Renaissancemen.org

I have a pretty good story of losing 175 pounds in 3 years, but I’d like to start off with saying I gained about 90 or so back since in 6 years. Big picture of the gain is I used to exercise about 1 hour a day on the weekdays and 2-3 hours each weekend day. I hurt my back from so much running, my mother died of a long bout of cancer, and I welcomed a little on into my life – all of which contributed to me getting off the intense exercise wagon. As of May 10th, 2025 – things are now looking up to get back on the horse, so to speak.

First – let’s look at a “before” pic.

Like many of you, I had dealt with struggles with weight my whole life. However, I was the athletic kid who just happened to have weight on him. When it was nice out, I’d be outside 10 hours a day playing, riding bikes, baseball, etc. When winter happened, I’d usually gain some. My entire life, I have been stupidly active with sports. However, the saying goes – “you cannot out run a bad diet”.

Over time, I had reached 372 pounds. Most don’t understand how people like me can get there. Constant dieting my whole life, driven by half starving yourself, taking off 20-30 pounds, getting injured or exhausted, then before you know it, the 20 you lost came back and invited her friends. It was a constant cycle. I’m here to tell you that calorie counting works, but it also doesn’t. WHAT you eat is the most important factor in maintaining your health. If you eat right, HOW MUCH you eat should take care of itself. Eating right in a sense means to stay clear of processed foods, high levels of carbs, and chemicals which affect your hormones.

I started in year 1 by meeting with a trainer and going over a suggested plan. She wanted me to eat 40/30/30 – That is, 40% carbs, 30% fats, 30% protein. I had been programmed as a kid that fats were bad for you, so I always avoided them. My doctors in the 90s insisted on “fat free diets” as well as telling me I needed to follow the food pyramid of 6-11 servings of grains/pastas a day. When I sat down and closely looked at what I NORMALLY ate, it was something like 75% carbs, 10% protein, 15% fats – or something stupidly skewed towards carbs. Also, I had grown up learning that you should eat 1800 calories a day. So, when you are over 300 pounds and eat mostly carbs, good luck to eat only 1800 calories. Why? Because of two things:

1. Hormonally, when you have a lot of carbs like that without fats and proteins, it spikes your blood sugar, you get insulin pumped into your system, then when this crashes, you get a hunger hormone released to tell you to eat. So I could eat 2 plates of pasta for dinner and bread, and 3 hours later want to eat my face off from being so hungry.
2. Proteins and fats have a satiety effect. I’ve always been told “fats are bad”, but you also have to understand not all fats are created equal. The problem is – a lot of my foods blocked or reduced leptin – so I never got satiety signals, which made it easy to overeat.

In my particular case, I can call all of you calorie counters as quacks. I followed the rules. I exercised hours a day. And I went to bed every night for years hungry. Your assumption is that I’m eating 4,000 calories a day of pies, snacks, and eat terribly. Someone like me spent 90% of his life eating the food pyramid, fat free, and exercised my face off – only to crash, overeat for a few weeks, undo all of the work done for 4 months, and then repeat the cycle. The overarching problem is fit people see overweight people and this leads them to think that the fat person has no self control. No will power. They are lazy and don’t exercise. Essentially, you look at a fat person with disgust that they have a character flaw – and because of this, there’s a stereotype with fat people that they are somehow too stupid to count calories or don’t have the motivation or willpower to succeed. This story here is to tell all of you to go fuck yourselves, as the knowledge you learned and spew to people is a bunch of horse shit – so much that 70% of the US population is now overweight or obese. Is it because everyone is stupid or lazy – or perhaps they are following shitty advice by people who have no clue what they are talking about?

This story is about you understanding everything you have been taught is wrong.

So when I met with the trainer, she started me at the 40/30/30 and 2700 calories. When I did THIS way of eating, it was VERY hard to eat 2700 calories. Lots and lots of broccoli, rice, and chicken breasts. Lots of food prep. My top weight was 372 prior to meeting the trainer. In September 2016. I was walking 4 miles a day on 1200 calories. I dropped 20 pounds in about 2 months. However, I had back spasms and was collapsed on the kitchen floor. I went in to the urgent care, and the first thing they did was tell me to “lose weight”. I’m like “hey fuck face. I’m here because of the intense walking I’m doing at this size and calorie restriction”. While they THOUGHT they were trying to help me by pointing out the obvious, all they did was insult me as I’m sitting in a wheelchair with a back that is frozen in place from exercising as much as I possibly could.

