Image courtesy of
The carbohydrate free diet.
What would you do if you needed to lose some weight?
An answer might be:
Diets are plentiful. However, I feel any attempt to take a short cut, almost like dealing with the symptoms of an unhealthy lifestyle, will only ever achieve short lived results or come at a price, such as shorter life span or exhaustion or increased risk of disease.
To steroid or not to steroid?
To explain further, taking steroids for example has the potential of getting a short-term gain. Glucocorticoids (GCs), often referred to as corticosteroids, have some side effects that may come to the fore with long term use. Such as cataracts and glaucoma, Atherosclerosis and cardiovascular risk, Increased blood glucose and diabetes, Impaired wound healing, Weight gain and fat redistribution and more like adrenal dysfunction. Courtesy of
The alternative to traditional medication therapy?
Is there an alternative to pharmaceutical intervention? Or anything else that produces great health with easy weight loss? I believe so. When one decides to make a change and wants fast results, we might only want to achieve this with as little effort as possible, and even without any effort or having to suffer anything too painful or difficult. This may lead some of us to seek a pill. Pills throughout history have been associated with reducing pain and alleviating symptoms and making problems go away. So it is not surprising to want to explore this avenue, especially if it should perhaps work!
Where is this going?
You may have already guessed where this is going. There are stages needed to pass through to get to a healthy body and weight. I am going to list them in an order that you may agree with.
Step one: Are we eating to fix health/hair loss/memory decline/improve eye sight?
1st: Whatever reason you are eating for, whether it is to feel full or for nutrition or energy; weight loss; healthy brain; to look great; feel great; or avoid cancer; fitness; stop hair loss; just to have more energy; to improve eyesight; to stop pain; to stop memory decline; to improve mood; to be happy; to improve sex life; to improve your breathing; to gain strength; to gain better results in exams; to live a long healthy life; to enjoy more time with your children or grandchildren; to stop brain fog; to gain focus; to have longer concentration periods; and a lot more reasons. Then you need to find a target diet that meets your needs.
Step two: Your old diet will try and hold onto you.
2nd: Now that you have found your target diet, that is you have done your research so that the 1st step of this program has been sorted out. Easier said than done. This first step mentioned above may take a long time, but with help this could take a lot less time, and just an hour or so if you get professional help. So next is this step 2 and here it is necessary to realise that your old diet will try and hang onto you. The difficulty one has with getting away from their old diet depends on just how unhealthy or addictive it was. So do not feel bad if you have difficulty moving to the new diet plan, because your old diet contains some or lots of the almost 2000 additives allowed by government to be put into food.
They are added to everything from baked goods and breakfast cereals to energy bars and carbonated drinks.\" Now although I have been studying this since 2012 and a year at college doing an access course to science recently it still astounded me to find out that not all ingredients have to be listed in the food that you buy. The reason for this seems almost logical. The government and the food industry say, almost quite rightly, that as the concentration of ingredients get smaller there comes a point at which it is negligible and therefore not important. It turns out that if your food contains less than 10 parts per million of sulphur dioxide then it does not need to be included in the ingredients list! When 100 parts per million if breathed in would kill!
Some of these
or pesticides or anti-biotics are indeed in some of our foods and not listed in the ingredients because the government thinks the amounts are too small to be of any significance, maybe I should rephrase that, they have
However, it is my assertion that there are unlisted ingredients that can have an overly negative affect on the health of sensitive individuals like myself. It is possible to
that do not list all the ingredients and it is my opinion that some of these will have an accumulative affect over time for people that have the advantage of a good start in life. Again it is my opinion that this may be felt by exceptionally resilient individuals in the form of being slightly overweight or beginning to show signs of mild ill health including a sudden onset of poorer eyesight near or around the age of 50 years old. This last comment is not necessarily scientific, but as we know science is only good with dealing with one variable at a time, multivariable environments, like cloud computing or the human body, as expressed in David Asprey's book
it seems that science can find it awfully difficult or slow to isolate this one variable, and therefore this approach sometimes seem not always suited for complex systems. However, where it does work and succeeds, I am gratefull and pleased that scientists dedicate their lives to such an effort.
