The Secret of Setting New Year’s Resolutions You Can Keep

The Secret of Setting New Year’s Resolutions You Can Keep

Special Event Diet The Brutal Way

With 2013 right around the corner, on January 1 or soon thereafter, there’s going to be a lot of people either starting a low-carb diet for the very first time, or they will be returning after regaining part or all of their prior weight loss. Unfortunately, most of those people won’t stick around for very long.

They’ll probably drift away by Valentine’s Day because New Year’s Resolutions are harder to keep than they realized.

Want to know why?

The truth is, sticking to a diet plan – any diet plan – won’t work very well (including a low-carb diet) if it’s your latest attempt at self-improvement. That’s right. Trying to self improve doesn’t work. It’s negative and painful, and we always try to avoid discomfort. That’s programmed into us. We are literally programmed to seek after pleasure and avoid all forms of pain.

Don’t believe me? WATCH yourself sometime. WATCH your family interact with each other. WATCH your friends, and WATCH people you don’t know. Just plop yourself down on a bench at the mall or eavesdrop on the couple over at the next table the next time you go out to dinner. LISTEN to the people you work with when they talk. LISTEN and just WATCH people.

You’ll learn more about our initial infant and childhood programming and conditioning that controls our everyday behavior and reactions than you ever wanted know.

Most New Year’s Resolutions Focus on What We Don’t Like About Ourselves

In fact, I’m willing to bet that – for most of us – that’s why we’re on a low-carb diet. Because there’s something about ourself that we don’t like.

Regardless of the general low-carb mantra that says, “It’s not a diet; it’s a lifestyle,” and regardless of the general low-carb mantra that insists that following a low-carb diet is about regaining health, few of us truly believe that. It’s taken me literally years to wrap my brain around that Truth. We aren’t doing low carb to improve our health. We’re doing low carb to fix something we don’t like. We’re doing low carb because we want to fix something about ourselves that we believe is wrong.

Am I right?

Common New Year’s Resolutions

There’s far more resolutions than I could ever list in a single blog post, but these are just a few:

• weight loss through dieting
• buying a gym membership, or a set of weights
• plans to quit smoking
• trying to lessen stress or control anger
• commit to be more organized
• try to make more money
• plan to get out of debt

All of them are negative things that we don’t like about ourselves, things that maybe other people have mentioned that we should fix about ourselves. Could that be why only 8 percent of those who ever make a New Year’s Resolution are able to keep them? Could that be why less than half of the American population even bother with setting annual goals?

We are programmed to break them. We are programmed to fight against anything that causes restriction, discomfort, insecurity, fear, and pain.

So What’s the Secret? Seeking After Pleasure?

I suppose that we could travel to the other side of the pendulum and seek after things that are pleasurable. We could seek after things that make us happy. If we decide to do that, those goals and resolutions would be much easier to keep:

• spend more time with family, rather than on yourself
• take a class at your local community college
• read a book you’ve been wanting to read
• plan an exciting vacation or weekend
• start a new hobby or business venture
• take the kids to the park regularly
• go to a movie once a month with your spouse

Depending on our inner beliefs and attitudes, we would be far less likely to break those types of resolutions than we would were they to cause us discomfort. But unless we remain extremely aware, our negative programming (the suggestions in our lives that we have accepted without experimenting with them for ourselves) could raise its ugly head and ruin it all.

The Secret of the Middle Path

Extremes are never helpful. Think about a child whose parents give him or her everything they desire. What happens? They turn into a tyrant, a bully, a selfish adult who doesn’t know how to tolerate even a speck of discomfort. That’s because a lack of opposition in our lives can be just as destructive as too much.

We need an opposing force. We need something working against us in order to polish away the roughness. We need life to be just the way it is. So perhaps the whole business of setting goals and resolutions is what’s wrong with the process, because a goal is always attached to an ideal. And ideals always provide disappointment and frustration when things don’t turn out the way that we hoped.

Now, that is the real reason why people leave a low-carb diet, isn’t it?

You start off in January with a ton of excitement, hoping that you can finally correct what is wrong with yourself, but something goes wrong. A few weeks down the road, you discover that the diet doesn’t work as well as it did for others. Your weight loss is moving along at a crawl, or maybe there is no weight loss at all. Maybe, you’ve even gained a few pounds.

So we start to think of ourselves as a failure. We are disappointed because our ideal didn’t bear fruit. Sometimes, we feel angry and deceived. Sometimes, we feel like it’s our fault. And sometimes, we begin to encounter even stronger forces of opposition because when we’re different or when something doesn’t work for us that worked for someone else, it makes them feel uncomfortable.

