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Keto is now everywhere!  I’m happy to see that.  However, some of my friends are still pretty skeptical.

Two weeks ago, the Jillian Michaels thing also happened.  So more negative press from the haters.

If you are non-keto, give me 10 minutes of your time – not necessarily to convince you to do what I do, but to show you why I am of sound mind and have made a healthy choice.

“It can’t be healthy to eat nothing but bacon and butter”

“It’s not healthy to remove entire food groups”

“It’s not healthy to starve your body”.

 

I’m going to take each of these, one at a time.

“It can’t be healthy to eat nothing but bacon and butter”

When you talk about keto today, everyone just thinks of Atkin’s diet of bacon and butter.  Well, Atkins wasn’t all bacon and butter.  Keto is a close cousin of Atkins.  When I read the Atkins book, it really didn’t focus much on macros.  It had talked about getting into ketosis, then walking your carbs out to maintenance levels over time.

If you look for the keto book, well, there isn’t one.  The ketogenic diet is over 100 years old, and was fed to children who had seizures.  They found these seizures could be suppressed if they stopped giving the kids carbohydrates.  What they did then was give them a diet of 92% fats, 6% proteins, and 2% carbs.

In today’s keto practice, the concept is to go into ketosis by significantly restricting your carbohydrates and staying in ketosis.  This usually means less than 30-50 carbs per day for most people.  Some of us who have been doing this for a long time might even get away with 75-100 or so carbs on heavy exercise days.

The root problem here is that the perception of nothing but bacon and butter gives the way of life a black eye.  However, 95% of my meals are ridiculous amount of greens with meats and fats.  I think I might eat out like once a month or so, and when I do, it’s usually a chicken Caesar salad, chipotle salad, or a diner with eggs.

 

I eat these enormous salads with meat.  The horror!!  But I also have some treats from time to time.  See, you can have 50g of carbs in a day.  Saying something isn’t “keto” isn’t exactly accurate.  I can have a bite of cake any time I want.  But I don’t eat the cake because eating a big hunk of it is….unhealthy and that’s what got me into this in the first place.  This way of life has taught me the true nature of indulgence – once in awhile you have a little of something bad.  You don’t eat it every day.

One day…I had a cupcake with what I estimated to be 25g of carbs.  Woke up the next day in ketosis.  But I also ate a steak for dinner and eggs for lunch, so I didn’t even approach my 50g for the day.  10 years ago, I might have eaten 3 cupcakes after I had 400g of carbs for the day.

What do I eat?

I eat 8 meals a week.  I eat relatively big meals which put me at 50g or less of carbs a day and has me over 100g of protein.  Fats make up the rest – whether from my waistline or the plate.

M-Th it’s usually OMAD – one meal a day.  This is usually 1200-1600 calories in a salad and maybe some peanut butter afterwards.

Friday I’m usually fasting

Sat/Sun is usually a late breakfast with eggs/bacon or perhaps my chicken thighs and cabbage.  Dinner could be like a steak and cauliflower, loaded cauliflower, keto pizza, zucchini with pasta sauce, or zucchini lasagna.  Maybe a handful of raspberries, blueberries, or strawberries.  These are DELICIOUS meals that are very satisfying.  All of these control my insulin, keep me full, and create calorie deficits WHILE going to bed full.

 

You do see bacon there, but it’s not a ton of it.  Maybe once every two weeks.

Most of this boils down to how we were programmed in the 1980s and 1900s that fat is BAD.  Unfortunately, this was incorrect.  Like 180 degrees incorrect.

*Fats are required by your body

*Proteins are required by your body

*Carbohydrates are NOT REQUIRED for your body.

But this raises your cholesterol!  Maybe.  But what many people don’t know is that your body produces 10 times the amount of cholesterol that you eat.  Every cell in your body needs cholesterol.  It is there.

Inflammation is the key to everything.  What causes inflammation?  Smoking, foods that are high in omega 6s, “vegetable oils”, sugars, trans fats.

Sugars?  Yeah….that guy who pointed as fats to be the reason for everyone to get heart disease?  Yeah, he was not correct – and then we built the goddamn food pyramid on this hypothesis and made everyone in the country fat.

Look at the below study.  Look at that pretty line!! The MORE FAT YOU EAT, THE MORE LIKELY YOU ARE TO DIE FROM HEART DISEASE!!!  This is what he published.

