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This post might be something that answers a LOT of questions for you.  I’ve been ranting about keto forever, but let me take a slightly different approach by not talking about reducing your carbs to 5-10%, but perhaps more reasonably 40%?  Maybe 100-150g a day?  Why should you even consider reducing your carbs at all?  Fruit is healthy -right?

 

For me, the big question I always had for me was why did I spend most of my life exercising my face off and having tough times dropping weight?

I know it’s hard for really thin people to understand, but there are plenty of us out there who have busted our asses year in and year out to drop weight.  We might start off nicely, then eventually we’d hit the wall.

This post helps me feel vindication.

 

A calorie = a calorie.  It’s thermodynamics stupid!  Calories in MUST equal calories out.

Yes…..but why are you putting more food in your gullet?

…….

…….

Because your body told you to eat.  Your body told you that you were hungry.  So you ate.

 

I just watched a video which piggybacks on something I heard a year or so ago, but they went into detail a LOT more.  This also explains a lot.  Let me give you a 50,000 ft view.  A lot of this also is the reason for metabolic syndrome which explains the exploding healthcare costs in this country.  The video linked in the last sentence also explains clearly what doctors are being told that is incorrect and outdated.

 

Get ready for some football!!

I’m a die hard Eagles fan.  I’m a bank teller.  Chuck comes in one morning with $2,000 dollars to deposit.  I put $2,000 in his bank account.  During the course of the day, Chuck spends those $2,000 dollars and he’s not getting richer, but he’s not poorer either.

One day, Chuck comes in wearing a Cowboys jacket.  I hate the Cowboys.  I decide with today’s deposit, I’m going to pocket $500.  Chuck has $1,500 in his account today, and I put the other $500 in the vault.  Chuck is going well about his day and around 7PM realizes he’s out of money.  He can stop spending money today, or put more in the bank.  He swears he counted the $2,000 properly for the deposit, but needs to run some errands so he goes back to the bank and puts another $500 in.  He’s still wearing the cowboys coat, so I pocket another $100.  He runs into the same problem later on in the evening.

Chuck doesn’t realize that I pocketed $600 of his money.  He just knew his bank account was low and he needed to put money in to use his debit card.  At the end of the day, he put in $2600 but spent $2000.  That other $600 went to the bank vault.

It was skimmed off the top.  Remember this.

This cycle repeats itself for months.

After a long while, Chuck realizes he’s living way beyond his means.  He’s been spending this $2,600 daily from the money in his safe, but his bank has only given him access to $2,000 per day.  He has no savings account.  The bank has robbed him of $100,000 over that time.

This is how insulin works.  Insulin is the fat storage hormone.  It is skimming calories off of the top and shuttling them to fat storage.  The more insulin you have, the less access you have to your own stored fat.

If Chuck would have just continued to wear an Eagles coat (foods lower with insulin and the glycemic load), he would have put $2,000 in and received $2,000 out.

While I’m a “low carb zealot” – I did the right balancing act with the 40/30/30.  Keto just accelerates this loss.  More on that below.

But let’s back up here.  I have told all of you numerous times that I have conquered my hunger.  Hunger is the key here folks.  Hunger is the problem.

What skinny people cannot possibly comprehend is the levels of hunger to which fat people have had in their lives in order to lose weight – and the hundreds of times they went to bed after eating 2500 calories and being so hungry they could gnaw their arm off.  They don’t know about all of the miles they ran while 300+ pounds and the countless injuries suffered trying to get into shape.  They just don’t know.

They see you and assume that you sit on a couch and binge eat daily.  They see you as a damaged character who just can’t help himself.  And this is where I have a problem.

The truth is, that happens at times.  It could be some sort of food addiction.  An emotional event could trigger something.  A breakup could have us turning to food for comfort.  That is what ADDS the weight – over time.  But what is the problem with LOSING the weight?  Why does it start to happen, then stop – and then you gain it all back?  Watch the first video I linked above, and it explains EXACTLY why you have taken off the same 25 pounds 15 times and gained back more every time.  Your doctor cannot explain that, they just assume you are the lazy fat bastard who is lying to him.

You’re not wearing an Eagles jacket, you are wearing a Cowboys jacket.

This is also known as eating grains, cereals, breads, pastas, waffles, fruits, potatoes, etc.  You also know about the candies and sugars with sodas.

But if ALL calories count, why can’t I have 2,000 calories of bread, soda, and spaghetti?