An example of how difficult things can get with complex systems is happening right now around us. ME or CFS (chronic fatigue syndrome) has been felt by over a million people alive today in America alone, and up until now, because research scientist could not find a bio marker all these suffering people since the 1970's were often being told by some GPs (general practitioners), that it is all in their heads and were offered CBT (cognitive behavioural therapy) instead of real research into the pursuit of the source of the problem. Well, a discovery of the bio marker might well be with us finally with the phenomenal contribution and effort of
Giving science credit where it has achieved the almost impossible in some cases or just little steps in the right direction is the right thing to do. Similarly in my opinion when thousands upon thousands of people say that they do not feel well, like with ME/CFS as seen in the book Plaque (see above paragraph), and they say something is wrong, they should not be ignored. Our hunches are all we have sometimes, and if we are not scientists, should we stop in our search for optimal health until we die?
These additives; preservatives; pesticides and antibiotics need further discussion, however, for our purposes all we need to know is they, if consumed, may have a legacy that holds us in the past, in the form of potential addiction, with some of these having withdrawal symptoms. These for me are real and difficult to deal with. This is where carbohydrates enter the scene. As a processed food it is surprising to me to find bread everywhere. I understand, because I was raised on bread. The trouble is nearly all types of flour and any flour that are made to be sold on supermarket shelves will contain additives to help preserve shelf life. This seems like a good idea at first, until some of us may start to suffer the effects of some of these additives.
What can be done about it? Luckily for all of us, there is an organic section in most stores these days. This means that pesticides and antibiotics are controlled. This is great news but remember if the product contains less than
it still does not need to be listed in the ingredients list.
Step three: What is wrong with carbs, fat is bad right?
3rd: The third thing to get to terms with is the mistake the
when it decided to back the argument that fat was bad for you and that carbohydrates were good. It did not even distinguish between healthy fats and bad fats. Well, it did say that cholesterol was the worst, and got that wrong too. Because egg yolk is not bad, even though it contains cholesterol. Also, coconut fat is also cholesterol and again it is known as a
I will get back to this when I re find it. I just need to add one more thing, trans fats! These were actively pursued as a healthy alternative to butter, in the form of margarine.
well almost, and indeed have a half-life of 6 months and given the choice to smoke a cigarette or eat one teaspoon of trans fats,
said he would prefer to smoke the cigarette! This rant I am having here can and should continue, however you can follow
So the government decided that fat was bad and that sugar was good. So the medical industry grew up using this knowledge and advised accordingly. Unfortunately, because the government got it wrong it took our dear health care system down the road of being complicit in the further decline of some of its patients. With the line of we are just following the government guide lines. Also, anyone giving advise out, had to toe the line or suffer consequences of being struck from the list of some organisation or other or potentially lose their pension.
Step four: But why do I have to quit bread?
4th: The fourth thing to bear in mind is that
Step five: Malnutrition is our birth right.
5th: The fifth element in all this is that even with our best efforts in eating well, we will never provide enough nutrients in today’s environment. We are too stressed, over worked, undernourished, and in almost all our diets, almost 100% of the cases leads to exacerbated malnutrition, and even with organic home grown produce, unless on an allotment, the soil may have been depleted of both minerals and insects including all sorts of biodiversity. This has led for example to broccoli which is now producing 3 times less folate (B9) then it did back in the 70s. Folate for example has mostly been replaced with a synthetic and this site says that
This is just the beginning of the subject of how is the west is malnutrition? I can go on for hours about this, but for further information on this
Step six: What does intracellular calcium levels have to do with anything?
