Mother’s Day is a day when I do for the mother living in my house. We had cream and coffee for breakfast and worked on our landscaping. Its what she wanted to do, so we did it until the rain made us quit. I drank and eight ounce can of Coke when I came in the house. That is a very small dose of fructose, even though it is ‘high fructose’, but its a small enough dose that I didn’t feel the sweetness in my blood.
Our first solid food was onion rings at the best barbecue restaurant in Kansas City, Jack Stack at the Crossroads, near downtown. I ate two rings, which are sweet onions in a thick, crunchy bread shell. Washed it down with more Coke. You see where this is going, right? Dinner was pork ribs surrounded by cole slaw (sweet), baked beans (sweet), potatoes au gratin (carbs), cheesy corn (carbs), and french fries (carbs). We ordered a creme brule of which I ate a half spoonful, but the damage was done. My system was loaded up with carbs, gushing insulin to compensate.
Top that off with fresh home made popcorn and real butter while watching Game of Thrones.
When I eat this many carbs in less than eight hours I have a reaction. My heart hammers. I sweat. Laying in bed I must be out of the sheets as I sweat. I awaken halfway thru the night a bit hungry and cold, and get under the sheets.
There was a time when I blamed these symptoms on other things. I thought it was hot in the room or humid in the house. It wasn’t, and I only feel like it is when I have eaten carbs. The reactions that I have, like my heart hammering I would blame on other things, but now I know why it happens. My whole life it has been the food I ate and now I finally know it. Eating carbs makes me feel a bit sick, but it always did. Eating them your whole life really does make you sick–it causes real go-to-the doctor kinds of problems.
If you go on a diet and it includes carbs then you are not going to have a good time of it. If you are hooked on carbs and cut back a little, you are hungry all the time. If, on the other hand you cut back on carbs only, you will not get hungry. You can eat any time you want as long as you don’t exceed your carb allotment. Any fat you eat that your body does not need you will get rid of in your waste. It is a wonderful way of eating.
Yet, I keep going back to eating carbs. They make me feel bad but I eat them when I want to. Even knowing that I will pay later doesn’t keep me from doing it. Doesn’t this sound familiar? Ever do something you know you shouldn’t but you do it anyway? Ever do it and try to hide that fact from your loved ones? Sounds a helluva lot like addiction doesn’t it? It is.
This is Clare Walker, a homemaker in England, and for the last six months, today is her anniversary, she has been leading a Ketogenic Life. She has unveiled, gradually, the beautiful woman from within her cocoon of slowly gathered insulation. At this point you might be wondering “what is a ketogenic life?”
I am glad you asked. Ketosis is a natural phenomenon that takes place about an hour after every meal. It takes place, that is, unless there is still free insulin floating around in the blood stream. The first picture in the collage is of a woman whose blood had insulin in it twenty four hours a day. After there is enough fat on your body the fat itself causes insulin production. To turn that around a person needs to eat zero carbs for from three days to a week.
You see, insulin is only produced in a normal health body if the person eats carbohydrates. No carbs, no insulin. Without insulin and blood sugar the body instead takes the triglyceride molecules locked up in fat cells and breaks each one into fatty acids, which are loaded onto good cholesterol particles and carried to your muscle and organ cells, where they are used for energy instead of blood sugar. As your body consumes energy every second you live, it then also obtains that energy from your fat stores.
The ketogenic diet promotes you to utilize stored energy when you are not eating, and it prevents any fats from being stored when you ARE eating.
Step 1: Stop buying any food that contains carbs. If you can’t give away or throw away the carbs in your house then eat them but don’t replace them. I ate mine.
Step 2: Do not drink anything but clear liquids, no alcohol, nothing sweetened in any way.
Step 3: You will be getting your energy by eating fats, so know which fats are good. There is only one good liquid fat, and that is olive oil. No man made fats are good so eat real natural ones, butter, lard, tallow, suet, coconut oil. Buy meats that have fat on them. Eat the fat from chicken and fish. If you are used to trimming fat I hate to tell you but that was both a waste of your time, counterproductive, and removed all of the flavor.
Step 4: Learn to cook and start cooking your food. No restaurant cares if you eat carbs or if the food they buy is properly raised. They are in business to make money not look after your health.
Step 5: Either eat breakfast that is meat and eggs only (no juice, no bread, no cereal) or just drink coffee with real cream or real butter to lighten it. The butter (one or two tablespoons per cup) will provide you with the energy and satisfaction to take you all the way to lunch without hunger. Living without hunger is not only the strength of this way of eating, it makes doing it FOREVER possible. That is why I refer to it as a Way of Eating (WOE) not a diet.
Step 6: Eat a lunch that does not contain any carbs, drink another coffee with cream or butter.