This came on the heels of Eisenhower getting a heart attack and Americans wanting to know why!  You see, 30-40 years before, heart disease wasn’t nearly the problem it is today.  I just assumed up until 3 years ago that everyone was supposed to just die of heart disease or cancer.  But it wasn’t like that 120 years ago!!  120 years ago, 1 in 30 got cancer, and 1 in 5000 got diabetes.  Today, it’s 1 in 3 for cancer and 1 in 7 for diabetes.  Heart disease is everywhere!

just look at the “biggest loser” series.  These guys tell you to eat carbs!  just exercise more. Drink your orange juice, eat your cereal with all kinds of fruit.  Have snacks.  Pound your body with insulin all the time.

Get a heart attack before the age of 50, as you profess to be the pinnacle of health.

Yup.  Eat all the fruit you want.  Pound the carbs.  Do you think he had high cholesterol?  Nope.  In fact, studies have shown no correlation between cholesterol and heart disease recently.  Eggs were bad.  Then they were good.  Then bad.  Now good.

The problem with all of this is that fat IS NOT BAD FOR YOU.  Take a look at the other chart below.

This is the study’s REAL DATA.  Ancel Keys decided to omit some items because they didn’t fit the narrative.  For example, the inuit had, at the time, eaten nothing but fat and meat.  These populations and those that didn’t fit the pretty line were dropped from the final study.

This was shitty science, that led to everyone over 35 today being scared shitless of fat.

What this study didn’t account for was –

1. what percentage of these populations smoked?
2. What was their carb counts?
3. What was their vegetable oil consumption?
4. What was their flour consumption?

I can go on and on, the point is, EVERYTHING YOU WERE LED TO BELIEVE WAS BASED ON THE DATA ABOVE.

Re-read that.

This led to the “food pyramid”

So – the inuit have over 50% of their calories as fats and have the lowest heart disease rate of any population.  And our science tells us to put it as the lowest amount.

Our bodies do not need ONE GRAM of carbs to live just fine, yet they tell us to eat 6-11 servings of pasta, rice, cereal?

Fruits – 4 servings?  A banana has the same amount of sugar as a coke.  “but it’s different sugar”.  No, not really.  Coke has high fructose corn syrup, which is like 55% fructose and 45% glucose.  Bananas have fructose.  Fructose is processed in the liver, and your liver can only process the fructose in a day of about 1 serving.  Meaning, that second, third, and fourth serving of fruit cannot be processed by the liver, at all, and is stored as fat using de novo lipogenesis.

Starchy vegetables like potatoes?  Your body gets pounded by insulin.

A vast, vast, vast amount of what I eat are non-starchy veggies with 12-16oz of meat per day.

I have talked about hunger before, here, and I can tell you this:

1. Fats are VERY satiating.  You can pound 2 boxes of oreos without blinking, but how are you after about 4 slices of bacon?  When you are “fat adapted” well on my diet, you actually get to listen to your body again.
2. When you spike your insulin, it crashes, and you get significant hunger pangs.  Yet the Standard American diet asks you to punish your insulin…ALL DAY LONG.
3. Continued pounding of insulin over time results in insulin resistance.  This will add weight to you.

To conclude this section:

1. I eat a massive amount of food which is comprised mostly of veggies and meats
2. I have virtually nothing that is inflammatory.  Any cholesterol in my body passes harmlessly by.
3. Recent studies have shown that there is no correlation between high cholesterol and heart disease.  Clotting factors are the highest indicators, and so are high inflammatory diets, trans fats, and smoking.
4. Everything you know about fats was based off a 1950s hypothesis that lied to you
5. Everyone has gotten fatter and sicker…by a LOT since the food pyramid was put into circulation.  Like. In a very, very bad way.

Lastly, this is one thing I really want to drive home….what do you feed farm animals to fatten them up?

• grains
• corn

If cows are let to eat grass, and chickens are left to eat bugs and worms, they don’t get fat. It’s only when introducing corns/grains that these animals start getting fat.

So – let’s base a complete diet around grains and tell our people to eat it, even though their bodies have zero requirements for it.  Yeah, that’s the ticket!

“It’s not healthy to remove entire food groups”

I want you to go back in the way back machine to 15,000 BC.  You are my 212th great grandfather living in northern Europe.  It’s November.  Quick, tell me what your carb sources are?

To the best of my understanding, agriculture was only invented 10,000 years ago.  Our peoples were nomadic, living off the land.  The “hunter/gatherers”.  My ancestors are northern European.  My guess is their diets were mostly fish, meats, and fats.  During the warmer months, maybe they ate berries or root vegetables and greens.