6th: The sixth main part of this process in getting your health and weight back is addiction. I of course do mean all the regular addictions and all the ones mentioned above in step 2, but also our own bodies constant desire for seeking a state that only seems reachable with poor diets or alcohol or coffee or additives or overeating or just being indulged in all our past food habits drinking habits etc. It just seems sometimes that there is something larger than food or drink or drugs or overindulgence at play in our attaining an equilibrium that makes us feel normal. In my opinion this is to do with intra cellular calcium levels. It is my belief that through years of neglect, poor food choices and their associated ingredients and poor exercise habits and even too much animal or dairy products that our intra cellular calcium levels have got used to a higher than healthy level. This is to say, that when we make a start on being healthy, which would bring down our intra cellular calcium levels, that we begin to feel uncomfortable. This feeling is in my opinion very similar to withdrawal symptoms. I have alcohol withdrawal to compare against. So just to say, I do not yet know how long it takes for our intra cellular calcium levels to drop back to a healthy state. Also, that high levels of intra cellular calcium have been associated with all kinds of diseases. This also includes cancer.
Also, when alcoholics try and quit alcohol they suffer withdrawal, this withdrawal apart from the sugar, sulphates, and perhaps gluten tends to show itself with a general unsatisfaction. I think some people describe it as having itchy skin or in my case it was pacing up and down rubbing my arms like I was cold. The advice given is to disolve a teaspoon of glutamate into a glass of water and dissolve it and then drink it. This may well work. The reason it works is because glutamate is capable of raising the intra cellular calcium levels. It is for this reason that we are told to reduce red meats, because they contain high levels of glutamate. By temporarily raising our glutamin intake which, therefore raises our intracellular calcium levels that withdrawl symptoms are lessoned. This is also why in my opinion that when we have a health kick, even if we are not addicts, that it becomes increasingly difficult to sustain. Yet others that have had a good diet for most of their lives, number one, do not need to go on a health kick and number two if they did, they would be able to sustain it for longer dispite not needing it so much. To put it another way, their metaphorical elastic that bridges the gap between diet and intra cellular calcium levels is stretched less in healthy people then in unhealthy, dispite unhealthy people needing it most. I would really like to know at what rate our intracellular calcium levels can be made to change in the right direction, down.
I am not sure whether a diet can do much to change the intracellular calcium levels or whether it is nearly entirely driven by our diseased state in our bodies. I do not think there is much need for blood work here. Since ultimately we are all going to try and be healthy at some point. Why not just eat as healthy as one thinks they can and try and sustain it. Once the uncomfortableness has made itself clear and is stable, add some glutamate to ones' diet and see if the feeling subsides from a 90% presence down to a 30% presence after a one or two teaspoons of glutamate a day in a glass of water. Then do what you want for six months either trying to improve this intracellular calcium level or being carefree with ones' diet and then repeat the experiment with the same diet that one stuck to the first time round. Ofcourse, depending on your goal, if you had decided to try and improve it, then perhaps now the uncomfortableness is simply non existant. This is real feed back and worth its weight in gold. For more information on this visit
Although this page is still under construction.
Step seven: Heavy metal toxicity will stop weight loss in its track.
7th: Next is dealing with any potential toxicity. This will halt any potential progress in its tracks even if everything else is on point and correct. The most common risk of toxicity for normal people is a chance encounter with the dentist. One of the options is a silver amalgam where up to 50% of the material used is mercury.
This can be bought online or at your local vitamin shop. Just follow the instructions immediately after and or during getting fillings and follow this up with more charcoal. Adding vitamin C to this will help.
Also, try not to lose weight during this timme, because fat can protect toxic levels existing in the blood stream by storing some of these toxins inside the fat cells. It is probably better to gain some weight during the period of gettings fillings, so as to manage the toxicity in the blood stream. This rule applies to most heavy metals. The next most important toxicity that one may need to be aware of is lead. Lead was given as the main contributing factor in Sir John Franklin's 1845 Arctic expedition where all members of the crew died on Beechy Island in the Canadian Arctic.
Also lead in petrol has been found to produce higher levels of lead in children.
On this list of most common and dangerous heavy metal toxins is arsenic. This contamination can cause multiple organ failure in sufficient quantities, but way before this happens arsenic is a major disruptor of ATP (adrenal tri phosphate) production. This is bad because ATP is what gives us all our energy. So, a disfunction here will not be good, and it can cause cancer. It is in our drinking tap water and some foods like rice. Although it is only in the husk, brown rice, and soaking over night and cooking in a 1/5 ratio with water and draining will remove upto 80% of the arsnic from the rice courtesy of
The good news is it just takes a few days after avoiding it to show signs of levels dropping.