Step 7: Eat a dinner that is from this list of ketogenic foods…
Avocado
Bacon
Sausage (at least 15% fat), you don’t want “low-fat” anything
Cheese — natural cheeses
Eggs, free range if you can
Beef Steak
Lamb
Liver, Liver pate, sauerbraten
Pork
Chicken (with skin and fat)
Game – any kink if you are lucky enough to get it
Fish, the wilder the better
Crustaceans, Oysters, Mussels etc
Sliced meats
Butter–like Kerrygold, from grass fed cows, but make it REAL butter
Coconut oil
Coconut milk
Heavy Cream
85%+ Dark Chocolate–here is your one snack
Kosher or Himalayan pink salt
Nuts and berries, in moderation (after the first week, not before)Green, leafy vegetables and Cauliflower are not necessary, but will not detract from your goals, they are here because lots of people think you can only get vegetable nutrients from vegetables…
Spices are excellent condiments, and every single one is ok
Full fat milk is optional because it contains Lactose. This must be included in your carbohydrate allowance.
Tomatoes, Peppers and Cucumber, but count the carbohydrate content and don’t eat the first week!
Mushrooms are fine
You can make a lot of really great food using these notes. All you will be missing is the starch you are used to. Your plate might look pretty empty. Its not. The fats you will be eating will fill you up fast.
Step 8: Go back to step one and do it again, day after day.
I have been advocating this for an entire year, no–more than a year. Once you have a handle on it it’s not hard to do. You just don’t eat store bought bread, crackers, potatoes, rice, pasta. You don’t eat them. You only have dessert once in a while on a special, INTENTIONAL occasion.
Congratulations, Clare, and all the Keto-ers in England and elsewhere. If you feel like it, please comment below if you are currently living this life, this new life of not counting calories, not worrying about fat content in foods, not having to hate your bathroom scale. We all want to know your story, we all want to know that we can do it too.
The article in the Times the other morning has certainly stirred up a great deal of sentiment online. Not only did I write about it, but so did the Washington Post and there have been articles in Mother Jones and now this article, once again in the Times, adding more information.
The root of the problem is not willpower but neuroscience. Metabolic suppression is one of several powerful tools that the brain uses to keep the body within a certain weight range, called the set point. The range, which varies from person to person, is determined by genes and life experience. When dieters’ weight drops below it, they not only burn fewer calories but also produce more hunger-inducing hormones and find eating more rewarding.
Why You Can’t Lose Weight on a Diet–By SANDRA AAMODT MAY 6, 2016
This is an alternate branch of science weighing in. The brain is doing something to change the metabolism of the dieter. According to this article people that never attempt to lower their weight on purpose end up gaining less weight in their lives than people that do so, and the earlier that they attempt to control their weight by starving the more weight they gain over their lives.
Some experts argue that instead of dieting leading to long-term weight gain, the relationship goes in the other direction: People who are genetically prone to gain weight are more likely to diet. To test this idea, in a 2012 study, researchers followed over 4,000 twins aged 16 to 25. Dieters were more likely to gain weight than their non-dieting identical twins, suggesting that dieting does indeed increase weight gain even after accounting for genetic background. The difference in weight gain was even larger between fraternal twins, so dieters may also have a higher genetic tendency to gain. The study found that a single diet increased the odds of becoming overweight by a factor of two in men and three in women. Women who had gone on two or more diets during the study were five times as likely to become overweight.
Statistics drive me crazy. Words like “more likely” can be true but very misleading. The fact that women that have gone on two diets or more are five times as likely to become overweight is almost a silly statistic. How many men or women go on diets if they are not concerned about becoming overweight. Does it matter to this study that now two out of every three adults in the United States is overweight? Does it matter to this study that now vast numbers of grade schoolers in the United States is overweight?
Why would dieting lead to weight gain? First, dieting is stressful. Calorie restriction produces stress hormones, which act on fat cells to increase the amount of abdominal fat. Such fat is associated with medical problems like diabetes and heart disease, regardless of overall weight.
Second, weight anxiety and dieting predict later binge eating, as well as weight gain. Girls who labeled themselves as dieters in early adolescence were three times more likely to become overweight over the next four years. Another study found that adolescent girls who dieted frequently were 12 times more likely than non-dieters to binge two years later.
In this article we have a ‘root of the problem’ and then we have a first and second reason that dieting leads to weight gain. In my mind the root of the problem is on target for how the body cuts back on it’s energy usage when it sees a challenge to it’s fat stores. The brain and endocrine systems are the mechanism by which this occurs. Stress to the mind and the body are the triggers to the brain to take action thru the endocrine system. Binge eating is a different mental process and is usually associated with the defective compulsive behaviors of the addict. When eating becomes and addictive behavior a person can gain weight, this is true, but this is not affecting two out of three Americans.
However, as far as not gaining weight goes, there is only one way to keep the body from making fat out of what we eat, and that is to not eat carbohydrates. If you do not make fat you don’t have to worry about when or if your body will use it. It turns out that starving will not work long-term nor will ‘busting your ass’ exercising. Either of these things ends up changing both your mind and your body to harden it’s resolve to keep fat, and sacrifice everything else to do so. If you want to not gain more weight, quit eating carbs. Don’t eat processed food because it contains hidden sugar and other science based products. Processed foods will have a known affect on your weight, they will make it go up.
Eat real food. Don’t worry about your weight, it will take care of itself. Stressing about weight is counterproductive. Starving is counterproductive. Dieting is counterproductive. There is only one way to lose weight and that is to not put it on. The best diet is No Diet.
