I think many of my friends think I’m whackadoodle for doing keto, or perhaps it’s just another fad diet. I’ve now watched so many keto/low carb videos on youtube I feel like I can teach a college class on the subject. The truth is, this way of eating actually seems to be the way humans are to eat, at least during winter times.
Let’s back up. How do you eat now, the FDA food pyramid? What I’ve been finding out, is apparently that food pyramid was put in place by a 1977 commission by McGovern and based off of faulty research by Ancel Keys. Keys tried to draw a line between a country’s heart disease and its intake of saturated fats. He presented a pretty chart which clearly showed association. The only problem with this, is he only plotted 7 of the 22 countries studied. To top it off, no clinical studies were ever done on the food pyramid to see if the diet was “safe” for everyone.
Please, please let that sink in. The way our government has been teaching us to eat, for 41 years, was based off of a shitty diagram and then not tested for safety in this country.
Take a look at exactly what happened when they introduced a “low fat diet”. All products starts to reduce fat content and increase sugar content. We were all told to have 6-11 servings of grains a day.
There’s a documentary for free on YouTube called Carb Loaded: A Culture Dying to Eat which can go over all of this a lot better than me. This can also tell you why a lot of skinny people start getting the pudge in their bellies when getting older. It also explains why “skinny” people get type 2 diabetes, despite possibly being marathon runners. Lastly, anyone wonder why a trainer on the Biggest Loser, Bob Harper, had a heart attack? Anyone? You think he ate like shit? Nope. My guess is he ate exactly like the food pyramid suggested. Now, they have him selling pills on TV for a pharm company. Does anyone…I mean ANYONE see the problem here?
One thing the low-carb community is promoting is that – ironically – there is no such thing as an essential carb. You have essential fatty acids needed. You have essential amino acids needed. But your body DOES NOT NEED CARBS to live. Once again, please process this concept. There is no such thing as a required carbs.
But what about vitamin C? Well, I will eat my leafy greens to get this, but truth be told, animal organ meats have this. I’m just not going there.
So I’m going to paint a picture for you. It’s winter time, and my peeps are hanging out in Sweden, Finland – you know, those places where tons of vegetables grow in December/January. So they are roaming about, hanging out, and one asks the other if they wanted to stop at McDonald’s. Unfortunately, McDonald’s would not come around for another 8,000 years. They meant old man McDonald, who just caught a bunch of fish. You see, for my people, much of the year they didn’t have leafy greens or berries, and they ate fish and animal fats/meats. You stick my genetics into 1980 and food pyramid life, and this is what you get. Obesity.
I have done atkins before, but I had a hard time 20 years ago dealing with the restrictions at that time in my life. Additionally, I found where my failure was – I had a LOT of the sugar alcohols. Apparently, one of the bar makers is being sued over claims about their sugar alcohols not being as low carb as they said it was.
My living these days is pretty freaking good. Yesterday for lunch, I had a “meat lover’s omelette” with 5 eggs, bacon, ham, and sausage. I later for dinner had my zoodles made with 3 zucchini, half a pound of grass fed 85% fat beef, Rao’s sauce. SOOOOOOO good. At this point, I was around 2300 calories and stuffed, so no need to have anything else.
I do NOT feel like I’m a diet. In the last 7 weeks of doing this, I had 5 minutes where I felt restricted. I was shopping for my beloved Eagles super bowl, and I was having thoughts of tostitos and salsa. Ordering pizza. Wings. Oh…wings! So I made a ton of wings and dipped them in ranch. That was my only time I really felt out of it.
I have very little hunger. I’m also doing the 23:1 intermittent fasting during the week and weekends I’m eating 2 meals with a 16:8 window of eating. On the weekends, I’m having keto coffee (so not technically 16:8) and on weekdays I’m mostly having black coffee, then 1-2 cups of hot tea during the day. My hunger is non-existent, mostly.
This is what critics of low carb say, that it’s ultimately about calories in and calories out and you ultimately lose weight because you “trick” your body to eat less and you aren’t hungry.
Again, step back and process that. Look really hard. You’re telling me that I can eat a lot less food, exercise a ton, lose body fat (and not muscle), AND I’m rarely ever hungry? Also – this way of eating has been associated with preventing heart disease, diabetes, stroke, cancer, dementia, Alzheimer’s, and possibly tons of autoimmune diseases? And they have lots of studies to back this up? AND no studies were ever done on the food pyramid prior to pushing it on the American public? AND there is no such thing as an essential carb?
What starts to happen in my brain is things start shorting out. You mean this way of eating prevents many of the ills of the western diet? You mean to tell me that all of my ancestors actually ate like this for 4-6 months at a time when no carbs were prevalent, and this is a natural state of eating? Mind = blown.
This also then tells me that it’s higher carb cousin of paleo might be a more natural state during the warmer months. More fruits and starches included on this, which might put on a few pounds during the warmer months in anticipation of food scarcity during winter. OK – so our bodies ARE meant to produce insulin – to capture the excess energy and store it for when food is not around? And…our bodies are meant to use that fat during times of carbohydrate scarcity?
