What to Do if You Have High Cholesterol Levels

What to Do if You Have High Cholesterol Levels

The Brutal Way

What do you do if your cholesterol doesn’t improve on a low-carb diet? What do you do if it gets worse? Many low carbers will tell you that you don’t really have to worry about high numbers. But is that true?

Low-Carb Bacon and Eggs Breakfast

• Should you just ignore your high cholesterol tests?
• What does Dr. Atkins say about elevated cholesterol levels?

Insurance Companies Keep Track of Your Cholesterol Numbers

For many of us, ignoring our cholesterol tests is no longer possible because health insurance companies are beginning to tie health insurance rates, as well as eligibility of insurability, to your cholesterol levels, smoking habits, and other health markers. In my own situation, we have to take a yearly physical that includes cholesterol tests, and input that information at Cigna’s website. If we choose not to do that, at the present time, our insurance rates will increase by 20 percent. If you smoke, they will add an additional 10.

Although this was the first year that participating in Cigna’s Health Survey was mandatory by my husband’s company, Cigna takes those figures, compares them to previous data, and gives you recommended goals that meet “their” standards. The movement in this country towards socialized medicine isn’t likely to allow low-carb dieters to continue ignoring their cholesterol numbers forever.

Standards are bound to get tighter as we move forward into Obama Care, so thinking about the health implications of what’s going on right now is important for long-term health, as well as weight-loss success. Despite current thought, Dr. Atkins never took the viewpoint that I hear so often within the low-carb community. In fact, most people’s attitudes and rationalizations about elevated cholesterol levels are downright frightening because many newcomers are listening to the distorted, twisted advice.

Dr. Atkins View on High Cholesterol

Although Dr. Atkins is best known for bringing very low-carb diets and graduated low-carb diets into the spotlight, his life’s work also included nutritional research and vita-nutrient therapy. As a cardiologist, he didn’t simply slough off elevated levels of blood fats in an effort to defend his diet blindly, but clearly stated that “cholesterol and triglycerides are one of the most widespread causes of heart attacks, strokes, and clogging of the arteries in general.”

What he reminded us of was that high cholesterol levels themselves are not disease. They are blood lipid abnormalities that serve as “predictive factors for a hardening of the arteries.” If you treat the symptoms without figuring out what’s causing the elevated cholesterol, there’s no guarantee that you will stop or even regress the disease process.

But Dr. Atkins also believed that by bringing your cholesterol numbers in line with the current medical view,  you can at least keep yourself off of statins and help avoid their awful side effects. In addition, “high triglycerides and low HDL levels are the two lipid abnormalities that are clearly and unequivocally linked both to insulin resistance and to the intake of carbohydrates.”

Apparently, LDL cholesterol is not.

Those with insulin resistance need to avoid excess carbohydrates at even moderate levels, because your body’s chemistry “turns the carbohydrates into triglycerides.” Triglycerides often interfere with the production of HDL, the good cholesterol that helps transport LDL molecules to the liver to be recycled or eliminated from the body. “The Atkins Center experience [was] that people whose triglyceride levels are more than double their HDL levels (in mg/ml) do better on carbohydrate restriction.” But that doesn’t hold true for everyone.    

“Some people get the best results by restricting saturated fats, while others do better if they eliminate all sugar from their diet and reduce consumption of carbohydrates. You must learn which works best for you.”

No two individuals will react the same way to dietary and nutritional changes. However, Dr. Atkins also believed that elevated cholesterol was a symptom of “dysnutrition,” and that if you “correct the dysnutrition, you will control your blood cholesterol.”

What You Can Do to Lower Your Cholesterol Levels

It’s overly simplistic to say a low-carb diet will automatically improve cholesterol levels. That depends on how you implement what you learn. “Occasionally, a major elevation in blood cholesterol does occur in patients on a low-carbohydrate diet.” But occasionally was Dr. Atkins findings pre-1981. Today, a typical low-carb diet doesn’t even fit Dr. Atkins profile of what a low-carb diet for lowering cholesterol should look like.

 Although he has always stated that avoiding eggs and saturated fats are a last resort, his sample menus as late as 2002 had dieters eating ham, ground turkey, round steak, salmon, and mozzarella cheese. His cornbread recipe even contained real, whole-grain cornmeal along with a soy-based bake mix, and that was specifically for his ongoing weight-loss phase. So we’ve traveled pretty far out in left field from what Dr. Atkins believed.