The Key Lies Within Our Subconscious Minds

THE KEY to making New Year’s Resolutions is to first recognize that discomfort is going to surface in our lives from time to time. We need to accept that discomfort for what it is, and move on. Put your focus somewhere else. Because the Truth is, the discomfort doesn’t really matter. What matters is that we stop fighting life and begin asking, “What is life trying to teach me?”

“What does life want me to know?”

What am I doing that is causing me to forget who and what I am? What am I doing that is causing me to make carbohydrates so important in my life?

What we believe is True when coupled with strong emotion is what will come true. That’s how powerful our subconscious mind is.

So the secret to setting New Year’s Resolutions that you can keep isn’t found in fighting against our subconscious minds. It isn’t found in setting up unrealistic goals. It isn’t found within the various plans for self-improvement or even diets that make us all sorts of wild promises that may or may not happen.

The SECRET is found in reprogramming ourselves to let go of all of the false beliefs that have brought us to this very moment of existence. The SECRET is to let go, and let LIFE FLOW…

Can Keto-Adaption Increase Weight-Loss Success?

Can Keto-Adaption Increase Weight-Loss Success?

Questions??

I was reading Jimmy Moore’s latest n=1 Nutritional Ketosis report that he posted to his blog recently, and discovered that Regina Wilshireof the Weight of the Evidence blog is beginning to post again. I thought that she might be around because someone with that name recently “liked” my author fan page at Facebook. I’ve always enjoyed reading Regina’s posts because she’s not fanatical about a low-carb diet. She’s extremely realistic.

Since she’s a professional nutritionist, her focus has always been on the nutrient density of food rather than typical low-carb topics such as Ketosis, Keto-Adaption, or that most carbs are evil. Her approach is what I would call The Middle Path. She doesn’t subscribe to extremes. She simply calls it as she sees it.

I wish I would have known that she had put up a few posts over the past year, because it would have saved me much of the misery and weight gain (a whopping 22 pounds!) I’ve suffered from experimenting with Nutritional Ketosis over the past few months. She gave some excellent advice to a low-carber who had stalled part-way to her goal. But at least, I now have something I can work with – a real, honest, down-to-earth method for correcting my current weight problems.

Today, however, I want to talk about a misconception within the low-carb community that keeps surfacing – this time, in Jimmy’s response to one of Regina’s latest blog posts about his experiment. Regina has a couple of ideas as to why Jimmy’s current low-carb diet plan is going so well, but Jimmy has perceived her posts to be an attack, rather than realism, so in his latest report, he tried to save face by explaining his opinion about what Regina thinks might be going on.

“So one question remains: Was it the keto-adaption or the calorie-cutting that has worked in producing the weight loss success I’ve seen? If you ask me, I say WHO CARES?! The fact is it’s working. Whatever the mechanisms for bringing it about, the bottom line is I’m burning stored body fat and improving every measureable health marker I have tested so far. At the end of the day, the results are much more interesting than any attempt to explain why they happened. It’s my contention that becoming fully adapted to using ketones (fat) for fuel has allowed my body the opportunity to run as it was intended to without the need for arbitrarily counting calories, carbohydrates or really much of anything.”

That response to Regina’s post is loaded with things I could talk about, but today, I’d just like to address Jimmy’s opinion about keto-adaptation being responsible for his weight-loss success because he’s a strong player within the low-carb community, and a lot of folks tend to accept his opinions and ideals as Truth without experimenting with them for themselves.

Granted, that isn’t Jimmy’s fault. Experimenting with suggestions and ideas that we’re presented with on a daily basis is our own responsibility, but a lot of folks within the low-carb community hold similar misunderstandings about ketones and fat.

What is a Ketone?

A Ketone is the waxy by-product that’s left over when the liver breaks down triglycerides into fatty acids to fuel the process of gluconeogenesis after our glycogen reserves (the storage form of carbohydrates) fall below a certain level. It is not a fat. These ketones are a signal that the body is predominantly burning fatty acids for fuel, rather than glucose. However, the presence of ketones in the urine or the blood do not signal that your body fat stores are being used for fuel. They simply show that glucose is in short supply. Nothing more, as ketones are also made from dietary fats.

Keto-Adaption Explained

When the body enters a famine situation, most of the body’s tissues can use fatty acids for fuel, but there are a few exceptions. The brain, kidneys, red blood cells, bone marrow, and certain muscle fibers cannot use fats. They require glucose. However, the fact that the brain cannot use fatty acids doesn’t mean that the brain can only use glucose because certain portions of the brain can use ketones. When glucose is in short supply and ketones are readily available, the brain will adapt to that situation and begin using ketones for up to three-quarters of its energy needs.

