Two book I bought at www.amazon.com. |
One is called The Insulin-Resistance Diet: How to Turn Off Your Body's Fat-Making Machine by Cheryle R. Hart, M.D. and Mary Kay Grossman, R.D. What sold me on buying this book is the sentence that reads: "Discover if insulin resistance is the culprit for those extra pounds."
From what I have read elsewhere, and in this book, is that it is recommended to pair up a carbohydrate with a protein anytime you eat. I have striven to do this in the past, ever since the first time I became pregnant and had been diagnosed with gestational diabetes. If I've eaten cottage cheese, I have paired it up with saltine crackers. If I've eaten a cheese egg omelet, I have paired it up with Malt-O-Meal, sprinkled with cinnamon (which is good for diabetics, too).
I am hoping to find out if I was afflicted with insulin-resistance while I was pregnant with my last (fourth) child. No matter how much insulin I took, the amount of sugar in my blood would not decrease. The doctor who was seeing me for my gestational diabetes often chided me for "whatever" I was doing. I had to take matters into my own hands towards the end of my pregnancy and eat only one meal a day of chicken with something else, to prevent my baby from getting too big to fit through the birth canal. By the way, she was my heaviest, but I managed to give birth to her without a C-section.
The other book is called Stopping Inflammation: Relieving the Cause of Degenerative Diseases by Nancy Appleton, PhD.
This book deals with symptoms and allergies of various foods and possible environmental causes. Here's the situation: I itch all the time. If I am exposed to sunlight, I itch. I even itch when I am under stress. I want relief from that symptom! Ugh!
One main reason for researching about Metabolic Syndrome is that high blood pressure, high cholesterol and anxiety really reared their ugly heads in my life a few years ago. In just perusing the book about inflammation, these very symptoms are mentioned, along with others. I was taking medication four years ago for all of those symptoms. I know I should not have done it, but I stopped taking them, without notifying my doctor. I was getting chest pains after taking Lipitor, which I took for high cholesterol. I was then prescribed another medication for angina attacks.
It was then that I decided I did not want to be on a roller coaster ride of medication-taking so I went on a quest to lose weight, hoping, as some radical doctors had suggested, that some of the maladies would disappear. I ended up losing a total of thirty pounds, and I felt less anxious. I know that I still need to lose more weight so I am now looking into exactly what happened to my body when I was heavier and what is still happening to me. I highly suspect, as vegan and/or vegetarian groups do, that what is in our food supply could be hurting my body.
What could be causing the extra weight? What could be causing all the symptoms that my body is afflicted with? Could it be gluten? Could it be contamination of food that has been modified or over-processed? Could it simply be the combination of food that I am eating that is causing me to feel sick all the time?
What I do know is that I am empowered enough to read the literature that is available. Sifting through it is another thing. I am a slow reader when it comes to new content. It takes time for new ideas to be digested by my brain. I am hoping that these books give me some concrete answers. I really think, also, that more people need to learn about what could possibly be afflicting their own bodies.
Thanks for taking the time to read this, my faithful readers.