I love eating the Trim Healthy Mama Way, and I have found great encouragement and recipe ideas from the Australian and American Facebook groups. There are some great documents on these pages that help with learning how this way of eating all works. I have found though that after spending some time on the American page, somehow it all became a bit confusing and overwhelming with all the different ideas about what to eat and when. How many carbs should I eat with this meal? How much fat should I eat with that meal? Lots of you mamas have also expressed the same sentiment so I thought we could look at how to get back to basics with Trim Healthy Mama.

Let’s remember the simplicity of THM. The fundamental principle of the THM style of eating is to avoid foods or combination of foods, which require large amounts of insulin to be secreted to regulate our blood sugar levels. By doing this, we will get slimmer and healthier at the same time. When we eat foods or combinations of foods that trigger our bodies to secrete large amounts of insulin, we wreck havoc in our bodies. Insulin is a storing hormone helping to store nutrients and fat. While we want it to store all those healthy nutrients, it is the fat storage that becomes the problem when too much insulin is released. The more of this hormone we secrete, the more fat we will store. By applying the THM basics to our eating, we will rev up our metabolism, and re-direct our bodies from fat-storing mode into fat-burning mode. Are you excited? I am!

Last week I was gifted four boxes of old books on health topics by a friend’s mother. In this collection I have found some treasures discussing this idea of insulin and its pivotal role in our health, or more pointedly our ill health. The common thread in these books is the premise that sugar, in all its forms, is at the root to our weight issues and ill health. Mainstream experts, however, have been telling us a different story for decades and only now are we seeing small trickles of truth coming out.

The research is now showing that simple table sugar is not the only factor that affects our blood glucose levels and consequently our insulin secretion. The role of carbohydrates is also a potent factor in insulin production. These carbohydrates are absorbed from our gut as simple sugars and quickly become glucose. If you look at the current food pyramid recommendations, you will see that we are encouraged to eat large amounts of carbohydrates. Mmmm, maybe this is why most of our nation is struggling with weight.

In Chapter 1 of Trim Healthy Mama, Pearl and Serene explain how our bodies deal with this glucose. After our body decides how much of this glucose it needs for immediate energy needs, it loads up the delivery truck and makes its deliveries.

Our pancreas releases insulin, which converts some of this blood glucose into glycogen. This in turn is stored in our muscle and liver cells for later use. When these glycogen stores are full, insulin converts the glucose into fat – a triglyceride. Triglycerides are then carried on the delivery truck to our fatty tissues and deposited as, you guessed it, fat.

In the next few posts, we will look at how to get off this overloaded delivery truck model. Serene and Pearl aptly explain an eating style that will help us avoid foods or combination of foods, which require large amounts of insulin to be secreted. By doing this, we will get slimmer and healthier at the same time.