There is a paradox. It is possible to lose a lot of weight thru semi-starvation and extreme physical activity–there is a TV show that documents the possibility. Those same show contestants now know that it is impossible to keep the weight off by continuing to do the same thing. Nobody wants to starve forever, and if you do not continue to lower and lower your consumption for some mysterious reason you will begin to gain weight once again. A paradox is a situation that combines contradictory features or qualities. Simply stated in this case it is that you can eat less calories than you consume and gain weight too. Want proof? Read this report that follows alumni of “The Biggest Loser” as they utilize the hard-won knowledge gained in their reality show to regain all of the weight they lost, no matter what they do.
Danny Cahill stood, slightly dazed, in a blizzard of confetti as the audience screamed and his family ran on stage. He had won Season 8 of NBC’s reality television show “The Biggest Loser,” shedding more weight than anyone ever had on the program — an astonishing 239 pounds in seven months.
When he got on the scale for all to see that evening, Dec. 8, 2009, he weighed just 191 pounds, down from 430. Dressed in a T-shirt and knee-length shorts, he was lean, athletic and as handsome as a model.
“I’ve got my life back,” he declared. “I mean, I feel like a million bucks.”
Mr. Cahill left the show’s stage in Hollywood and flew directly to New York to start a triumphal tour of the talk shows, chatting with Jay Leno, Regis Philbin and Joy Behar. As he heard from fans all over the world, his elation knew no bounds.
But in the years since, more than 100 pounds have crept back onto his 5-foot-11 frame despite his best efforts. In fact, most of that season’s 16 contestants have regained much if not all the weight they lost so arduously. Some are even heavier now.
Why?
Here is the “energy balance” equation that your doctor or dietician might use to show you what you need to do to lose weight.
E(stored)=E(eaten) – E(used)
The idea that they expect you to take away from this is that you have control over the right side of this equation, eating and exercise. If you do less eating and more working that the energy balance will force energy from your storage to keep both sides equal. This is true. If it is the ultimate truth though, then why do the “Biggest Losers” gain their weight back and to maintain it they constantly have to lower and lower the eating or raise and raise the exercise? If they keep doing what they did the day the show ended they gain it all back. Why doesn’t diet and exercise work for the rest of your life? Well it doesn’t work, for anybody.
It doesn’t work because what we are trying to describe in that equation is not as simple as a teeter totter, where you can store energy by pushing down on one side. What we are describing is the human system. What is happening to the Biggest Losers makes sense if you don’t try to make the equation work like you think it does, but instead look at how it works and learn the lesson that that Law of Physics is teaching you. The Left Side of the equation is not a static thing that only moves if you manipulate the Right Side of the equation. In fact, as the Biggest Losers can attest, it is possible for your body to change the Left Side and manipulate the arguments on the Right Side to make that happen. Their bodies are changing the E(used) value to force their E(stored) back to it’s starting point and beyond.
Answer this question from your own life experience. Think of the skinny friend you have that can eat everything in sight and never gain a pound. When you think of that person and why they are like that don’t you think “they have a higher metabolism?” So you already know that metabolism is a thing that can make up for someone eating an amount of food that would turn you into a Thanksgiving float. It does not explain why their metabolism is like that and yours is not, but it does exemplify how a human body could deal with excess food energy and not be forced, like a simple machine, to store that energy in their thighs or belly fats. The body decides if it will store it or ‘burn’ it thru the metabolism. Science knows and can track that the biggest losers, after their show experience, all had significant changes in their ‘basal metabolism’. When you diet you do, too. It’s why diet and exercise are not the way to lose weight. By diet I mean ‘semi-starvation’ diet.
It has to do with resting metabolism, which determines how many calories a person burns when at rest. When the show began, the contestants, though hugely overweight, had normal metabolisms for their size, meaning they were burning a normal number of calories for people of their weight. When it ended, their metabolisms had slowed radically and their bodies were not burning enough calories to maintain their thinner sizes.
Researchers knew that just about anyone who deliberately loses weight — even if they start at a normal weight or even underweight — will have a slower metabolism when the diet ends. So they were not surprised to see that “The Biggest Loser” contestants had slow metabolisms when the show ended.
What shocked the researchers was what happened next: As the years went by and the numbers on the scale climbed, the contestants’ metabolisms did not recover. They became even slower, and the pounds kept piling on. It was as if their bodies were intensifying their effort to pull the contestants back to their original weight.
Your body can change the energy you burn without you moving a muscle. This paradox is solved. If you want to lose weight then you have to keep the energy out of storage to begin with, by eating foods that do not have to be put into storage before they can be used. I learned reading Gary Taube’s great book “Why We Get Fat” that if you get fat the body will defend it. Your fat will be used last for energy. Being fat causes you to produce insulin even if you are not eating carbohydrates. Having insulin in your blood will keep you from using fat stores. All of this is proven in the lab and has been known by biochemists since the 1960s, fifty years ago. When you eat fructose it must be converted to fat before any muscle, organ or brain cell can use it. When you eat carbs they get turned into fat to protect you against high blood sugar, then insulin keeps it there.
