Welcome to our collection of pages designed to help you undertake a "real food, lower carbohydrate diet". Lower carbohydrate diets have been shown to be helpful in people with Type 2 Diabetes and Pre-diabetes to return sugar levels to the normal range and put these conditions into remission.   A real food, lower in carb diet can also be helpful for weight loss, to treat fatty liver, improve cardiovascular disease risk, reduce high blood pressure, polycystic ovarian disease and arthritis.  Many people have also described that it has helped them to generally improve areas such as sleep, mood, fatigue, inflammatory conditions, perimenopausal symptoms and overall sense of wellbeing, regardless of diagnosis.  Many people have reported feeling more empowered to help control their conditions through understanding the root causes of their conditions and trying this approach to nutrition.  

What is "real food"?

Real food is food as nature intended - unprocessed. Real food contains great vitamins, minerals, naturally occurring fats that nourish and sustain our bodies, allowing us to grow, repair and provide energy.  Vegetables (especially those grown above ground which have reduced starchy carbohydrates), fruit (although some fruits contain higher natural sugars), meat, fish, eggs, nuts, seeds, herbs, spices, full fat dairy are all naturally healthy ingredients.  Often things bought in the shops contain highly processed foods.  Cooking from raw ingredients wherever possible is a great starting point.   

Why undertake a lower carbohydrate diet?

Carbohydrates (bread, pasta, potato, cereals, biscuits, cakes etc.) are all broken down into sugar. At any time there is only around 5 grams of sugar in your blood stream.  This is controlled by hormones, including one called Insulin.  Whenever the sugar level rises in your body, insulin works hard to make sure it is used (in muscles), stored (in the liver, ready to use if required) and any excess sugar is stored as fat.   Importantly, circulating insulin reduces the body's ability to burn fat instead of sugar.  This extra fat in the liver contributes to fatty liver disease and in the pancreas leads to Type 2 Diabetes - both are markers of insulin resistance.  The page on metabolic health gives more information on this. 

By reducing the amount of carbohydrate (and therefore sugars) in the diet you can reduce the amount of fat in the liver and pancreas, reduce insulin resistance, increase fat breakdown and improve your metabolic health.  There are a number of other physiological changes that are thought to occur as a result of reduced sugar, reduced insulin, reduced salt retention, reductions in oxidative stress on cells in the body, which may a play a role in improving other conditions and inflammation.

Introduction