Our bodies can use two types of fuel, glucose and ketones.  This is how evolution designed us.  In times when we could eat berries and chase animals, we needed power.  If we needed to run from tigers, we needed quick bursts of speed.  This fueled our speed and glycogen stores.  Maybe we ate our fill of berries.

The concept of the food groups is also relatively new.  And, like stated above, humans need ZERO carbs to live.

I would ask you a serious question.  What is more important:

• Getting every micro and macro nutrient your body needs to survive and thrive OR
• Getting your 6-11 servings of grains/breads/cereals to fulfill a quota.  On something your body doesn’t need.  And will make you fat.

So what I did was adopt a way of eating that I believe my ancestors ate.

This way of eating eliminated my inflammation.  It also helped me lose 77 of my 147 pounds relatively effortlessly while being satiated.

My heart rate is 10 beats better…

 

 

This is the benefits of the keto diet…

And I feed my body foods that reduce inflammation….

 

Furthermore, I can tell you that the internet is filled with:

1. People who have lost TONS OF WEIGHT eating and living like this
2. Fitness experts that say, “yeah, you can lose weight – but what about the cholesterol”

If you want to lose weight…

1. Heal your body.  Eliminate the processed foods, sugars, and inflammatory foods
2. Be able to listen to your body’s cues for the first time, ever, by feeding it the correct foods.  Our bodies weren’t designed to eat processed grains, yet we are told to eat 6-11 servings a day

So should I eliminate a group of foods?  For me, after I felt what my body is SUPPOSED TO FEEL LIKE, oh hell yeah.

Unfortunately, for many, sugar is like a drug.  They don’t realize it, but it has a very strong hold on them.  It had a hold on me in the forms of breads/doughs/pastas.

A book I’ve been reading called, “The case against sugar” may ultimately be looked at someday as the one book that saved humanity.  We had little to no idea what sugar has done to us, as it has only been a few generations since it became prevalent in our diets.

Lastly – fruits today aren’t even what they were 100-200 years ago.  Our bodies were just not meant to process this shit.

This is watermelon 200 years ago in a painting versus now.  They frankenfooded this shit to make it taste sweeter.  You can tell me that watermelon is delicious, and I will agree with you, but confusing that for healthy is the mistake.  Just because something is a fruit does not mean you should pound it.  Have a small handful of berries, call it a day.

“It’s not healthy to starve your body”

This is also something from Jillian Michaels.  She feels that depriving your body of carbs is starving it!!  Well, no.  Any and all glucose your body needs it can get from proteins and fats through a process called gluconeogenesis.  So no, Jillian, your body runs just fine without that big ass banana and orange juice.

Remember what I said about running from the tiger?  Your body will hold about 1800 calories of carbs in your muscle glycogen stores for immediate bursts of energy.  When your blood sugar dips a bit, it will get any stored liver glycogen to normalize it.  If you run out of liver glycogen, your body will start to break down fats into usable fuel called ketones.  This is where you get “ketosis”.

So now you aren’t running from tigers.  Maybe you are walking all day and all night to gather berries, go for water, or travel to a neighboring village or town.  “Fat burning zone” is where when you need to go on a long walk, your body will spare that muscle glycogen and just burn fat.  A lot of my weight loss, overall, I’d say I can point to all of the walking I did in conjunction with diets.  I did a ridiculous amount of walking and hiking.

This is how our bodies survived.  When you are carrying 20-30 pounds of extra weight because you ate those berries during summer, you are now carrying 60,000-70,000 calories of fuel for walking.

You eventually go into ketosis when your berry sources run out, and you spend the next 8 months or so hunting small/large animals and living off of their meats/fats.  Remember, organ meats will get you all of the vitamins/minerals you need, and the fats in the animals allow you to digest fat-soluble vitamins.

It would be normal for someone thousands of years ago not to eat often.  I am routinely able to fast for 42 hours once a week, and I’ve even done a 72 hour fast.  When I was a sugar burner, the idea of going more than 5 hours without eating would make me cringe.  Now, it’s not a big deal at all on keto.  The hunger maybe hits a 5 or 6 out of 10 for maybe 30 minutes, then it disappears.  After you do OMAD for awhile, I would only get that hunger around 5-6PM on my fast day and then it would disappear.