When Atkins speaks of using a low-carb diet to control your cholesterol levels, he means that you need “to avoid sugar in all of its forms, even fruit and fruit juices, and you should keep your intake of starches to a minimum.” That’s because “diets low in total carbohydrates and alcohol usually lower triglycerides dramatically.”

According to Dr. Atkins, simple sugars elevate triglycerides more dramatically than complex, unrefined carbohydrates. While medical professionals don’t always agree on which is worse, triglycerides or total cholesterol, Atkins believed that “both contribute equally to heart disease potential.”

Dr. Atkins cholesterol recommendations require strict attention to the ingredient lists on the products and spices you buy, and avoiding any product that contains:

• alcohol
• sugar
• corn syrup
• honey
• fructose
• dextrin
• high-fructose corn syrup
• maltodextrin
• or any of the sugar alcohols

That eliminates almost all sugar substitutes and puts you on a regimen that mostly consists of whole foods. It also means you should eliminate all products that contain any amount of starches or flour. While that sounds like a no-brainer, store-brand cream cheese, most brands of mayonnaise, bacon, sausage, extracts made with an alcohol base, and many other typical low-carb foods would not fit that profile.

In addition, the amount of carbohydrates you eat per day needs to be fine-tuned to fit your blood cholesterol levels, rather than just for weight loss.   

Vita-Nutrient Therapy

For many people, a strict low-carb diet may still not be enough. While triglycerides can drop dramatically and HDL increase with a standard low-carb diet, LDL cholesterol levels can be far more stubborn. Although cutting down on saturated fat is the typical treatment for elevated LDL cholesterol levels, Dr. Atkins always preferred to take a nutritional approach to the problem first. Supplements such as:

• niacin
• pantethine
• inositol
• chromium
• Vitamin C
• essential fatty acids
• fiber supplements
• lecithin granules
• garlic

were always included in his treatment program for elevated cholesterol levels. His view on health was never low-carb tunnel vision. Even from the beginning, it was completely nutritionally based.

Dietary Fats

Most medical recommendations lean toward substituting saturated fats with polyunsaturated or monounsaturated oils. While scientific tests have shown the positive results on cholesterol levels when making such changes, Dr. Atkins cautions that an increase in polyunsaturated oils increases your need for Vitamin E

In addition, He also used to insist that vegetables oils be cold-pressed, rather than chemically extracted. That insistence was softened a bit to “best” in 2002, but his reasons are still valid. Supermarket oils are treated with “gasoline, benzene, carbon disulfide, and/or lye.” They’re also overheated and treated with antioxidants and corn-based defoamers.

Cholesterol and Thyroid

According to Dr. Atkins, another thing to look at if you have elevated cholesterol levels is your thyroid. In his professional opinion, elevated cholesterol can be a symptom of a sluggish thyroid. However, he never relied on thyroid tests to check thyroid function. He preferred to use your basal body temperature because what he was interested in was how your thyroid was functioning, not the amount of thyroid that was circulating in your blood.

For a sluggish thyroid, Dr. Atkins often used kelp supplements “because kelp contains iodine, the element upon which thyroid function depends.” However, most cases of thyroid deficiency are not due to iodine deficiency, although a fear of salt does seem to be common among low carbers. You can see that in the number of people who continue to believe that the Atkins Flu is inevitable.

Even so, Dr. Atkins saw nothing wrong with giving kelp a try, claiming it was a “relatively safe nutritional technique for cholesterol lowering” when thyroid was suspect. In fact, in Dr. Atkins clinical experience, metabolic resistance to weight loss in obese individuals was almost always due to thyroid deficiency.

When iodine isn’t the issue, natural or synthetic thyroid hormone may be necessary, but there seems to be as much misinformation among medical authorities regarding thyroid function as there is about cholesterol. Most general doctors will go by whatever the lab they use suggests, so if you suspect you might have thyroid issues, it might be best to seek out a thyroid specialist instead of a general or family practitioner.

Sources:

Atkins, Robert C., M.D., Dr. Atkins’ Diet Revolution: The famous Vogue superdiet explained in full, Bantam Books, New York, 1972.

Atkins, Robert C., M.D., Dr. Atkins’ Nutrition Breakthrough: How to Treat Your Medical Condition Without Drugs, Bantam Books, New York, 1981.

Atkins, Robert C., M.D., Dr. Atkins’ Vita-Nutrient Solution: Nature’s Answer to Drugs, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1998.

Atkins, Robert C., M.D., Dr. Atkins’ New Diet Revolution (expanded edition), M. Evans and Company Inc., New York, 2002 (originally published 1992).

