I admit I used to be very afraid of butter.  I have always preferred butter to other ‘low fat’ alternatives but I am also a child of the ‘fat is bad’ generation (and have been varying-degrees-of-overweight most of my adult life) so butter has always felt taboo for me.  Well, I am here to tell you my friends—I am a bone fide convert.  Staunch advocates of low-fat eating had best look away now!!

Until recently I couldn’t even tell you the last time I had a packet of butter in my house.  Seriously.  No idea.  However, a month ago I began a new eating plan (just as all the yummy treats are starting to appear for the festive season—way to go Sal!) and quite suddenly, and very unexpectedly, I found all my previous ingrained beliefs about food and dieting (and full fat versus low fat) started to crumble around me.  Butter has become my new best friend.

I admit when I came across the dietdoctor.com website my first thought was—‘I wonder what they’re trying to sell?’  Imagine my surprise then to find that they didn’t appear to be trying to sell me anything at all, except perhaps a different way of looking at the food I eat.  There were no advertisements, no product placements and they even stated that they accepted no industry money for their research either.  So far so good.  It turned out that the site was run by an international team of doctors, clinicians and research scientists whose whole concern seemed to be an attempt to address the staggering rise of obesity, diabetes and heart disease rates all around the world today.

The more I read, the more interested I became . . .

I had heard about low-carb-high-fat (LCHF) diets before (wasn’t that what Atkins was all about?) but I had never tried one.  (I’d tried virtually everything else but not that.)  I was highly skeptical.  (How could high fat food possibly be good for me?  It goes against everything I have ever been taught.)  But I like to think I have an open mind (about most things at least) so I read everything on the site and I watched all the videos, and the more I read and the more I watched the harder it became to come up with excuses not to try it.  It all seemed to make perfect sense to me.  Could everything I thought I knew about ‘good’ and ‘bad’ food be so completely wrong?

Anyway, long story short, I decided I needed to give it a go.  I am not diabetic, nor on any medication and I didn’t have a lot of weight to lose but the possible health implications of continuing to eat the way I was eating were enough to give me pause.  I decided to give myself over to the LCHF eating plan (full on, no cheating!) for one month to see what would happen.  No sugar, no grains, no fruit.  This was going to be interesting.

The first week was by far the hardest.  Everything they said might happen, did.  I had a searing headache for the first three days.  I had heart palpitations.  My muscles ached.  I had waves of nauseating hunger (don’t look at the lolly jar—don’t look at the lolly jar!) and I almost had an anxiety attack the first time I fried my hamburger in a pan swimming in butter!  But I persevered and then, towards the end of that first week, I started to realise I actually felt pretty good.  I was no longer getting hungry between meals.  I was sleeping better.  I wasn’t missing the bread, or the fruit, or the sugar at all, and all the butter (and cheese . . .  and cream . . . ) I was eating was actually really delicious . . .

Suffice to say, a month later I feel great.  Not only am I actually enjoying my food more (my girls are beside themselves with all the lovely smells that come out of the kitchen these days—yes folks, Sally has actually been cooking!) I am eating plenty of it—and Bonus!—I have also dropped nearly 6 kilos by doing it.  The proof is in the pudding (or lack of it). I am a believer.

But you shouldn’t take my word for it.  If anyone out there is interested in losing weight, or is diabetic (or pre-diabetic) this is a great site for information if nothing else.  All I urge is that you go onto the site with an open mind.  And here’s a small tip—there is a huge amount of free information on the site, but there’s even more information on the member pages (videos, films, presentations, etc).  Membership is only $9.00 a month, but you also get your first month free.  So sign up, read and watch everything on the member pages and if you still believe the whole concept is bat-crap crazy you can pull out before your first membership fee is due and the experience will have cost you nothing.

Go on.  I dare you.  www.dietdoctor.com.  What have you got to lose?