Trim Healthy Mama Plan (20 page)

This konjac root also transforms into zero-calorie noodles—think pad thai—yum! We get to indulge in all these goodies and experience a host of health benefits at the same time. It is nature's second most alkalizing food and a wonderful balance to meat and dairy, which leave a more acidic ash in the body after digestion. It is a grain-free, gluten-free product that is a great find for those with celiac disease and wheat intolerance.

Gluccie is a wonder food for those with
diabetes—a source of fiber that absorbs several times its weight in water and forms a gel in the stomach, creating a feeling of fullness. This is a boon for those with diabetes or prediabetic conditions as it slashes the rise of blood sugar in half and allows for a slower, more safe release of carbohydrates. It helps keep fasting blood glucose levels stable. A study conducted on diabetic patients who were given glucomannan for ninety days showed a drop in their fasting glucose levels by an average of 29 percent. If you have high blood-sugar readings in the morning, try some Gluccie pudding as an evening snack and you may notice a remarkable improvement the next morning. Check out our “Trim Healthy Mama Puddings
Part 1
and
2
” videos on YouTube or enjoy the many new Gluccie puddings, creamy drinks, and sauces we make in the
Trim Healthy Mama Cookbook.

Gluccie can be a great dinner helper. We both have large families and try to stretch our meals as far as they can go. Gluccie helps us accomplish this in dishes like spaghetti sauce and chili. Once you have made up your regular sauce or chili, simply put one and a half cups of boiling water in a blender and add three quarters to one teaspoon of Gluccie. Blend until it is thickened. Add that to your sauce and you create a greater volume of food! This also helps to blunt the blood-sugar rise from the meal and cuts
calories per serving. This is a wonderful trick to help lower the glycemic load of your family meals.

Gluccie is the most powerful fiber you will come across yet it does not have a fiberish mouth feel. For this reason it is an incredible cholesterol regulator and colon cleanser. You'll want to drink lots of water when you eat anything made with Gluccie to help it broom out your colon. Those with sensitive stomachs will want to start gently with it. If a gassy problem is quite severe at first, pull back and use smaller amounts at a slower pace. Little by little your body should become more accustomed to it. Although it is very cleansing, Gluccie is known to soothe conditions such as
diverticulitus.

On plan we use this powder as a food always mixed with a liquid, such as in the Fat-Stripping Frappa in the “Shakes, Smoothies, Frappas, and Thin Thicks” chapter in the
Trim Healthy Mama Cookbook.
There have been some concerns that when people use it as a supplement in capsule form there can be a choking hazard. The way we use Gluccie on plan negates this concern; however, you will want to store this dry powder in a high cupboard away from small children. Always consult with your own doctor, but there is no evidence to show that you need to be afraid of consuming glucomannan while pregnant or nursing.
Konjac root is a traditional food used daily in Japan and China. This is not a drug or an herb but an everyday food. If pregnant, use common sense by not replacing other important and needed healthy higher-caloric foods and snacks with glucomannan puddings or noodles all the time.

You can find both organic and nonorganic forms of Gluccie on our website, so it can fit within your particular budget. Our organic Gluccie is unbleached and very potent—this form is the one we use in all our recipes. A little goes a long way, so the one-pound bag should last you several months, making it a budget-friendly food over time. If you have a less potent grade of glucomannan you may have to use more powder than what we call for in our recipes. It is difficult to find glucomannan powder in stores other than in supplement form (capsules), and those do not work well for our recipes. If you want to purchase online, look for a high-viscosity grade of glucomannan. Glucomannan powder ranges in viscosity anywhere from 15,000 to 36,000 IU. Your best thickening results will come from higher grades.

We also offer
Not-Naughty-Noodles and Not-Naughty-Rice on our website. These are fabulous noodle replacements that are made with pure glucomannan without any of the common fillers such as potato starch or tofu. Imagine chowing down on a big bowl of noodles that actually make you slim rather than fatten you up! Watch the free video on our website in which we show you how to make Hot Pot Soup using these noodles. This
recipe is so easy, quick, and tasty and is similar to a big bowl of ramen noodles without all the junk that goes into them. Not-Naughty-Noodles have a chewier texture than most starchy noodles, but once you are accustomed to that, you'll fall in love!

More and more grocery stores are starting to carry glucomannan-based noodles. Look for the words
konjac root
in the ingredient list. They are white, almost transparent noodles packed in water and they will usually be in a refrigerated section. Sadly, these brands too often contain needless fillers such as potato starch. The carbs are still low enough that they can work on plan, though, so go ahead and give them a try so you don't have to miss out completely if you don't want to order online. Another problem (for some people) with most store-bought glucomannan noodles is that they have a fishy smell when you open them. This smell will go away when you rinse them, but it can be off-putting at first. This smell comes from the water they are packed in, not from the noodles themselves. We have loved using
konjac noodles for several years and just got used to the smell, but we were so excited to be able to source our own brand of Not-Naughty-Noodles that don't have that odor. This has made many a smell-sensitive Trim Healthy Mama very happy and able to embrace these slimming noodles where the smell had previously put them off.

Final note on Gluccie powder or noodles: Consult your doctor before using it if you take medication. Taking your medication at the same time as a meal that contains glucomannan may cause your medication to work more slowly. This is due to a longer digestion time, part of the reason Gluccie makes you full and allows the body to absorb more nutrients from your food. Best to take meds away from glucomannan or keep in mind the delay.