After this episode, is when I met with the trainer. This woman, I believe, saved my life, and will always have a special place for me. I had lifted weights for years. Boring as hell. I could squat, dead lift, bench, and leg press a small toyota. I was strong. I was athletic. But nothing was adding up given all of the advice my doctors and nutritionists gave me my whole life. You see weakness. I see bad fucking medicine that I followed – to a tee. My first weigh in at the trainer was on my birthday in 2016. I was 347 pounds.

About 14 months in, I was down from 372 to about 300. I don’t think I had ever eaten this volume of food in my entire life – as she was telling me to start off eating 2700 calories. Really? I normally shot for 1800-2000. This is the FIRST PERSON in my ENTIRE LIFE to tell me to eat over 2000 calories. But because of the MAKEUP of the food, with the 40/30/30 – and the introduction of the boring chicken/broccoli/rice, I had problems getting to 2700 calories. And – the satiety was immediately felt.

Towards December 2017, I felt so much better, but was starting to lose control of the carbs and my weight immediately started ticking up – despite not changing my calorie consumption. My trainer had been talking to me about keto, and I just thought it was an atkins gimmick. I had lost weight on Atkins before, but like everything else, it could come right back on me.

I gave it a shot, and then you realize keto is extremely healthy for you. Everything you learn is about this. Note how fruits are at the top of this to be eaten sparingly.

And what they WANT you to think keto is this…

Because these people control the media and need you to consume packaged goods, sugary snacks, and massive amounts of grains. Did you know the food pyramid was recommended to all of us for decades, but was never tested prior to being rolled out?

Which looks in reality a lot like this…

And you quickly realize none of those big companies above sell any of that shit.

Every day I was eating one meal a day (OMAD). I was in ketosis a lot and had low carbs. I did some fasting. But this is what my meals looked a lot like. This bowl is a mixing bowl and is massive, and it was about 1400 calories a day. However, I never tracked my calories. I was rarely hungry. Why was I eating 1800 calories and STARVING all the time and now I’m eating 1400 a day and never hungry? Hormones of leptin and ghrelin – along with insulin is the reason why.

You then realize that ancient man did not have grains and corn and pasta – we evolved over 500,000 years and breads/grains are only the last few thousand. Like where did humans get carbs 15,000 years ago? You then understand that low carb is our DEFAULT. Yes, we can process carbs, but our body tends to store them. Think about if you are alive 15,000 years ago. You find a berry patch, and you eat and eat. You put on some weight, and when winter comes – there’s no carbs anywhere. Your body has now stored calories in fat for your body to use via lipolysis over the winter. Your body is then also able to produce ketones for energy.

Ancient man was not a body builder. They were lean. Calories were hard to find. A natural state was ketosis. To add muscle, you NEED carbs via insulin to create protein synthesis. But if you want to be 5’9″ and lean and run, you can do the rest of your life without a single carb and you will be just fine.

Anyone who understands inflation and the Arab Spring realizes when food costs get too high in your budget, you lose your government in riots. So, in the 1970s – they invented the food pyramid to have you replace that 1800 calories with cheaper calories. Breads/grains/pastas are far cheaper than grass fed/finished beef.

Have you not realized the difference between grass fed cows and walmart cows is the fat/marbling? You do realize they are feeding cows grains/corn to “fatten them up”? Have you understood that a cow’s natural diet is grass, and they are rather lean when eating this. So what do you think is going to happen when you tell an entire goddamn population to eat grains/corn? They are hungry and consume more and get fat. This is the shit every doctor in American preached for 50 years.

But they want to convince you that YOU are weak. YOU are the problem. YOU cannot put down the pie. Or, perhaps it was shitty food science? The entire nutrition industry is based off of the physics of calories in, calories out. It’s entire premise is WRONG. If you use the endocrine-based nutrition way of living – this is a lower carb diet. You cut out shit foods and things that spike your insulin. Guess what? You don’t get hungry because your body knows you are carrying around a spare tire. And, because of this, and the lack of insulin, lipolysis works very well.