So our ancestors routinely would go long periods without eating.  Most religions that go back thousands of years talk about fasting.  They didn’t have supermarkets 5,000 years ago, so yeah, people may have gone a day or two without eating regularly.  Additionally, studies have shown that you don’t lose any muscle until about 40 hours.  Then, it’s a rate of about 1/4 pound per day.

Recently, in 2016, the nobel prize was awarded for studies on autophagy.  Basically, it showed that with not eating over a period of time, your body eats its weak and corrupted cells.  What this meant was a boost for cancer prevention – and they said that if you fast for 3 days a few times a year, you can prevent all kinds of major diseases.

Nobel prize.

When you are a carb burner, it may take you 3 days of not eating prior to triggering autophagy because your body will eat through its glycogen stores first.  When you are on keto, it takes about 12 hours for autophagy to kick in.  When I eat once every 23 hours with OMAD….

1. The foods I eat satiate me to the point I only want to eat once a day
2. By eating every 23 hours, I’m getting about 11 hours of autophagy clearing out bad shit every day
3. If I was a carb burner, I would not be realizing any autophagy, ever
4. Because I’m on keto, a 72 hour fast gets me my 3 days of autophagy needed to help prevent cancer.  Carb burners need to fast for 72 hours prior to even STARTING autophagy

 

Humans were not meant to eat 400g of carbs per day.  Carbs TASTE GOOD.  They can help you make giant muscles.  They can help you dunk a basketball.  For 99.99% of the population, once you are trim, eating under 125 or so g of carbs per day should keep you at a good number.

My cousins in the paleo realm have about 125 and are at the high end of “low carb”.  Mark Sisson, 63, is a big keto/primal/paleo advocate.  He was a carb burner for 49 years and was sick all the time while running marathons.  His story is amazing.

 

In conclusion:

1. If you have weight to lose, you should look into low carb eating
2. Our ancestors ate closer to how I eat than the SAD people
3. By reducing carbs, you will improve your autophagy and help prevent cancer, diabetes, heart disease, alzheimers, PCOS, and many other metabolic related diseases
4. The science in the last 10 years strongly supports this way of eating is healthier for longevity.
5. Eating low carb has scientifically been shown to prevent/reverse certain types of cancers

Overall, this is not a bacon and butter diet.  Yes, they happen to be part of it, but the scary thing you see is cholesterol and fat.  I’m hoping this helped you look at this type of eating in a different way.  I hope to show that this way of eating is clearly the best way to lose weight – for me, and the studies are showing that the science is there to back it up.  Some of the leading low carb advocates today will be winning Nobels in the future.

I want you to look at the below chart and ask yourself, do you still believe that the food pyramid is the healthiest thing for you?  6-11 servings of grains/breads/pastas a day?  These 10 companies own just about everything.

Then…what happens when you get sick?  Is there a cure?  No.  There’s treatments that require you to take pills the rest of your life.  Treatments for cancer, cholesterol, heart disease, diabetes…

120 years ago, most of that shit was rare.

We didn’t live to age 46 because we all died of cancer.  We lived to 46 because:

1. Infant mortality rate was crazy, which drove down the number
2. Women died during childbirth
3. People died in droves of…the flu
4. Soap wasn’t invented until the mid 1800s.  People died of bacteria
5. People worked dangerous fucking jobs and died.
6. Kids died and shit.  A lot.  If you ever play with that ancestor.com shit, you will see people had like 10 kids and shit, and many of them died young.
7. Back in the day, tigers ate people.

 

You and I just think that the modern marvels of medicine have lengthened our average age to 76.  In some cases, that is true!  But people just didn’t fucking get cancer, heart disease, and diabetes at the rates we get it now.  1 in 30 used to get cancer – now it’s 1 in 3.  How much does that cancer treatment cost?  What is your prognosis even if you beat it?  The root answer here is not relying on medicine to help us live 3 more years if we are the 1 in 3 who get cancer.

It’s eating food that doesn’t give us these diseases.

look at the inuit.  Where is their heart disease?

120 years ago, 1 in 5000 people had diabetes, it was rather rare.  You don’t get diabetes from being fat.  You get diabetes because your body is murdered with insulin all day long because you can’t control your hunger from the grains and you are being fed like cattle and chickens – grains and corns.  The sugars disrupt your hormones and you get leptin resistance.  You are just hungry, all the damn time, and with no fats coming in, you have no satiety.

The answer – if you have extra weight, reduce the sugars if you want to lose weight.  It will take weight off.