The way to lose weight is to not put any more fat in storage.
How?
Don’t eat carbohydrates for a long time. Three weeks would do the trick. This depletes your blood of insulin and forces your cells to being using ketone bodies for energy. Once that is happening then your cells will utilize fat from storage. This does not require exercise or starvation. Hunger is a symptom that you are not doing it right. Eat all the calories you want, and if very few of them are in the form of carbohydrate no energy will be put into storage.
You will not lose weight quickly. You won’t win a reality show this way. The weight will come off though. It won’t be a struggle, you fighting a losing retreat against your own metabolism and hunger. You will have plenty of energy in your blood when you are eating and when you are not your body will not jealously guard the fats you have put away. The first to go will be the fats that determine your pants size. Because you are eating plenty of fat and protein you will trade muscle for fat. You will not lose a lot of weight but you will lose waist inches as your organ fat melts first. Many people will lose an inch of waist every month until the organ fat is gone.
Next you will begin to lose subcutaneous fat, the kind the ladies hate and that the majority of men never get. It will go away because the body has no choice. What you are doing is resetting your basal metabolism downward. You are going to be eating less and less, burning less and less, weighing less and less. The answer is to not eat sugar. Not only sugar, but even things that taste sweet, like diet sodas. Your body will secrete insulin at the thought of something sweet. Its proven by your reaction to the sights in the cake case. Seeing food can make your body sweep all energy out of your blood in preparation for a flood of sweets to come. Insulin cannot make you fat in this case, but it can keep your fat right where it is.
E(stored)=E(eaten) – E(used)
If E(stored) goes up because the body is intentionally trying to gain weight–it will lower E(used) of it’s own accord. It will give you intense hunger of it’s own accord. You will gain weight despite your intentions, because you are not in charge of this process. You are in charge of the kinds of energy you give it though. You can give it things that cannot be put into storage, things like natural fats–lard, butter, tallow, olive oil, natural meats like fatty cuts of beef and pork, green leafy vegetables that don’t have any carbohydrates in them.
At the bottom of the article is a video of my food science hero, Gary Taubes, trying to convince scientists to conduct a study that will prove these ideas in humans. It is 38 minutes long and parts of it are trance-inducing and extremely technical. He is very smart and very knowledgeable, as is his audience. The takeaway here is that it is difficult to get science departments to study the equation, because it seems to say “diet and exercise” MUST work. To study the equation from the fat storage side back seems like scientific lunacy, but to a mathemetician it would make sense to see which side of the equation are variables and which are results. Here is the same equation written another way…
E(used) = E(eaten) – E(stored)
In this version of the equation you have less energy for activity because your body is putting everything you eat into storage. Conversely if your body is helping you lose weight then you aren’t hungry, and very little is being put into storage. This is what happens when you quit and stay away from sugar. Your body begins to help you lose weight.
Most people who have tried to lose weight know how hard it is to keep the weight off, but many blame themselves when the pounds come back. But what obesity research has consistently shown is that dieters are at the mercy of their own bodies, which muster hormones and an altered metabolic rate to pull them back to their old weights, whether that is hundreds of pounds more or that extra 10 or 15 that many people are trying to keep off.
It is not your fault you can’t keep it off, because you didn’t know why. Now you do. Keep eating sweet foods and drinks, keep eating the bun on that hamburger and you will keep being fat. Now you know. The most dangerous thing in your lunch is the sweet drink. The second most is the bun, not the fat they cook the fries in. Lastly is the potatoes in the fries. If you ate the meat patties and the cheese with the salad, pickles and onions on the sandwich, heck have a second or third one, you would not gain a pound from it.
Losing a Key Hormone
Slower metabolisms were not the only reason the contestants regained weight, though. They constantly battled hunger, cravings and binges. The investigators found at least one reason: plummeting levels of leptin. The contestants started out with normal levels of leptin. By the season’s finale, they had almost no leptin at all, which would have made them ravenous all the time. As their weight returned, their leptin levels drifted up again, but only to about half of what they had been when the season began, the researchers found, thus helping to explain their urges to eat.
“What was surprising was what a coordinated effect it is,” Dr. Proietto said. “The body puts multiple mechanisms in place to get you back to your weight. The only way to maintain weight loss is to be hungry all the time. We desperately need agents that will suppress hunger and that are safe with long-term use.”
There is more than one way to lose weight and the way I am describing does not involve being hungry all the time. We know which agent causes hunger and we know that there is a diet that does not. Just quit eating carbs. They are looking for a drug you can take so you can keep eating the foods that they are selling. The obesity epidemic, the need for ‘biggest losers’ was created by and exactly tracks the rate of sugar consumption in America. I am not talking about snack cakes and candy or soda pop. I am talking about hidden sugar in all the processed foods. When they took fat out they put sugar in. Quit eating those things and you will lose weight without hunger. Your metabolism will adjust to your natural weight, not the constantly upward tilting weight you have been accumulating.