I mentioned I was an athlete. Prior to doing low carb, I’d bike and “bonk” at 22 miles. Anyone who has done fitness then realizes you need gels and carbs to not bonk, right? So you see all of these endurance athletes consuming gels. If I am 100 pounds overweight and biking, why the hell would I need gels? Has anyone stopped to understand the logic in that? OK – you are going to talk now about substrates and how you need carbs for a type of muscle group. This is true if you are doing hills. But that 22 miles was on a rail trail with no real incline.

So I bought a book by Dr. Phinney and Dr. Volek – which talks about endurance exercising performance on low carb. I followed it. And, guess what? After 6-8 weeks, your body now adapts to fat as the primary source of energy via ketones. This allowed my body to efficiently break down fats via lipolysis. I was then swimming an hour, biking 35-45 miles, and then running 8 miles at like 275 pounds. ZERO carbs. Now, this wasn’t going up hills. Flat surfaces. But I ask you why when I would exercise before I had a hard time losing weight and I would “bonk”? It has to do with glucose storage in the form of glycogen in your muscle tissue and liver. For a carb eater – this is all about 1800 calories or so. It is quick burst energy.

So the common thinking is that with the “carb” diet, you eat your 2000 calories, and exercise a ton – and overnight your body will deplete your glycogen stores and you repeat over and over. But why the fuck are you trying to fuel your body on glucose if you are overweight? You want your body to take the fat you already have on you off.

Weight training is also great for weight loss – as there’s an afterburn effect. It takes quite some time to adapt to weight training on low carb, as the immediate reaction is your body has no real glycogen stores and with this, you are using phosphates to do a few reps and you are done. On low carb, over time, your body will take that 10% of carbs in your diet and add back to your glycogen stores – which helps you for hills. But for steady state cardio – your body is now using ketones as your primary energy source and the glycogen stores are used for things like brain function and hills.

The food pyramid has made the entire country sick – and launched countless thousands of people in the “bro science” industry. You look great with a shirt off, so you must know what you are talking about to fat people. Just stop. You were probably raised eating something resembling a 40-30-30 and got activity. Someone like me who grew up poor would eat out of a vat of pasta all week and once a week split a $4 large pizza with my brother. We ate cereal every day. Breads were everywhere. Fat free foods were jam packed with sugar to make them taste good.

The “science” failed all of us. And, everything you know about nutrition is probably shit. Yes. You do look good with your shirt off. Now try to advise someone who is 100 pounds overweight who grew up poor on processed foods and pastas and was hungry all the time to just cut calories. No.

To go further, read books by Gary Taubes – he gives you the history of how shitty our food science is in this country. Doctors are wickedly smart about memorizing shit and telling you about it. But Dr. Ken Berry insists most doctors only have about a half of semester in med school on nutrition – and all of that is calories in/calories out shit. You then start to fall down the endocrine system with Dr. Lustig, who warns you about the dangers of fructose. Yet people still tell us to eat all the fruit we want. Dr. Lustig IS the leading academic in this space – and he is an endocrinologist. He shows you how he mapped out how fructose is processed in the liver the same way wine is. Wine is made from grapes. So when you are stuffing your kid with fruit, you are spiking his blood sugar and adding fat around their liver. Your body can only process about one serving of fructose in fruit a day. If the kid is overweight, why are you giving him sugar? Fructose is sugar. The orange juice and apple juice scam is real. There is no such thing as “healthy fruit sugars”. It’s marketing meant to sell you shit from all of those companies above I told you. You do not need 5-6 small meals a day. You don’t need breakfast. You think ancient man was somehow eating 6 times a day? They would do a hunt, kill a deer, and eat it. Academic sources cite that they craved the fat off of the animals and gave the hard muscular tissue to the dogs. The fat is calorically dense and provided massive satiety. Then they might not eat for a few more days and this was fine because of ketosis. But you are somehow fed that breakfast is essential? No. See the marketing above for those companies again.

And guess what. Eating processed foods, massive amounts of carbs, chemical additives – all of this makes you sick. So let’s see what happens when Americans do get sick off of the same diets doctors recommended for 50 years.

And – if you tried to tell people how keto CAN be healthy, the below people control the narrative.