Because your body will only see 1500 available of it and make you hungry to deposit the other 500.  This is the camp of those of you who do evening snacking.  The other 500 is the banker throwing 500 calories into the fat vault.   It’s there, your body just doesn’t know it – or have access to it.  If you choose not to eat that, you will be VERY hungry.   For some reason, your body is not accessing all of the fat you already have, but asking for more sustenance.  Why is your body telling you that you are hungry and you’re fat?  So – you have a choice:

1. Day in and day out, for the rest of your life, be hungry and eat 2000 calories of pastas, breads, cereals.
2. Eat more to give your body the 2,000 it is asking for.  To satiate you, you end up taking in 2,600.  This leads in weight gain.
3. Put on an Eagles jacket and eat 2,000 calories of different types of foods to make your body no longer hungry.  Then, run some extra errands for 300 calories per day and since you are wearing that Eagles jersey, you now have access to the 100,000 calories in the vault that the banker stole from you.  You have only put 2,000 calories into the bank today, but 2,300 were available to you on your debit card.

If you’re not tracking the above, it is basically telling you this – if you eat foods that create more of an insulin hit to your body, over time, your body becomes insulin resistant and it takes more and more insulin to clear your body of glucose.  This, over time, requires you to consume more and more calories due to extreme hunger pangs.  Insulin blocks leptin – which is the hormone that tells you that you are full.  Ever wonder why you slam the Chinese buffet and 2-3 hours later you are starving?  Yeah.

So let me tell you what has happened to me over the last 30 months.

Months 1-16, I did IIFYM for 40/30/30.

Using my banking example above, I had a “sit down” with my banker and we went over the items in detail.  Chuck was allowed to wear a cowboys wrist band, but he had to wear an eagles jersey.  This gave him SOME access to his money.

So what I did for 16 months was learn the accounting system of the body, so to speak.  I counted every goddamn morsel of food that went into my mouth, and I tracked every moment of exercise.  I had previously had 60-70% of all of my calories as carbs, day in and day out for my entire life.  I lived off of pasta 5 days a week.  I’d be tired, hungry, sleep like shit.  And then when I went to 40/30/30, I started with 2850 calories a day.  I lost like 13 pounds the first month!!  But when I’d eat 1200 calories of my pasta, I had problems losing weight???

At the end of my journey with IIFYM, I had crept up on the carbs to 45-50% per day.  This stalled my weight loss for 3 months, and then over Christmas 2017 I ate a whole box of chocolate peanut butter pretzels in one sitting.  I did NOT like my food addictions, and the carbs were making me feel like shit.  I did NOT want to have to track every calorie for the rest of my life.

For ME – weight loss happens and I got access to the vault at 40% carbs.  You might be 50%.  You might be 30%.  But, I can tell you, the more Cowboys bling you are wearing, the less access you have to the vault and the more money is being stripped from you at the deposit – right into the vault.

So – many of my facebook friends over the years are not low carb zealots like me.  What happened to me was I was having problems at 40/30/30 with some impulse control around holidays, cakes, pies, chocolate – these are things that would shoot up my calories for the day, and I found on days where I ate these things – I would be STARVING going to bed with 2400 calories in me.

95% of the time on IIFYM, my hunger was fine – this was a massive deviation from before this whole thing – my hunger was out of control..  This was how I lost 70 pounds and went over the first hurdle.  The drawback with IIFYM is you have to count calories, militantly, your whole life.  You have to have that come to jesus moment every single day with the banker and get out the calculators.  Over time, I was not getting enough access to the vault.

I wanted unfettered access to my vault.  They were MY calories dammit!

So what then happened was I went keto the day after Christmas in 2017.  So I’ve been keto maybe 14+ months, and I’m down 83 pounds with it.  Here’s what happens with keto.

I wear an Eagles jersey, hat, scarf, and wrist bands.  No cowboys bling anywhere.  The banker sees me, takes my $2,000 deposit, and whispers to me that I’ll have $2,300 available to me today to use, he’s giving me $300 of the stored vault money he stole from me.

Great!!!  I then spend $2,300 that day but I only put $2,000 in the vault.

After about a month of this, the banker pulls me aside and has a sit down.

“Look, here’s the deal.  As long as you are putting SOMETHING into your account daily…maybe $1,000….maybe $1,500…maybe $2,000 – I will give you UNFETTERED access to all of the $100,000 I stole from you”.

So what I do is I throw out the ledger, and once  a day, I ballpark between $1,000 and $2,000 I put into the bank.   Some days I see the balance and it has $3,000 available for me to spend, yet I only put in $1,000.