Here is the Taubes video I was talking about. He is looking for scientists to conduct experiments at the end. Be your own scientist. Try what he is suggesting. Save yourself first, then tell your friends and neighbors like I am doing here. I did it.
Someday people will look back on these times and shake their heads in disbelief. It will be like when we look back at bleeding, the procedure where ‘doctors’ would intentionally open a patients vein to let diseased blood escape, weakening the sick even further.
One hundred years ago there was no obesity epidemic. Fifty years ago there was no obesity epidemic. In my lifetime there was a time that nobody counseled that you had to eat less or exercise more to lose weight. There were not fitness gyms and gurus in every village in the land. Free weights were for bulking up, not slimming down.
There were fat kids in school, but most kids in school were just like I was, skinny little things that ate the breakfast mom made, the peanut butter sandwich at lunch with a whole milk chaser, and whatever was on the table was dinner, no complaining allowed. We cleaned our plates, because there were starving children in India.
Something has changed and it is not us. It is known, and proven, that you can eat as many calories as you can without gaining weight. It is proven that a calorie is not a calorie once the food is inside of your body. Eating a ‘calorie’ of sugar is different in every single respect from eating a calorie of fat. Once in your mouth and it dissolves it takes a different path to the cells where it is to be used than fat.
Sugar is everywhere and if you eat any industrially prepared food there is an excellent chance that it will contain sugar, whether it makes any sense to you that it would or not. Sugar is a very broad category of food, one that includes a great number of names. There are 61 different names for it that may be found on food labels.
Agave nectar
Barbados sugar
Barley malt
Barley malt syrup
Beet sugar
Brown sugar
Buttered syrup
Cane juice
Cane juice crystals
Cane sugar
Caramel
Carob syrup
Castor sugar
Coconut palm sugar
Coconut sugar
Confectioner’s sugar
Corn sweetener
Corn syrup
Corn syrup solids
Date sugar
Dehydrated cane juice
Demerara sugar
Dextrin
Dextrose
Evaporated cane juice
Free-flowing brown sugars
Fructose
Fruit juice
Fruit juice concentrate
Glucose
Glucose solids
Golden sugar
Golden syrup
Grape sugar
HFCS (High-Fructose Corn Syrup)
Honey
Icing sugar
Invert sugar
Malt syrup
Maltodextrin
Maltol
Maltose
Mannose
Maple syrup
Molasses
Muscovado
Palm sugar
Panocha
Powdered sugar
Raw sugar
Refiner’s syrup
Rice syrup
Saccharose
Sorghum Syrup
Sucrose
Sugar (granulated)
Sweet Sorghum
Syrup
Treacle
Turbinado sugar
Yellow sugar
Sugar is a chemical, one molecule of glucose that is attached to one molecule of fructose. After dissolving the two chemicals take different paths. Fructose cannot be used anywhere in your body but your liver. Both will be taken apart and reassembled inside of your fat cells. The combination of the two is worse than either of them on the body. Alone, glucose does not taste sweet–think of eating a raw potato, it contains glucose. Alone, fructose is mildly sweet, combined they are what you know and love, ‘sugar’.
Sugar (sucrose) is a special case. Just like cocaine, alcohol, nicotine, and other addictive drugs, sugar appears to induce an exaggerated response in that region of the brain known as the reward center— the nucleus accumbens. This suggests that the relatively intense cravings for sugar— a sweet tooth— may be explained by the intensity of the dopamine secretion in the brain when we consume sugar. When the nucleus accumbens “is excessively activated by sweet food or powerful drugs,” says Bartley Hoebel of Princeton, “it can lead to abuse and even addiction. When this system is under-active, signs of depression ensue.” Rats can be easily addicted to sugar, according to Hoebel, and will demonstrate the physical symptoms of opiate withdrawal when forced to abstain.
Taubes, Gary (2007-09-25). Good Calories, Bad Calories (Kindle Locations 9042-9048). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
Sugar is special and it is known, no–proven, that the reason we are gaining weight is sugar. Carbs and refined starches are an additional problem, but alone the glucose in these are not the demon that sugar is. Food scientists do not add hidden starches to increase the tastiness of eight out of ten foods on the shelf, because starches do not add flavor. No, the reason we are gaining weight has nothing to do with calories or exercise!
Someday our thin and healthy ancestors will look back at us with amazement, because we refused to see what will be obvious to them. Eat sugar in moderation and thrive. Eat it to excess and die sick and fat.
I was reading the New York Times this morning and the article was about people who completely overturn their lives to quit ‘over eating.’ Their addiction to food is so strong that only by quitting their jobs, selling their homes and moving closer to the rehab center that helped them lose weight could they find a way to keep it off. Habits are known to be easier to break if you get out of the environment in which they were formed. It is known though, proven clinically, that it is possible to not gain weight even if you eat fifty percent more calories per day than you do right now. Overeating does not cause people to store fat and then not use it. Starvation will produce weight loss, but it is not because of the calorie reduction. It is because of the sugar reduction.