So my weight loss story was essentially do the exact opposite of what they had told me to do repeatedly for 30 years of my life.

This is how I ended it…at 197 pounds. Forgive me for blacking out the wife’s face, she hates my social media presence.

In August of 2019, I competed in a sprint triathlon and fell in love with the sport. 300m swimming in a pool, 15.7 miles biking a hilly terrain, and then a 5k (3.1 miles). I finished midway through all of the 250 competitors. It was an accomplishment that no one can ever take from me.

For the years leading up to it, I was also running 5ks. I LOVE running.

At this time in my life, I was also applying to be a direct commissioned officer in US Cybercom. I had been selected to be one of 11 interviews out of 5,000 applicants. I had worked as a contractor under US Cybercom for years, and led teams up to 125 people defending one of the most important US military installations in the country. Time was running out on me, and I needed to push harder to lose more.

Troubles brewing

A few months after my triathlon – my mom passed from stage 4 pancreatic cancer. She was going through the exact same thing as Alex Trebek, on almost the same timeline. My mom had spent her life craving sweets, ensuring we had cereal for breakfast, making up Kool Aid for us, giving us tons of pastas. Eventually – this led her to be a type 2 diabetic. Her doctors told her to “lose weight”. They pointed her to the American Diabetes Association page and a popular weight loss program. These again, focused on calorie control and “whole grains”. She was allowed to eat as much fruit as she wanted. The ADA page was filled with plates of pastas, whole grains, fruits, etc. I begged her to stop eating the fruits. Her doctor told her it was the right thing to do, and I’m just some idiot reading things off of the internet. So she’d have this fruit, these whole grains – her blood glucose levels would rise. She had severe insulin resistance by this point, so she needed endogenous insulin shots. We have plenty of sources now with doctors that have “cured” type 2 diabetes with a ketogenic approach. Six years later, the ADA FINALLY recommends a low carb approach. But you were fucking smart because you listened to your doctors, who are following guidelines given to them by the AMA, who gets tons of cash from…..all of the shit food companies above.

Your doctors have been poisoning you for 50 years because they are doing what the “science” told them to do. Well, the science was fucking wrong, and my mom eventually developed pancreatic cancer. Insulin is produced in the pancreas, and when you are clubbing the pancreas for decades to produce insulin, guess what? You get insulin resistance. Your HBA1C rises. Your doctor tells you to “lose weight” by cutting calories and eating “healthy fruits”.

I did the research. And, I’m not your typical Dunning Kruger idiot who reads an article. I have been diagnosed with ADHD and severe OCD, and I believe I have a touch of the autism – which this last one was a self-diagnosis in 2008. I become obsessed with subjects that interest me, and my ADHD provides hyper focus as a super power. I didn’t read an article. I immersed myself in all of this for 4-6 hours a day for 3 years. It was the same efforts I gave to my 2 masters degrees. It was the same effort I used to master chess and play in the world open at 15. It was the same efforts that led me to being voted most musical in HS. And being captains of sports teams. And mastering training for triathlons. And – what led me to be a C level employee today with 12 industry certifications. I am your worst nightmare to debate on this subject, and to display my findings – I have over 150 health blogs here. Each and every one of them is more words than you can read, and each one of them has graduate level sources – many of them. I have read about 15 books on these subjects and my library is quite impressive. I have helped at least 30 people lose 30 pounds using the low carb approach.

Going back to my mother – I spent the last few weeks her life caring for her and barely sleeping with a job hours away. The day of her funeral, I was 224. you fucking gym bros would look at this 27 pound weight gain as me falling off the wagon. What you dopes aren’t understanding is the effect of cortisol (stress hormone) on the body. There were days I forgot to eat. Other days I ate some carbs on the road to my job from my mom’s house where I never slept. You see weakness with weight gain. You fail to grasp the effect of hormones on the body, and how that dictates weight loss and weight gain.

6 months later when my son was born, I was 245. At this time – I was running a $45 million contract with 75 people during COVID. The stress was insane. My child was born in the NICU and stayed there for 10 days, all the time I was worried he might die.

