. Mood feels good. The day feels great.

5 Step Approach to Guide Your Eating and Food Choices

‘Are these ingredients… ok?

A question that my patients frequently ask is, ‘Are these ingredients… ok?’ What they mean by this is are the ingredients in this food going to nurture my mind and body and will they be a friend or a foe when it comes to losing weight? The good news about the LML Programme is that you don’t need to follow involved instructions about reading food labels or shop using an App or calculator. Food and eating should be far more natural and enjoyable than that.

Instead, I advise applying this 5-step approach to guide your eating and food choices:

Sleep – The Ultimate Elixir

Sleep – The Ultimate Elixir

Every cell of your body has a natural in-built clock that operates on a 24-hour cycle. These internal body clocks tell each cell of your body, with astonishing precision, exactly what to do and when. The clocks tell hormone-producing cells that it’s the right time of day or night to produce a particular hormone. The clocks tell your liver when it’s the right time of day to produce cholesterol.

The clocks tell your brain when to be firing on all cylinders and when to go into retreat into the cave mode. The clocks set blood pressure and blood sugar according to the time of day. The clocks govern whether your gut is relaxed or active. These are just a few examples of the brilliance of your body’s in-built clock system.

These clocks are giving instructions according to a timetable that has served us well for millions of years. The morning is the time these clocks have evolved for maximal mental and physical work. Whereas in the mid-to-late evening the body’s clocks tell each part of the body that it’s time to get into rest, re-charge and repair mode.

If, however, you are wide awake at night when the clocks think re-charge repair and the release of certain hormones should be happening the clocks become chaotic and your health suffers. It doesn’t matter how many years this pattern of going to bed late has happened, the body’s internal clocks which have evolved over millions of years do not re-set.