I am not making these things up, they are actual studies in labs around the world. If a person has insulin in the blood stream the fat cells in his body will not release fat into the blood. Insulin in the blood means to the energy system of the body that there is still free glucose in the blood. Insulin has a role to keep blood sugar in tight bounds, since out of bounds sugar can kill. In a normal person, say a child fifty years ago, every night while he sleeps his blood sugar levels dropped overnight as ever cell in his body consumed energy in the blood. To support cellular life the fat cells would disassemble triglycerides contained within them and the FFA (free fatty acids) produced would be transported by cholesterol molecules to the hungry organ, brain or muscle cells that needed it. Overnight we all lost weight. I, personally, lose about two pounds every night.
These days most people still have insulin in the blood instead, keeping the fats locked up in fat storage and we wake up hungry, having lost very little fat overnight. The day starts with a big hit of sugar, even if we eat something healthy like sweetened yogurt or something sweet and starchy like cereal, chased down with liquid candy like chocolate milk or orange juice. There is no time in the day for fat to be used if we snack and eat insulin producing foods all day long, perhaps even waking in the night for a dose.
Overeating is not the problem…lazy living is not the problem. Sugar is the problem. Artificial foods laced with sugar are the problem. Articles like the one in the Times today, that tell you that to lose weight you could change everything, spend time in rehab, move closer to a center that is surrounded with ‘people like you’ is the problem. You are ALREADY surrounded by people like you. We all share your problem, we are all buried in foods containing unsafe levels of sugar. You cannot escape this environment and you do not need to suffer hunger pains for the rest of your life to lose weight.
All you have to do to lose weight is give up sugar. You can still eat sugar in birthday cake every year. You can have dessert after your anniversary dinner. You can eat sugar when you mean to and it would never be a problem. Put sugar in every drink you take, hide sugar in every bite of food, then it is a national problem. The science is in.
The perceived taste of sweetness is sufficient to stimulate insulin secretion. Just as Pavlov demonstrated that dogs will salivate at the sound of a bell they have learned to associate with feeding, Stephen Woods and his colleagues demonstrated that rats will secrete insulin when confronted with similar eating-related stimuli. (These researchers arbitrarily chose the smell of mentholatum, a mixture of menthol and petroleum jelly, more commonly used as a topical rub for chest colds.) Humans will do the same. This reflexive release of insulin, Nicolaidis suggested, is “pre-adaptive”: it anticipates the effects of a meal or a particular food, and so prepares the body. As Mark Friedman describes it, this cephalic release of insulin also serves to clear the circulation of “essentially anything an animal or a person can use for fuel. Not just blood sugar, but fatty acids, as well. All those nutrients just go away.” Hence, the thought of eating makes us hungry, because the insulin secreted in response depletes the bloodstream of the fuel that the peripheral tissues and organs need to survive.
Taubes, Gary (2007-09-25). Good Calories, Bad Calories (Kindle Locations 8988-8996). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
Insulin locks the fat in your fat cells down. Even the thought of a sweet treat can cause it to be release, and you will experience hunger from it. Has this ever happened to you that you were not hungry then you saw a treat or something delicious and it gave you hunger pains? This is proof of the science of insulin that I describe. Insulin strips your blood of energy, forcing it into muscle, organ, fat, because you are about to add sugar to the blood stream. To keep it from going to high, the body forces it low. Insulin in circulation keeps fat there indefinitely. It’s why its easy to put on weight but hard to lose it.
There are people who have varying degrees of discomfort when they eat bread, crackers, cookies, cakes–foods that also happen to bear gluten within them. Their symptoms, collected, have been dubbed “gluten intolerance” or “gluten sensitivity” because they are not celiac sufferers and gluten will not kill them quickly with an acute allergic reaction, but they will feel bloated, get diarrhea, get ‘foggy-headed’ perhaps get headaches.
I just read a lengthy article (find it here) that says that these symptoms may not be from gluten, but instead may be their body’s reaction to FODMAPs that are in these same processed foods. A FODMAP is not a thing, it is a collection of related things:Fermentable Oligosaccharides, Disaccharides, Monosaccharides, and Polyols. An oligosaccharide is a saccharidepolymer containing a small number (typically three to ten) of simple sugars (monosaccharides). A Disaccharide contains two monosaccharides. A monosaccharide contains one. Polyols in food science are Sugar alcohols, and are commonly added to foods because of their lower caloric content than sugars; however, they are also, in general, less sweet, and are often combined with high-intensity sweeteners.
One would think that if folks ate gluten-free foods and still developed the symptoms that that would be enough to convince sufferers that their problems are not gluten related, and perhaps some are thus convinced. I don’t know why there are still so many gluten-free labels on store shelves.
I am not here today to argue for or against the hypothesis that undigested sugars or sugar-alcohols in your guts are causing you pain and discomfort. I wholeheartedly believe that to be true. When you eat beans that is exactly what is causing you pain and discomfort. You know this from your youth, so you don’t go searching for something to pin your farting on, you know what is doing it. So, if you think about it, you know what it is in processed foods that is causing you pain and embarrassment…the complex sugars that you cannot easily digest. They ARE being digested, but not by you, and the bacteria that are doing the digesting are putting off gases. They are creating new and unique chemicals inside of you, some of which you may be having adverse reactions to. This all makes sense to me, and I do not debate any of it.