Why Can’t We Embrace the Low Carb Journey?

Why Can’t We Embrace the Low Carb Journey?

Questions??

This morning as I was taking a quick glance at my email, I noticed that I had received a link to a post made by Angela England at her popular website, Untrained Housewife. Angela is a professional writer and author. She used to write for Suite 101 when I was there, but like me, she is currently focusing her writing and editing efforts elsewhere.

Untrained Housewife focuses on teaching the lost art of self-sufficiency. Angela does that by showing you how you can start moving in that direction regardless of your current living situation and lifestyle. Her specialty is teaching the lost art of homemaking, gardening, taking care of animals, and cooking with whole foods.

But recently, she received an email attacking her for sharing space on her website with other authors, and not being completely self-sufficient and off the grid. They even went so far as to call her a fraud because she wrote a book on homesteading while she was living within her city’s limits.

I couldn’t help but think how closely that situation related to the experiences that many of us go through on our low-carb journey.

Low-Carb’s Herd Mentality

Although I’ve never been called on the carpet for only being partially successful at reaching my personal weight-loss goal, throughout my low-carb journey, I have seen individuals criticized and attacked for preaching the low-carb message while still short of perfection. In fact, I’ve even seen individuals shun specific voices who have chosen to embrace a portion of someone else’s journey that they didn’t agree with.

Mention the wrong name (such as Kimkins) within the low-carb community and/or appeal to a handful of principles that person believes in – such as only using enough dietary fat to make your diet work – and you can quickly find yourself instantly losing credibility and abandoned. Why? Because most of us have a strong need to belong.

Even if the majority isn’t right in what they’re doing, we don’t want to feel like we’re not a part of the crowd. We don’t want to be criticized, condemned, and attacked for not believing, saying, and doing what everyone else is believing, saying, and doing. We don’t want to be alone. We want to be a part of the low-carb community. We want to do low carb right.

Except that the majority isn’t always right. We are individuals. We each have a different degree of metabolic damage, different levels of health, and different dietary goals. We have different genetic make ups, different tastes, and different things that work for each one of us. None of us is perfect. Most of us are probably not at our goal weight, but the one thing that we do have in common is our low-carb journey.

The New Low-Carb Community Message

When we first started our low-carb journey, most of us didn’t know a whole lot about it. I know that in 1975, when I first found Dr. Atkins’ book in the public library, the concepts of low carb and insulin resistance were new to me. I wasn’t in the best of situations. My unsupportive husband at that time had recently started a new job and funds were tight. There was no Internet. There was no one to help me figure out how to implement Dr. Atkins’ advice correctly. All I had to rely on was myself.

In 2007, when I returned to low carbing for the third time – after being bedridden for two years with bilateral vestibular dysfunction, and partially bedridden for another two years – I still wasn’t completely sure of myself. Now, I had a supportive husband. I also had the Internet filled with various low-carb communities to help me, but most of the people within those communities were preaching a very different message then the one I had received from Dr. Atkins’ first diet book or the John Hopkins Atkins Internet group available at the end of 1999.

Now that Dr. Atkins was no longer around to interpret his books, the low-carb community was preaching a high-fat message. They were preaching a high-calorie message. They were preaching everything contrary to the way I had lost all of my weight in 1975. They were preaching everything contrary to the way I had rid myself of part of my regain before my divorce, remarriage, and being struck down with vertigo.

Now, it was no longer about embracing the journey. It was no longer about accepting each person as an individual with metabolic differences. Now it was follow us. We are the “only” way. We will lead you to salvation.

Why Can’t We Embrace the Low-Carb Journey?

But for me, that didn’t happen. The way had traveled too far to the left. It had gone from eating fat in the same proportion as found in nature, the amount you would find in a reasonably lean piece of beef (1972) and recipes that only used chicken breast and other lean meats (1999) to extremely-fatty meats smothered in sour cream and cheese, and drowning in melted butter or mayo every single day.

The way had changed from adding back into your diet the foods you missed the most (1972) or creating your own personalized 20 full-carbs Induction diet (1992) to something called the Carbohydrate Ladder that had to be followed religiously in 2007 along with the Atkins’ Nutritionals view on vegetables or you were not doing Atkins.

Okay. So in 2007 when I was eating 20 full carbs and 45 to 60 grams of fat per day and managed to shed a lot of body fat eating that way, I was not doing Atkins according to the low-carb community. But they didn’t want me to call what I was doing Kimkins either – even though that’s exactly what I was doing. I am not going to lie about that. I was following Kimmer’s original recommendations that she posted on Low Carb Friends: 72 grams of lean protein, 20 full carbs, and just enough dietary fats to make the diet work for you.