Due to all of these errands, and the smaller deposits – my expectations were that I’d be tired from all of the errands I was running to pay all of these people.  But, I never ran out of energy.

Over time, my vault balance got lower and lower.  My banker pulled me aside and said, “keep it up, you’re doing such a good job showing up in Eagles gear that I will give you access to it all.  As long as you need to keep paying your debts, just make sure you put SOMETHING in daily…or NOT…and we’ll keep giving you the access you need.”

This is the aspect of low carb that all of you haters miss.  I’m NOT HUNGRY and I have UNLIMITED ACCESS TO MY FAT STORES….with 100% ENERGY.

While you are eating your toast, orange juice, oats, and bagels at 1600 calories a day and barely getting by with hunger and struggling with weight loss, I’m eating massive quantities of food, not counting calories, never hungry, and losing weight.

 

Let’s now get into the science and shit with this.

Insulin.  Insulin is secreted to remove glucose from the blood.  Your blood sugar runs in a tight window.  If your blood sugar goes too high, you secrete insulin from your pancreas to clear this out.  It will send this energy first to your liver and muscle glycogen stores.  Once they are topped off, it will send the remainder to the fat stores (adipose tissue).  When you have insulin going through your body, you CANNOT unlock the energy in the fat stores.

Insulin also blocks leptin, which is a hormone they discovered in 1994 which helps suppress your appetite.

Glucagon is a hormone that is secreted from your pancreas to raise your blood sugar.  So if you have zero carbs, ever, your body will be able to unlock the fat stores (with hormone sesntive lipase to create lipolysis) to then break this down to ketones.   Your body can go to your fat cells and extract glycerol to turn into glucose.

• Let me repeat that.  Your body NEEDS glucose.  Your body USES glucose.  You do NOT need DIETARY glucose.  Your body can pull it from your fat cells just fine.  So it’s not extreme to have zero dietary carbs, because your body can synthesize all of the glucose it needs.  Please re-read that last sentence.

So to be clear here, Glucagon is like the Eagles jersey and Insulin is like the Cowboys jersey.

To recap – if you have LOTS of food that triggers insulin, it will STORE and ROB you of calories FIRST by putting them into your fat stores BEFORE YOU HAVE A CHANCE TO USE THEM.  If you have LOTS of food that have a much lower insulin hit, you will have full access to the calories you ate and your fat stores.

 

I wrote something earlier this week that wasn’t LITERALLY true.  It was, kinda sorta true.  I wrote that 4 servings of fruit daily will kill you.  Now, there are vast differences with fruit.  Some has a lot more fiber than others.  For example, I’d prefer an apple over a banana due to the fiber content.  I’d take berries over grapes.  But I was using a little hyperbole that got lost in translation.  The main problem was fructose.  People think because it’s “fruit sugar” or “honey sugar” that this means it is HEALTHY.  No.  Fruit is healthy because of all of the vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, and fiber.  For example, if you strip all of that to make apple juice, you have a concentrated form of sugar called fructose and its just about as healthy as a can of coke.  Adding all of the fiber, vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants back give it the healthy aspect.  Do NOT mistake fructose for “healthy sugar”.  It is far from it.  But, with fruit, your body can slow the digestion of it with some fiber.  Too much of it?  Problems.  Too concentrated?  Problems.

As many of you know, my mom is going through a terrible illness.  She was going through weight watchers last year and while she was type 2 diabetic, her doctors were recommending to her to eat 45g of carbs per meal.  Please take a look at my links above where world-leading doctors are mocking the doctors who are recommending this for type 2 diabetics.  WW recommended “unlimited fruit” and I about lost my goddamn mind.  With all advances in medicine the last 10 years, there are a lot of doctors that are not caught up.  For example, leptin was discovered well after my doctor went to medical school.  So most heavier people are either diabetic, pre-diabetic, or on their way there – and weight watchers pays no attention to the QUALITY of the calories, but only limits the calories with a point system.  And does NOT attribute points to fructose.  Sad.

So everything that I’ve learned on THIS weight loss journey has had me very, very angry at the medical establishment for not keeping up with their craft.  I’m learning on YouTube from some of the leading doctors worldwide of causative studies in the last 10 years.  I’m reading about studies which educate me on a lot of this stuff.  I’m doing my own study of N=1 and I’ve lost 153 pounds and am the healthiest, most energetic of my life.  I’m trying to tell others what I’ve learned and I’m met with “is all of that fat healthy?”  I once had a dietician 8 years ago recommend 80g of carbs to me in meals 3 times a day and 3 times a day to have snacks at 20g of carbs.  A dietician was recommending 300g of carbs a day to a 350 pound pre-diabetic.  Yes….this did not work.