In the 5 years since my son was born, I have now gained an additional 55 pounds. What the MAIN difference was, is that I mostly stopped running, biking, lifting. With my new boy around, I wasn’t able to be active, and at the same time – I tried running at 245 like I was running at 197 and hurt my back. At least 6 other times over the next 2 years, I tried to run again, and 2 weeks in, I’d have severe back pains that kept me almost 100% immobile. I had also tried lifting a lot. Back feels better, I start lifting, and 4 weeks in, the lower back hurts again.

One thing of interest – the last 10 pounds I lost, I lost a TON of muscle. I ran a lot of 5ks, and by the time my mom had passed, my back was going through tons of problems, I had to go to physical therapy for a shoulder issue for months, then had the other shoulder have the same issue. For 3 years I had beaten my body to a pulp, and it needed to rest. Amazing how you gain weight when you stop exercising an hour a day! At 225 pounds, I benched 225 3 times and could run forever. At 197, I couldn’t bench 95 pounds one time, and didn’t gain any speed with the lower weight. I more or less trashed my muscle mass, which affected my metabolism, for sure.

Another thing I did for the last 2 years which I have NOT done since COVID. When I was working every day in the office, I did OMAD, or One Meal A Day. I would rarely eat on Fridays, calling it “Fasting Friday”. On a “regular diet”, this is not possible. You need to eat every few hours. Three times I was able to do 3-day fasts with ease.

So, this is my story. And why I am supporting what RFK is doing to the entire food and pharma industry. Until you understand the depths of depravity and corruption that made this country sick, you have no business criticizing RFK. You are merely a puppet with someone else’s hand up your ass from watching too much CNN. Who, are sponsored by big food and the pharm companies.

I am in the right with the science. You are not. I have more knowledge on this than your doctor. Which, is the entire point of this. Doctors gave us shitty advice for years, and then we are blamed for being fat for following their guidance.

To finish this off – I do want you to consult a doctor and/or a nutritionist about what I wrote above. The reason for it being is things like type 2 diabetes can be tricky, or you may have underlying conditions like my mom had (Leiden Factor V) which can lead to clotting disorders. The big danger is “ketoacidosis”. This is not a problem for 99% of you reading this, just be aware that your body may be so far beyond the ability to help itself that if you use this approach, you could severely hurt yourself. THIS is where I would trust a doctor, because they can tell you what your conditions are and how that might affect you. But I would not ask him or her for nutritional advice. For the most part – you are now getting chronic illness, and you go to a doctor – and what does he recommend? A pill that some hottie drug sales rep gave him samples of to push to you.

The establishment is NOT there to cure you. The establishment is there to make money off of you. YOU are their product. They use the TV to entice you to buy shit foods. Inflation crushes people so they can only afford walmart beef (high in omega 6:3), you eat cheap packaged food with chemicals, and eat volumes of cheap calories with pasta. You are hungry, you get chronic illnesses, and you are recommended to go to Weight Watchers. You are told to lose weight with the same strategy that got you fat. The medical community makes a ton of money off of your insulin resistance via diabetes, cancer, heart attacks. They give you pills to treat your symptoms. The gov agencies in charge of making recommendations to you have cushy relationships with big pharma and big food – and high ranking government officials then go to work at these big food and pharm companies. People at NIH get royalties from pharm companies. The vaccine schedule has significantly increased the amount of stuff in their shots as it is a guaranteed money maker for them. COVID happened and there were ways to treat things early with cheap drugs – but instead CNN ran a “horse de-wormer” campaign against one of the safest and cheapest drugs on the planet so you would need the clot shot and 100 boosters of a vaccine that was not a vaccine, didn’t prevent you from getting covid, didn’t prevent you from passing on covid, and there’s no real evidence that the vaccine lessened symptoms. When I had COVID, it was a mild cold for a few days.

Why? I practiced a low inflammatory diet that was low in carbs.

The answer to all of this is prevention. You have been told to eat the wrong way your whole life.

If you think about carbs as fuel, it’s like rocket fuel that can produce a lot of power, but it’s very dirty with exhaust (byproducts in your system). Fat as a substrate is like burning a candle. It is steady fuel for a long time and burns “clean”. For most people, they want to use fat as a primary source of fuel and eat carbs sparingly.

Yet, this is what got our country sick for 50 years. They have fucking pretzels, waffles, and high carb foods at the bottom. Lots of starches. Seeing this makes me sick to my stomach.