The purpose of keto-adaption is to save what little glucose there is for body organs and tissues that cannot use ketones or fatty acids for fuel. Ketone adaption is a life-saving mechanism designed to come into play during those short periods of time when carbohydrates are not available. Initially when carbs run short, most body functions can use ketones for fuel. That’s where the idea that a low-carb diet is fueled by ketones from. However, this only holds true for the first three weeks, or so.

After three weeks, most body tissues including muscle begins using fatty acids for fuel – not ketones – so that the ketones in the bloodstream can be saved for the brain. This form of physical salvation is called keto-adaption. Ketones in the blood are not about fueling the body. They are a life-saving mechanism that keeps the brain functioning so that the body can survive a famine situation.

The Ketone build-up in the blood has absolutely nothing to do with weight loss, but everything to do with brain and heart function because when you have an excess of ketones over what the brain needs, the heart can use what’s left over. Keto-Adaption is simply when the body stops using ketones for fuel and saves them for the brain in order to protect your life. This saving mechanism works independently of the body mechanisms that determine body fat loss, energy balance (maintenance or energy equalization), and increased body fat storage.

So What Good is Being Keto-Adapted?

A ketogenic state works to correct hormonal imbalances such as insulinemia, so that ketones can be made more readily available to the brain. In order for the liver to break down stored triglycerides into fatty acids that the body can use, insulin levels need to be low. While all dietary fats are initially stored as body fat and then drawn out of the fat cell throughout the day as needed, this in-and-out flow of fat can become blocked if insulin levels do not return to normal shortly after meals.

Despite what most low carbers believe about insulin, nutrients cannot get into your body’s cells without that initial insulin spike. It isn’t the spike that locks up stored body fat. It’s the way your body responds to the insulin you produce. In individuals who have problems with insulinemia or insulin resistance, being keto-adapted can help reverse those abnormal situations. However, low insulin doesn’t guarantee that you’ll burn stored body fat.

As Dr. Michael Eades has stressed time and time again: low insulin keeps the doors to your fat stores open, but if you eat more fat than your body can use in a day, or if you eat the exact amount of fat that your body can use in a day, you will not see weight-loss success. It cannot happen. A low-carb diet doesn’t negate the laws of physics. It simply teaches you how to use them to your best advantage.

Why Does it Matter? WHO CARES?

While some people like Jimmy don’t care why their current low-carb program works, ignoring the principles of why and shoving them aside as being insignificant can create disastrous effects for those who try to duplicate the same success. Why? Because in Jimmy’s case, he consistently tells his readers that he has raised his dietary fat and lowered his protein. He consistently tells his readers that dietary manipulation, along with keeping his blood ketones high, has been the way to his salvation – even though that isn’t what he’s actually doing.

When someone decided to take a look at what Jimmy is doing, and raised a few ideas about what it might be – in order to actually help some of the rest of us understand – Jimmy’s reaction was to perceive attack and brush off those ideas with a simple “who cares.” His reaction was that the Truth of the matter doesn’t matter.

Well, you know what? I care! And it does matter, because when I attempted to implement his advice into my life, mirroring what he said he was doing, it completely backfired on me.

• Why?
• Why didn’t it work?
• Why did Jimmy insist on Twitter that if it wasn’t working for me, then there was something metabolically wrong with me, because it has to work?

Maybe...because as Regina hypothesized, raising fat might not be what’s Jimmy is actually doing. He might not have raised his fat grams per day. He might have merely raised his fat percentage. If that's true, then it could explain why I gained 22 pounds when I raised the number of fat grams I was eating per day.

Percentage isn’t the same thing as fat grams and it changes when you manipulate the other macronutrients. Regina’s hypothesis is that Jimmy’s meals are probably lower in fat grams and calories, even though his fat percentage is higher.

That might be why his high-fat, low-carb diet program is working so well for him, and why my own high-fat, low-carb diet program did not. Because there were not the same thing. Either way, it’s not about Keto-Adaption. Keto-Adaption is about saving your brain cells from destruction when glucose runs low. It isn’t about weight-loss success or failure.

Why Does a Low-Carb Diet Plan Stop Working?

Why Does a Low-Carb Diet Plan Stop Working?

Questions??

Why Does a Low-Carb Diet Stop Working?