I’m angry.  I’d like to apologize to any of my friends if you’re caught in the crossfire.  I want to scream from the rafters that if you have 20, 40, 60, 200 pounds to lose – put DOWN the carbs.  If you have type 2 diabetes, or you are pre-diabetic.  Put DOWN the fruit and carbs.  If you are diabetic or pre-diabetic and your doctor is pointing you towards 200-300g of carbs per day – take a look at the people on dialysis machines due to diabetes and that is your future.

Above all, there is a grass roots movement today that is upending the dogmatic medical establishment over the last 60 years.  The studies I am learning about are CAUSATIVE.

EVERYTHING you have been taught originated with the “seven countries” study by Ancel Keys, which then led to the food pyramid.

 

All of you, including our medical professionals, were taught about how high fat causes heart attacks.  That if you eat fruits and whole grains, and just deal with energy balance, you will not gain weight.  The problem with Keys’ study was that he selectively LEFT OFF populations such as the inuit that had ZERO heart attacks and they ate mostly fat as their primary macronutrient.  There were other tribal populations that had virtually no access to carbs and they had….ZERO heart attacks.  When populations were then introduced to a western diet, they all got fat and got diabetes.

I ask of you to use critical thinking.  If you have ZERO NEED for DIETARY CARBOHYDRATES and your body can make all of the glucose it needs, WHY DO THEY RECOMMEND 6-11 SERVINGS OF CARBS PER DAY TO FAT PEOPLE?  If you have extra weight on you, would you not like to get the glucose from stored fat in glycerol which converts to glucose with gluconeogenesis?

TODAY…there are 150 million Chinese with type 2 diabetes.  Store that for later…

For years, it was told to us: you get type 2 diabetes because you are overweight.  If you want to reverse your diabetes, you must lose the weight.  The problem is, it was the carbs and insulin that made you fat, and removing the carbs and insulin will eliminate the type 2 diabetes and make you thin.  SO WHY DO THEY TELL YOU TO EAT 200-300G OF CARBS PER DAY WHEN YOU ARE TYPE 2 DIABETIC.  This is what many of the leading doctors are asking today.  Virta health was created by one of the leading voices in the low carb movement, and him (Dr. Stephen Phinney) and Dr. Sarah Hallberg routinely reverse type 2 diabetes.

Yet your doctor is telling you to eat whole grains and orange juice.

This advice, is, literally killing people.

So I ranted about fructose.  I did this because fructose is different from the bagel that you eat.  You mainly get fructose in several sources:

1. Fruit.  Your banana is 27g of carbs, and like 3g of fiber.  A can of coke is 38g of carbs, most likely with high fructose corn syrup.  While the fiber in the banana slows digestion, it still has fructose that may need to be metabolized by your liver, or perhaps it goes further down into your gut.  But items like raspberries have a much higher fiber content.  This makes the glycemic index of the raspberries much better.  Less of an insulin spike, and the higher fiber means less is going to your liver.
2. Sugar.  Sugar is 50% glucose and 50% fructose.  When your “complex carb” of bagels break down, they will break down into glucose which will spike your insulin, a lot.  But sugar is half glucose and half fructose, so half of all of the sugar you consume goes to your liver for processing.
3. High fructose corn syrup.  That quack biolayne loves to talk about energy balance.  He cites that sugar consumption has dropped off the radar since 1995 so we MUST be wrong about sugar.  Then, Dr. D’agostino brought up – “well, Layne, that was the year most products switched over to using high fructose corn syrup because it’s cheaper than sugar”.  HFCS is 55% fructose and 45% glucose.  It is sweeter than sugar, and cheaper.  So while “sugar consumption” has gone down, HFCS consumption has gone through the roof.   This also puts a harder load on our liver to process more fructose.

 

So all of that fructose hitting your liver is creating all kinds of issues.  Not only are you getting pounded all day long from insulin, which is locking your fat up in a vault, but you are also creating a condition where you are creating hepatic lipogenesis.  Your liver can only process so much fructose a day.  After it gets overwhelmed, it’s creating fat right there.  This is CAUSATIVE of metabolic disease – see the links above for the studies and CAUSATIVE, NOT CORRELATIVE effects.  Remember those 150 million Chinese with type 2 diabetes?  Have you seen a lot of fat Chinese people walking around?  11% of their population now has type 2 diabetes.  And they aren’t fat.