It was discovered by someone within the low-carb community that Kimmer had posted false pictures of herself on the Internet, and she was actually fat. She wasn’t living a low-carb lifestyle, and that angered a lot of people. In addition, she was verbally telling people to drop their calories to 300 per day. A few people were gullible enough to do that and ended up sick, so the low-carb community banded together and got Kimmer prosecuted for fraud.

Instead of questioning why anyone in their right mind would ever drop their calories to 300 per day, they decided to totally abandon the idea of eating lower fats and go completely the other way. Now, we don’t simply have folks eating a high-fat diet, we have people doing something akin to the Atkins’ Fat Fast at 85 percent fat and calling it Nutritional Ketosis.

Nutritional? Hardly…but almost no one is questioning that. Hardly no one is questioning the strange habits attached to that diet in order to eat that much fat per day. People are simply following the crowd (the same as they did with Kimkins) without evaluating their personal results. As a community, we’ve traveled from one extreme to the other.

So What Now?

As a community, are we ever going to actually support those who find what works for them, and then do that for the rest of their life? Are we?

That’s easy to say, but hard to put into practice. It’s far easier to judge what someone else is doing. It’s easier to attack those who aren’t doing low-carb the way that we think they should be, than it is to be happy that someone has finally found something that works for them -- even if that's simply counting calories or eating a lower-fat low-carb diet. It’s far easier to allow our fears and insecurities to rule over us.  

But what now? If we, as a community, don’t have the capacity to embrace the low-carb journey, then where are we headed next?

Building a Strong Foundation for a Low-Carb Lifestyle

Building a Strong Foundation for a Low-Carb Lifestyle

Low Carb Styles

There’s a thread over at Low-Carb Friends specifically devoted to those who have decided to return to a low-carb diet. It isn’t really about anything. It’s just a place to announce your intention of trying again. In a way, it’s a spot where you can declare your New Year’s Resolution to return home to where you know you belong. To return home to where you know you can shed the weight you’ve regained over the past few months or years.

The problem is that achieving success with a low-carb or moderate-carb diet often takes more than just a choice to return to carbohydrate restriction. Only a strong nutritional foundation can convert a low-carb diet into a lifestyle. Yet, most of these individuals have returned wearing their dieting mindset on their sleeve.

• They believe that this time things will be different.
• This time they will do better.
• This time they won’t stray.

If that’s your attitude as well, you might want to reconsider what you’re doing, and why.

Weight Loss Success as Taught by the Low-Carb Community

Within the low-carb community, you’ll find a large variety of ideas about what does or does not result in weight-loss success. You’ll be told to:

• get rid of your fear of saturated fats
• lower your carbohydrates
• up your fat percentage of calories
• don’t eat too much protein
• pick a specific low-carb diet plan
• follow your chosen plan exactly
• suck it up and just endure the Atkins’ flu
• ignore your cravings for carbohydrates
• drink gallons of water per day
• and just believe…

It’s not very reassuring. Why? Because you’re expected to reach your weight-loss goal by using willpower, determination, a self-improvement format, and above all – low-carb magick.

Nutrition, if it’s even discussed at all, is only briefly addressed in terms of insulin resistance, the state of ketosis, or the familiar low-carb mantra that says to “do this for your health, not the weight loss.” The reality is that the nutritional aspects of diet are placed on the back burner, while fat loss and dieting itself consumes the major focus of your efforts.

You should do Atkins, Protein Power, Nutritional Ketosis, or whatever the current low- or moderate-carb fad diet is of the day, and nutrition will simply take care of itself.

But is that true?

Building a Strong Nutritional Foundation is the Only Way

Can you truthfully give your body everything it needs to heal by simply focusing on carbohydrate restriction, upping your dietary fats by percentage, and/or counting your calories?

Probably not…not if the amount of people returning to a low-carb lifestyle every January is any indication of what works, and what doesn’t.

Obviously, those who feel compelled to return to a low-carb diet didn’t turn it into a lifestyle. They simply milked their dieting mindset. They ignored the suggestion or mantra to use solid nutritional principles for the foundation of their low-carb lifestyle, and attempted to do things in accordance with the conventional low-carb wisdom of the day.

That type of behavior almost always ends in failure because losing the weight isn’t the hard part. Most diets as written work, including low-calorie diets, if you follow them faithfully. The hard part is maintaining those losses. Maintenance is when the real work begins.