My debate is about what you should do about it. You can buy high-dollar ‘gluten-free’ products. That does not eliminate the FODMAPs from your diet, though. You still hurt and itch. You can eliminated breads and processed cakes, crackers, snacks from your diet. There is nothing wrong with this approach, because there is not much in processed foods to recommend them, and there is much in them to urge caution and moderation in your consumption of them. A third option, and one that I would urge you to consider before you write off an entire class of delicious foods, is that you ferment your breads.
I have written many, many words about the benefits of fermentation. When we ferment foods we give beneficial bacteria time and a suitable environment to pre-digest our foods for us. A person that cannot tolerate milk or mild products can eat yogurt without any discomfort, because the bacteria in yogurt have turned it’s disaccharide into something else, something that is then not available to bacteria in their guts that would give them intense pain as it digested those sugars.
I have been experimenting with real 100% whole wheat (ground by me from the wheat) sourdough bread. This bread is as different from any whole wheat bread I have ever eaten before as night is to day. It stays fresh for more than a week. I still don’t really know how long it would last without getting dry or molding, because I have yet to have it last long enough to tell you. It does not cause me any symptoms of carbohydrate overload. I can eat one or two big slices every day and I don’t fall asleep from the carb crash a couple of hours later. I don’t have any of my carbohydrate symptoms.
My guess is that if the bread I make, that I ferment for hours and hours, doesn’t have too many carbs in it, that it likewise doesn’t contain any FODMAPs. I certainly do not add any sugar to it, because my yeast and bacteria tag team do not need sugars to raise my dough. My starter can raise the dough without added sugar because I will give it plenty of TIME to do so. By the time my dough goes into the oven my guess is that it is FODMAP free. Another thing that my bread will contain that your FODMAP full bread does not will be bran. Since I start with whole unground wheat berries and grind it myself, the flour I make is not the same as the whole wheat flour you buy at the store. You cannot buy flour like mine because it does not keep for weeks or months on the store shelf. The oil in the wheat germ will spoil it. Mine will have it because I am not going to keep it for weeks or months, I am going to use it the day I grind it.
The gluten in my bread does not cause my dear and lovely wife to have any gluten-sensitivity issues. We both have some ‘wow there is a lot of bran in that bread’ issues–meaning that our waste products are bulky and pleasing to get rid of. Sometimes we get gaseous buildups as these buses move through our lower bowel, but it’s not a sign of a problem. It is a feature of good, natural food.
I do not fear gluten and I never have. I do fear processed Franken-foods. I don’t trust the FDA to protect me from the polyols that are in my foods, by their permission. I don’t believe that anyone tests the food additives with my long term health in mind. When I make it myself I never put things in it that would make it last for a year on the grocery shelf. I am surprised at how long my bread lasts without any of these things. You would be, too. If I ever find out what the limit is on shelf life for my bread I will certainly pass that on.
Here is a chart of ‘low fodmap foods’ that you can look over.
Note that lots of the foods to ‘eliminate’ could just as easily be fermented and eaten. Any of the beans can be, the cabbage can be turned into sauerkraut. Imagine getting rid of onions from your diet AND garlic! No, I think if you get rid of processed food and all of the uncertainty that comes with that, and start eating fermented bread, pancakes and waffles, even fermented crackers, that you will have eliminated your gluten-sensitivity issues as well.
There was no way to keep the fact that the Earth revolves around the Sun a secret forever. There is no authority that is so permanent that it can forever retard the march of knowledge. Even though people have died all through history for promoting radical new ideas, the fact that one side is promoting reality and the other side is promoting conventional wisdom permanently stacks the deck on the side of reality.
Decades ago “They” decided that saturated fats caused heart disease and heart attacks. “They” decided to warn us all away from eating saturated fats. Eating less fat lead to eating more sweets and starches, since there are only three dietary nutrients, fat, carbohydrate and protein.
The recommendation to eat less saturated fat caused the food industry to formulate polyunsaturated fats (shortening) that we could use in the place of lard in our pastry cooking, pan frying, and other solid fat needs. This man-made fat turned out to cause heart disease and heart damage.
I bring all of this up again because, once again, saturated fats are in the news. This time the truth is coming out.
The gist of the article is this, a study was being conducted to prove that saturated fats caused heart disease and heart attack. The Minnesota Coronary Experiment was conducted 40 years ago. The full reading of the data show that if you eat a diet that lowers your blood cholesterol you chances of dying of heart problems actually goes up, not down.
…the idea that spurning saturated fat will, by itself, make people healthier has never been fully proved, and in recent years repeated clinical trials and large-scale observational studies have produced evidence to the contrary.
The new research adds to the previous findings calling into question the health benefits of diets that reduce consumption of saturated fats in favor of other foods.
Evidence to the contrary would mean that spurning saturated fat can make you sicker. In fact, if you look at the health statistics of this nation it hasn’t mattered at all that our food supply has gotten ‘healthier.’ We have gotten fatter and sicker even though we are eating low-fat and low-cal and every other tweak. We are now learning that our flirtation with reducing our intake of saturated fats (butter, lard, tallow) has reduced our health.