A low-carb diet plan is an effective weight-loss tool because it promotes satiety and teaches us the importance of eating nutrient-dense foods. We learn how our prior eating habits contributed to our present metabolic situation. We learn that our personal metabolic defects can cause us to crave the very foods that create these imbalances. We also learn that changing our diet can literally correct those imbalances and change our lives.

However, for many dieters, counting carbohydrates and staying within a certain daily allotment isn’t enough to achieve success.

In my own case, the problem with not losing weight on a low-carb diet can be traced to a variety of issues:

• hidden food sensitivities
• celiac disease
• leaky gut syndrome
• endocrine disruptors
• fat malabsorption
• probably excessive ASP
• and who knows what else

But weight-loss problems are never the same for everyone. In general, the closer you get to goal weight, the more important calorie counting, fat intake, and portion control becomes. However, for many individuals, the amount of weight you’ve already lost and the length of time you’ve been low carbing plays just as large a role in the final outcome. Maybe, even more.

Misunderstandings Regarding Fat Storage

Many low-carb dieters believe you cannot store dietary fat without high insulin levels. They believe that low basal insulin and avoiding all insulin spikes always creates a favorable environment for fatty acid mobilization and utilization. If that were true, it would make calorie counting obsolete. However, fat storage and fat mobilization are accomplished quite differently than the method that most low carbers believe in.

When you eat dietary fats, Acylation Stimulating Protein, or ASP, rises significantly. This rise does not occur from glucose. Elevated ASP levels are independent of insulin and cause all dietary fats not immediately needed for fuel to be stored in your fat cells. This is opposite to the ongoing belief within the low-carb community that says insulin stays unchanged when you eat fats (therefore high fat is good) and only rises when glucose spikes (so eating carbs is bad). They conclude that low insulin therefore means easy fat mobilization.

However, later on, when the body needs fuel, Hormone Sensitive Lipase, or HSL, is stimulated. HSL breaks triglyceride down into fatty acids. Fat storage is not stagnant. It’s more like a constant river that runs in and out of the fat cell. Fat cells are not actually storage depots. The flux of ASP fat storage and HSL release can get clogged. When that happens, more dietary fat enters the fat cell than leaves. That is what actually causes overweight and obesity: the inability to use stored body fat for fuel.

How Dietary Fats Affect a Low Carb Diet Plan

Most people following a low-carb diet plan do not find value in counting calories. Others believe that eating more dietary fat will provide better weight-loss success. However, if dietary fat provides more fuel than is needed to achieve effective weight loss, the body will store more fat than it can mobilize. HSL only releases enough fatty acids to meet your daily metabolic needs. It doesn’t release extra just because you’ve upped your dietary fats.

Coconut Oil Doesn't Help Everyone Burn Fat
(Photo by Pseph)

So those who start spooning in the coconut oil or drowning their foods in sour cream and cheese on top of their current daily fat intake often do not experience what those who preach “up the fat” claim they will. More likely, they are not losing weight despite strict adherence to their low-carb eating plan.  

If you fall into the obese category, your ASP fasting basal levels are 58 to 400 percent higher than ASP basal levels found in those who are not. Higher circulating ASP interferes with HSL stimulation and therefore fat mobilization. Regardless of low insulin levels achieved by following a low-carb diet, when ASP levels are consistently elevated, stored body fat cannot be broken down into fatty acids for fuel. When such individuals raise the fat content of their diet, the result is easy weight gain rather than fat loss.

Why Portion Control and Counting Calories Matter

In the beginning of a low-carb diet, carbohydrate levels are low. Depending upon how much you weigh and how much you need to lose, most people initially find they can eat high amounts of dietary fat without having to focus on portion control or calories. You can experience effective weight loss rather easily because your energy needs are high.

For example, when I first started low carbing in 2007, I weighed 256-1/2 pounds. Even though I’m only 5-foot tall, at that weight, maintenance for me was over 3,000 calories a day! Since most people are much taller than I am, maintenance calories in the beginning of your journey will be quite high. This enables a dieter to adjust to the changes that a low-carb diet demands.

At some point, as body fat is lost and body fuel needs change, if a low-carb dieter continues eating high-calorie foods, energy input catches up with and balances energy output resulting in a long, lengthy stall. If you’re still in the obese category as I am, that also means higher circulating ASP. Plus, depending upon how long it has taken to reach your current level of health, your metabolic rate may also have dropped since we’re utilizing and optimizing the body’s starvation pathway.