Coconut is not only lip-smackin' good for the taste buds, it is beyond good for just about everything else. From nourishing babies by superpowering breast milk (explained more in
Chapter 23
, “Heads Up: Pregnant and Nursing Mamas!”) to nipping in waistlines by revving the thyroid, coconut is a jack-of-all-trades.

Munching on Toasted Coconut Chips, which we call Crispy Addictions (in the “Crackers, Chips, and Dips” chapter in the
Trim Healthy Mama Cookbook
) or savoring the velvety
smoothness of a Skinny Chocolate Truffle is a yummy way of swallowing this medicine. The middle-chain fatty acids abundant in
coconut oil are antibacterial, antiviral, antiprotozoal, antiparasitical, and antimicrobial. Coconut in all forms battles against flu viruses, so it is the first thing we reach for when the cold and flu season starts lurking around our homes. Coconut meat is incredibly cleansing with nine grams of detoxing fiber per one cup. That is three to four times as much as most fruits and vegetables. The middle-chain triglycerides kill body pathogens and the fiber helps to broom the nasties out of your body.

Coconut oil is a true trimming oil. It raises the thermogenic temperature of your body and this ignites your fat-burning potential. But losing weight can mean less padding and sometimes that can result in you feeling colder. Try this experiment if you're cold. Eat one tablespoon of extra-virgin coconut oil before an S meal for a few days or make sure to eat some Skinny Chocolate (found in the companion cookbook or on Pinterest) after an S meal. Notice how you start to feel warmer after eating coconut oil. Even the addition of one teaspoon helps us tolerate the cold better. Coconut oil is an excellent energy source, fuels a tired brain, and beautifies your skin from the inside out.

Are you confused between regular coconut oil and 100 percent MCT oil? MCT oil will be described next, as it deserves its own write-up. It is extracted from coconut oil and is purely the shorter middle chains, namely capric and caprylic acids. These are the quickest to absorb and are used therapeutically for weight loss and brain repair but also have many other therapeutic purposes. Coconut oil is rich in lauric acid, which is a slightly longer middle-chain fatty acid and is extremely effective at enhancing and defending the immune system. Both these oils provide different benefits even though some of them might overlap. We would never suggest substituting MCT oil for coconut oil as that is like substituting green supplements for fresh salads. In a perfect world, you would use both; but life ain't perfect and if budget is your issue, then choose virgin coconut oil as your mainstay, given that it carries the full spectrum of immune-supporting fatty acids. It is also more budget-friendly. If you have a serious condition that needs more concentrated treatment (such as early-onset dementia), then MCT oil will double up your arsenal attack.

You can find extra-virgin coconut oil in many grocery stores these days or online. Thankfully, as more is being learned about this incredible food, competition between
brands is driving prices down. Even budget stores like Aldi carry this oil inexpensively now. That calls for a fist pump from our budgeting Mamas.

If you hate the taste of coconuts, use the expeller-pressed versions of coconut oil that have no residual tropical taste or smell but still contain the helpful
middle-chain triglycerides. Another perk in cooking with coconut oil is that it is extremely stable and will not transform into insidious trans fats. We use the neutral-tasting coconut oil for cooking when we don't want our zucchini fries tasting like they were drowned in Hawaiian suntan lotion.

While on the subject of tropical oils we can't leave out coconut oil's ruby-red cousin, red palm oil. This deeply pigmented oil was prized by the pharaohs of ancient Egypt as a sacred food. In Southeast Asia and Africa it is as widely used as olive oil is in the Mediterranean. It carries many of the same benefits as coconut oil as it is also abundant in middle-chain triglycerides. Its rich ruby hue is due to it being nature's richest source of tocotrienols, tocopherols, and carotenoids. This makes it a super antioxidant, proven to reverse heart disease and fight cancer. It has a deep earthy taste, so you won't want to pour it all over your salad. But it makes delicious fried eggs and is one of the safest oils to fry foods with and retains much of its “superness” even after frying at high temperatures.

MCT stands for middle-chain (or medium-chain) triglycerides. These are the healthful fatty acids found in tropical oils. Virgin coconut oil is roughly 65 percent MCTs but the pharmaceutical-grade MCT oil we're talking about here is 100 percent medium-chain triglycerides. It is carefully extracted from coconut and palm oils.

We wish we had time to tell you just how AMAZING MCT oil is for your health, but we'd have to write a whole chapter on the subject. But before we get to its health
benefits, there's something else we love most about it and the reason we use it in many of our All-Day Sipper drinks. It does not clump into tiny balls when mixed with cold liquid like coconut oil does, and it does not give a coconutty taste to your coffee. Remember, we don't want you to replace coconut oil with MCT oil; you can use coconut oil in your sipper drinks, you just have to mix it with a little hot water to dissolve first. But do try to save your pennies so you can give MCT oil a chance at some point on your THM journey. Some websites have given MCT oil a bad name since it is extracted from coconut oil and is not in its original form. We do not advocate that you leave coconut oil behind in the dust, but in our minds there is nothing wrong with using ingenuity to isolate the most healthful compounds in foods and then use them to our benefit. Many beneficial supplements are extracted in this manner.

We have squeezed just some of its benefits into a little list but this does not do it justice. What follows is a very inadequate list just to introduce you to a very talented and capable dietary friend.