In the end if a theory is wrong the evidence is everywhere.
If you want to read how we got the wrong advice to begin with, read this book: “The Big Fat Surprise” by Nina Teicholz.
I recommend both of these books. They will shake your BELIEF that you should be eating less fat. “Why We Get Fat” will show you why your kids shouldn’t be drinking fruit juice as a ‘healthy’ alternative to milk in the morning. In short, you should start eating foods that your grandma and grandpa ate when they were kids. The only thing that will take off the weight you have put on is to stop eating the ‘healthy’ foods of today and go back 100 years to the everyday foods of yesteryear.
Here is a re-blog of an article on fermentation, and here is a link you can use to purchase the fermenters that I make. One Quart Clear Fermenter, with airlock. The sale is thru Amazon.com so you get all of their buyer protections, etc…
Cabbage, it’s principal ingredient, had a total bacterial count of about 10,000/gram. Microbial growth in cabbage was prevented by storage at 1 C but not at 10 C or above. In coleslaw, the cabbage flora died and was replaced by the flora of the cultured sour cream contained in the dressing.
You are absolutely filthy with bacteria. No amount of anti-bacterial soaps or deodorants will clean you, because every exposed surface, both external and internal is the terrain of the microscopic life that covers the Earth. This is not a problem, of course. You evolved, all the way back to the point that your ancestor was also a single cell, in this environment. All of your processes are tuned to cooperate with our microbe partners, we feed them…
As the season approaches where nature’s bounty buries us in food that is quick to spoil, please allow me to remind you that there is an option to ‘canning’ foods. Fermenting them is a better option, due to the fact that fermenting changes the foods into vitamin-packed health foods.
Here is an article introducing a series of articles from last harvest…
I did say that eating carbs wasn’t good for you. I have said it a thousand times and I always meant it. Bread at the store, even at the health food store, is mostly starch, and starch is mostly glucose. Here is an article detailing starch. In white bread about half of the weight of the slice will be starch. Starch, once in your mouth, begins to become glucose. Glucose in your intestine, goes straight to your bloodstream as a simple sugar. As your blood glucose level goes up your pancreas immediately must respond by dispatching insulin. Insulin orders all organs to take up glucose so as to keep your blood sugar in the safe operating zone. Too high and you pass out. Too low and you pass out. All of the glucose not immediately needed by nerve, muscle or organ is put into fat cells, or turned into triglycerides by the liver, so as to not kill you immediately.
This is why I have said, for the longest time, don’t eat carbohydrates.
My sourdough bread doesn’t contain very much starch. The yeast in my sourdough starter will eat the glucose in the dough. As it does it gives off carbon dioxide gas and alcohol. You can smell the alcohol in it if your nose is good. It is just like making beer, except for one thing, there is a bacteria in there too.
My vitamin factory, delivering goodness a slice at a time
When you make sourdough bread at home you are fermenting it. Fermentation allows natural yeast and bacteria to work together to convert the starch in the flour. Acetic acid–which inhibits the growth of mold, is produced in the making of sourdough. So, sourdough bread naturally preserves itself. Acetic acid the same one created when fermenting cucumbers into pickles, and cabbage into sauerkraut. The bacteria which are eating the products of the yeast are creating this acid. It is a natural preservative. My sourdough bread is fit to eat without any kind of special steps to protect it for over a week. Not only does it not mold, it stays moist and never ‘goes stale.’ (I say never because I have not had a loaf last long enough.)
The cooperation of the yeast and bacteria in sourdough create a medicine chest-worth of vitamins. Lots of people don’t realize this but the vitamins created for your pharmaceutical multivitamin are created by bacteria in fermenters. If you ferment foods yourself then a multivitamin is just not required. My sourdough creates a huge list of great-for-you things, like vitamins B1 through B6, B12, folate, thiamin, niacin, riboflavin, and vitamin E–-in addition to uniquely balanced proteins and fatty acids.
The minerals in my 100% whole-from-wheat bread come from the soil the wheat was grown in. Good soil equals good bread, and there is no middle man in my kitchen taking the wheat germ (and minerals) off for some other purpose. The bran protecting the grains are present in my bread, too. I am getting 100% of the mineral nutrient that nature intended, as modified by my trained rot-squad of yeast and bacteria. My bread is about 50% pre-digested for me, the starches are eaten and turned into vitamins. The starches are not there to make me have a huge insulin rush when I eat.
You cannot buy this bread at a store. You can buy the wheat. You can buy the water. You can buy the salt. You cannot buy the time that it takes for the fermentation magic to occur though. It takes too long to make this for it to be commercially viable. If you add yeast to the flour and water, and if you add sugar for the yeast to eat, then you are not getting what the bacteria make. You are not getting the vitamins. You are not getting the mystery products of millennia of evolution that have not even been named yet. You are not getting BREAD. You will have saved time. You are going to be eating a facsimile of bread that contains more glucose than you need. You will be eating what I was telling you was bad for you.
One Small Change at a Time 