Keep Both Your On-Plan and Off-Plan Treats Occasional

The dieting mindset tells you that you are either “on” or “off” of a diet. It tells you that the restriction is only temporary. It tells you that you can return some of your favorite carby foods to your diet once you’ve reached your weight-loss goals. While some of that might be true, the phrase “occasional treat” is where a lot of folks trip and fall.

What does occasional mean? To me, it means:

• holidays
• my birthday or my husband’s birthday
• our wedding anniversary
• or going out to dinner

To clarify going out, we don’t go out very often – maybe once or twice a year – because we are gluten-free and the only place I’ve been able to eat at safely (with my own personal degree of gluten sensitivity) has been P.F. Chang’s. And the closest one is an hour-and-a-half away.

So the first thing to accept is that occasional treats or occasionally eating higher carbs, higher dietary fats, and/or higher calories than your normal, every-day diet (on or off plan) doesn’t mean every other day, or even every weekend. It means rarely.

So commit to doing that. Root that idea in your mind from Day 1, and half of your weight-loss battles will have already been won. You aren’t telling yourself “never,” so there’s no reason to feel deprived. You’re saving those things for very special occasions. In fact, that will keep those occasions special and give you something to look forward to.

How to Beef Up For Chances for Weight-Loss Success

The best way to beef up your chances for a successful low-carb or moderate-carb lifestyle is to firmly plant your diet on top of a solid nutritional foundation. Your body cannot heal from insulin resistance or repair any internal damage done from the years of making poor nutritional choices (or celiac disease as in my own situation) unless you give it nutrient-dense foods. That means that “on” or “off” of Atkins, Protein Power, Nutritional Ketosis, or whatever you’re doing, you still eat only whole foods and you still eat an abundance of vegetables.

That’s essential.

Why? Because the best way to achieve a successful low-carb lifestyle is to begin with a diet that’s closely related to what you will continue to eat throughout maintenance.

That doesn’t mean that the Atkins’ carb ladder doesn’t have its benefits. But once you find your carbohydrate, fat, and calorie tolerances, that is when you begin to create a way of eating that you will use for the rest of your life. Don’t wait until you reach the pre-maintenance phase. Start today.Because if you don’t, you might never reach the pre-maintenance phase, let alone maintenance.

The idea behind a low-carb or moderate-carb diet is to heal your insulin resistance. Once you do that, you cannot return to the way you ate before or you’ll simply get the same results you got then. Your insulin resistance will return and so will the pounds. The only way to secure a successful future is to start building a strong foundation for your low-carb lifestyle from the very beginning of your diet.

What Can I Do?

Seek out recipes you can live with for the rest of your life. Learn how to incorporate an abundance of vegetables and whole foods into your meals. Don’t depend on processed products or low-carb junk foods to sustain you. That doesn’t mean a low-carb tortilla or low-carb flatbread sandwich is bad and can’t become part of your regular diet. But it does mean that you need to sincerely think about everything you are putting into your mouth.

The low-carb community as a whole has some weird ideas about what is or isn’t acceptable within the parameters of a low-carb diet. Many tag sweet potatoes, oranges, carrots, and peas as evil, yet see nothing wrong with putting gobs of butter on their food, drinking coconut oil in their coffee, or eating a brick of cream cheese or an entire bar of dark chocolate in the afternoon.

The truth is, it isn’t enough to just control the carb count. It isn’t enough to simply up your fats and lower your protein. None of that guarantees that you are fulfilling your nutritional needs. None of that guarantees that you are giving your body the nutrients it needs to heal and keep your hunger and cravings at bay.

The only thing that can make a low-carb diet a healthy lifestyle is to incorporate an abundance of nutrient-dense foods.

That means eating:

•  fresh meats
• whole eggs
• dairy products (if you can tolerate them)
• plenty of fresh vegetables and salads
• low-glycemic fruits such as berries
• nuts
• and healthy fats

But using healthy fats doesn’t mean to drink heavy cream out of the bottle or to eat grass-fed butter or organic coconut oil right off the spoon. That isn’t sustainable, and it isn’t healthy.

What is healthy is to give your body a wide assortment of proteins, vitamins, minerals, and live enzymes. Only then will you be able to actually achieve and maintain your weight-loss goals. When you begin your low-carb diet with a strong nutritional foundation and nurture that nutritional foundation throughout your weight loss phase, you set yourself up for a lasting, healthy weight loss.

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.