The problem with the food pyramid is mostly this. When you are taking in tons of carbs, your body produces insulin. When it produces insulin, you cannot burn fat. Again, this is a MASSIVE thing to comprehend. Think about all of those people telling you to eat 5-6 small meals a day – when…just WHEN is your body going to burn fat? Overnight? OK. Or is using the glycogen stores in your liver overnight?
A guy just won the Nobel Prize on autophagy. Why is this important? In our western diet, we eat 3-6 times a day. We eat our big meals, snack, food is everywhere. Guess what. Fasting has been around since before biblical times. They have found that fasting has massively increased benefits on autophagy. Meaning, your stronger cells “eat” your weaker and malformed cells. They essentially strip off all of the good parts and break everything down into smaller cell parts to be re-used to create new stronger cells.
When you are feeding your body constantly, shitty weird cells can develop and by constantly feeding them glucose, you are then feeding them. Once they get connections to a blood supply, these pre-cancerous cells then can develop into cancers. By using autophagy and a ketogenic diet, you will kill off weird/malformed cells and deprive the body of glucose to feed cancers. Remember, 100 years ago, 1 in 30 people got cancer. Today, it’s 1 in 3.
Watch these guys on youtube – Phinney, Volek, Noakes, Fung. Lifestyle folks like Keto Connect, Jason Wittrock, and Primal Edge Health give you easy ways to live off of it. You then have the information providers, with Eric Berg and Thomas DeLauer. Tons of information that is counter to the food pyramid culture.
March to 100…
Yesterday, I hit 93 pounds weight loss. 7 to go. Water weight has been fully restored. My last weigh in at the trainers a month ago I had lost a ton of water (3 weeks after I started keto). Water weight has gone back to normal. 7 pounds down since last weigh in. Down 22 pounds on keto now in 7 weeks, or about Pi per week. That is a pretty good fat loss, considering all of my water weight is back and I eat a ton of goddamn food while never being hungry. Also, I hadn’t seen my trainer in 3 weeks and have been slacking off on the mid-week work outs. I needed a break for a few weeks, but now looking to get back to it!! So yeah, I had 7 pounds of weight loss (12 pounds of fat loss) by not working out a lot. Sign me up!!
I’m really happy – Tues/Wed by me it’s supposed to be 70 degrees. I’m really considering trying to bike or run somehow, I really want to get out there. With 7 pounds ahead of me to conquer, I’m just laser focused. My eating will be sharp, my fasting will be sharp, I will be on point. I got this shit.
With being down 93 pounds since my start of this (279 currently)….THIS is what this spring/summer/fall has in store for me:
- Biking – I have an app called All Trails in which I want to see different trails all around me for the 7 months or so I can bike around here. Mostly flat trails at the moment, I’m not looking to hurl myself off of a mountain. Last summer at 310 pounds, I was able to bike 20 miles. I’ll be 40 pounds less and on keto, so I might be able to up that to 24-30 miles.
- Hiking – like the above, I want to visit different trails on foot. Getting outside and smelling the fresh air for me is intoxicating, after almost 15 or so years of smoking.
- Running – I used to run for weight loss mostly, and had some enjoyment from it. This year, I will do it purely for enjoyment. Last week, I ran a 12 minute mile for the first time since high school. Yesterday, I ran a 10 minute clip for 5 minutes during my warm up, so I think by the end of the summer – Sept/Oct, I will be around 225-235 and running a sub-10 minute mile for a 5k.
- Walking – this is an activity I would do for some fat loss. Pop on the tunes, take the dog for a 1-2 mile walk around my development.
- Swimming – I want to get back more into this again, I had gotten off of my normal routine of doing this and want to get back to it. I’m not interested in lake swimming, but I really crank it out in the pool!
The problem is, my life hasn’t been engineered for the above. Most of my social circles don’t do any of this. I’m ok with doing it alone – my social circles have been part of my problem. I always drank/ate to excess. I tried to be the life of the party to show I wasn’t boring. Truth is, I’m an introvert nerd/academic who enjoys solitary activities.
Of interest – when I hit 100 pounds weight loss – in my mind, I will still be “fat”. I’ll be less fat than I was, but by no means will I be skinny. Here are some of my objectives….
372 – start
330 – get below that because it was the weight I got married at
300 – get below that as this number is a magical number to die
295 – get below this, as I really haven’t been below this as an “adult”
284 – junior year of college
280 – in a 2x from a 3x
265 – sophomore year of college
245-250 – around the time I go from a 2x to a 1x. I don’t want to buy an entire 2x wardrobe to use for 1-2 months.
227 – lowest weight in high school, just before I graduated.
205 – lowest weight since 7th grade.
190 – goal for approximate 15% bodyfat. BMI will still be high and all of the muscle may put a strain on the heart long term.
168-175 – long term goal to be trim, lean, and be a runner with great cardiovascular health.
Overall, if I land anywhere from 170-190, I think I’ll be ok to call it a day and go into maintenance. Until then, I’m going to ride keto out and continue my fat loss!
Renaissancemen.org 
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