What most stalled low-carb dieters fail to consider is that their new smaller body now needs less fuel. While maintenance for me in 2007 (working in a boys’ home) was 3,000 calories per day, today, (writing online) it’s less than 1800! Plus, my body is going to extensive measures to replace the body fat it’s lost. While that doesn’t happen to everyone, it has happened to me.

Weight-Loss Success Sometimes Requires Less Dietary Fat

The purpose of all diet plans is to help you learn healthy eating habits. A low-carb diet plan can be an effective way to focus on and zero in on nutrient-dense foods. It can help to get you off of the processed carby junk and onto a more whole-foods diet. However, a low-carb diet doesn’t automatically translate into long-term, effective weight loss. Eventually, many of us come to realize that a 16-ounce porterhouse steak is not everyday life. It’s an exception to the rule.

Most Low-Carb Recipes Are High Fat

If you search through low-carb recipes, you’ll quickly discover that most of them are heavy on dairy, heavy on fat, and heavy on calories. They can sometimes work when you’re at the beginning of the path, but that isn’t always the case. While a few individuals have been finding success by turning to a Nutritional Ketosis plan that lowers protein and raises the amount of dietary fats you eat, that type of program won’t work if you don’t easily burn dietary fats. It also won’t work if your ASP levels are high.

That’s why it’s essential to customize your low-carb diet plan to fit your desires, health needs, lifestyle, food sensitivities, and metabolic issues. There is not a single low-carb program that works for everyone. Low-carb diets as written are wonderful starting points, but that’s all they are – starting points. They give you a place to start from. The Atkins Diet was never designed to be a one-size-fits-all diet plan that the low-carb community has turned it into today.

In fact, Dr. Atkins himself has said that some individuals do better on a low-fat diet. His nurse has said that sometimes calories do have to be addressed because the diet works best if you eat only as much as you need to avoid the discomfort of hunger. Now, that’s very different then the high-fat mindset being preached today.

Personal Effects of Eating High-Fat Low-Carb

The bottom line is that some people do best on a high-fat low-carb diet. Some people do best on a moderate-fat diet, and some people do best on a lower fat diet, but that doesn’t mean that if you need to eat lower fat you’re doing something wrong. It doesn’t mean that you need to change what works best for you to fit someone else’s ideal. It’s fantastic when you find something that works for you. It’s fantastic that so many people want to share what they’ve discovered about themselves.

But let’s not forget that these discoveries are personal discoveries. For me, I cannot eat a high-fat diet. I have never been able to eat a high-fat diet, even when I was doing Atkins in 2007. I did do some recent experiments with Nutritional Ketosis and high-fat eating because I was hoping that my fat issues might have actually been about eating too much protein, or were tied into my intestinal inflammation problems, but that hasn’t turned out to be the case.

I’ve come to a few realizations about myself that I wasn’t aware of before. Because I adopted suggestions made by others, I’ve paid a high price for those experiments. I’ve paid a high price for listening to and embracing the personal discoveries of others. My weight is up. My cholesterol numbers came back very bad two weeks ago, as did my A1c. Both were excellent when I was eating low-fat low-carb, so the only variable that has changed in my life was moving to a high-fat diet.

In addition, my overall health has taken a dump. The vertigo is almost as severe as it was when I lived in California and has not corrected itself even though I stopped eating a high-fat diet last week. My neuropathy and arthritis are back, even though both were in remission before I raised my fat intake. I am really, really tired, but that’s not surprising given my high triglycerides right now.

The point is simple. A low-carb high-fat diet isn’t magic for everyone. Some of us need to eat a low-fat low-carb diet. Some of us need to eat a low-fat, low-carb, very low-calorie diet in order to achieve weight-loss success. That’s just what is. The question I now have to answer for myself is this:

Is it worth the price?

I’m not sure that it is.

References:

Journal of Biochemistry, Murray, Ian, and Kohl, Jorg, and Cianflone, Katherine, Acylation-stimulating Protein (ASP): Structure-function Determinants of Cell Surface Binding and Triacylglycerol Synthetic Activity, 342:1, 41-48, 1999

Journal of Lipid Research, Kramer, Fredric B. and Shen, Wen-Jun, Hormone-sensitive Lipase: Control of intracellular Tri-(di-)acylglycerol and Cholesteryl Ester Hydrolysis, 43:1, 1585-1594, October 2002 (doi:10.1194/jlr.R200009-JLR200)

Obesity, adipocyte.co.uk, "Acylation Stimulating Protein" (accessed May 7, 2010)

Eades, Michael R., M.D., and Eades, Mary Dan, M.D., The Protein Power Lifeplan, Creative Paradox LLC, 2000