People really don’t know what type 2 diabetes is.  Well, it also is the “gateway drug” for other more fun and exciting adventures such as heart disease, stroke, cancer, dementia, and more.

I’m angry with the medical establishment.

I don’t demand all of you eat 50g or carbs or the like per day.  But if you have 10-20-50 extra pounds, you are showing markers of metabolic disease.  You may not be “fat”, but you may be sick inside.  You may be pre-diabetic and not know it.  You may have the beginnings of insulin resistance, fatty liver, and metabolic disease but “look” normal.

People are pissed that their health insurance costs so much in this country.  Well, diabetes (and more importantly metabolic syndrome) is the reason folks.  If you want lower health insurance, it starts with you.  If you want to prevent metabolic disease – you can!!  Don’t wait until you are diagnosed to then get drugs and insulin the rest of your life!!

Let food be thy medicine….

Have a talk with your banker.  Wear an Eagles jersey more often than not.  Reduce the money in the vault.

How can you start?

1. Track your food for one month.  Don’t do anything different.  Evaluate where you are.  Count your calories.  Get your starting weight.  Get your weight at the end of one month.  If your weight is the same, GREAT!  You know about what your total daily energy expenditure (TDEE).  My guess is it will be somewhere around 15 times your body weight in calories.  So if you are a 200 pound person, it will be somewhere around 3,000.  Also – track your macro percentage.
2.  Evaluate where you can cut some carbs, but keep the calories the same.  For example, maybe you find like me you were eating 60% carbs.  Take them down to 40%.  With this ratio, you are nowhere in the country of keto, let alone zip code.  Keto is roughly 5-10% of carbs.  At this rate, you are still a “sugar burner”, but you are having less insulin put into you.  Have 30% fats and 30% protein.  At the end of the second month, look at the scale.  Your calories have been exactly the same, but you will be down 5-10 pounds.  You will feel healthier.
3. Removed “added” sugars.  For example, you put sugar in your coffee.  Sugar is in your energy drink.  Added sugar in your lean cuisine.  Read food labels.  For example, your “low fat” yogurt you eat because you mistakenly think saturated fat will kill you (see Keys above) removes the fat, but they add tons of sugar to make it taste better.  Try full fat greek yogurt and add a handful of berries and a small amount of honey.
4. Eat fruit, but have 2-3 servings rather than piles of it.  The fruits you eat, have more fibrous ones that are lower on the glycemic index.
5. Eat a LOT more veggies.  This is one I missed most of my life.  Put butter on them.  Count the butter in your fat grams for the day.  The fiber will help you.  Eat giant salads.

 

Keto – when I went keto, about 5 months in I stopped tracking calories.  I was not very hungry, and I went to eating once a day naturally.  I didn’t need to eat 5 times a day because I was starving.  I went to “whole foods” and ate lots of greens and salads.  Yes, the first few weeks of keto I did the bacon, bunless burgers, and wings – that was to get me acclimated to using fat as a fuel.  95% of my way of eating since then has been whole foods, veggies, and lot of salads.

I have full access to my fat stores and I’m rarely hungry.  I’ve most likely reversed metabolic disorder and my previous “pre-diabetic” diagnosis disappeared this past November.  My blood lipid panels are amazing, I passed a stress test with flying colors, and I’m able to me more athletic than I ever have in my life.

Once I reach my goal weight, I can gradually add back some more potatoes, fruits, and possibly some grains.  But when I’m overweight, I should be cutting that shit out.  Using Mark Sisson’s guidance, he lives at most 100-150g of carbs per day to maintain, and maybe 3 weeks a year he’ll do keto to shave off a few pounds that maybe crept back on over the year.

 

To conclude:

1. If you are at a healthy weight, try to keep carbs around 40% or less.  Ideally, 100-150g a day for maintenance to prevent being thin but being sick around your liver with metabolic syndrome.  This is why thin people can get type 2 diabetes, heart disease, strokes, and cancer, yet otherwise look like the picture of health.  The more you exercise, the higher your carb tolerance can be with the 40%.  This is because your exercise is routinely pulling energy from your liver and glycogen stores which prevents storage in adipose tissue and in the liver.
2. If you are at a higher weight than you’d like to be, keep your calories the same to start, but reduce your carbs to experiment with how insulin resistant you are.  Replace your carb calories with more protein and healthy fats.  In the links I presented, they showed that you can reverse metabolic disease in children after 2 weeks by keeping the calories the same, but removing the added sugars/fructose.
3. Throw away processed shit.  Stay away from margarine, vegetable oils, trans fats, high levels of carbs, and added sugars.