Step eight: What have the mitochondria got to do with weight loss and should I care?
8th: Next is looking after your mitochondrial health and what a difference this might make. The mitochondria are important because they exist inside nearly all our cells. For example we each have approximately 50 trillion cells, and except for immune cells and red blood cells, each one of these has about 2000 mitochondria, unless one is sick, in which case this number drop. In cases where one is quite ill, this number can drop to as low as 200 (two hundred) mitochondria. The brain, heart and eyes in fact have many more mitochondria per cell. Some 10,000 (ten thousand) mitochondria and with the first born, (the first born has the most), the mother's egg will hold as many as 70,000 mitochondria.
Mitochondria have a shelf life of about 6 weeks. However, this changes drastically and very suddenly if they are assaulted by toxins including heavy metals such as copper, cadmium and mercury.
Why is mitochondria health so important for my diet plan? Your mitochondria do something quite miraculous. They produce some 80lbs (eighty pounds) of ATP (adrenal triphosphate) this is the battery of the cell and indeed, our own little furnace that powers all our movement. If our mitochondrial health is dysfunctional, then we are working with a flat battery so to speak. You may be asking how can mitochondria produce half my body weight in energy every day? Well, it does this by recycling about 96% of the existing mitochondria in our bodies.
Mitochondria are sensitive creatures; they need lots of antioxidants and polyphenols to stay healthy. This is achieved through diet! They also need to avoid toxins and poisons or at least take stuff to invoke a very rapid repair. Which again is what we consume, like with supplements. For your mitochondria to be healthy they also need good gut health, and exercise. There are some tricks in the book that will promote an even healthier bunch of mitochondria. For example, fasting boost their health and so does eating a keto diet also cold showers seem to have the ability of killing off old obsolete mitochondrial cells too, which then go on to help with the production of new mitochondrial cells in their wake, but again how does this help? Having mitochondrial health is at the root of all health and weight loss.
Why is mitochondrial health at the root of weight loss? The reason mitochondria play such an important role in weight loss is because they can burn just fat for fuel if need be. This is brilliant news. Getting our bodies into a metabolic fit state, so that our bodies burn fat for fuel all day and all-night means that losing weight is now easy. How do I get my body into burning fat? This is where all the books come in online now, on getting into ketosis. There does not seem to be one book on the subject that can cater for every type of person of all ages in all manner of different degrees of health. So, my suggestion is to read as many books on the subject as you can, pertaining to your need. I do have some recommendations:
According to
and all those that came before him including Warburg in their efforts to understand the root of cancers it was discovered that mitochondrial dysfunction play a role in whether one may get cancer. The discoveries that healthy mitochondria go some way in protecting you from getting cancer led to the question how? It turns out that a fat diet and lots of antioxidant and polyphenols help protect one from mitochondrial dysfunction, which in turn protects one from getting cancers. Here is a good place to start if cancer has a big interest for you.
Also for an easier introduction to the keto diet and cancer in a less scientific language, and the one that helped me the most, then one cannot beat
If just getting into keto and burning all your fat away is the top priority, then you could do a lot worse then getting
Another book for a deeper non cancer or weight loss perspective on keto fitness and its age-related impact one could do worse than the excellent book by
Step nine: Why brushing my teeth and exercise have something in common?
9th: Next is how exercise is that shock to the system that gives your whole body a boost in the right direction. However, I would not be surprised to find out that exercise is a double-edged sword, because it gives us a possitive kick that results in a system wide reset up to a new level of health and fitness. Whilst on the other hand if performed too much without sufficient good nutrition from your food and supplements it could potentially result in at worst no further progress or even tiredness at work persisting for longer than a day. Or worse still getting ill and feeling tired all the time with one having to resort to a schedule, as a form of motivation, to keep one training on those days that you do not feel you have fully recovered.
It is my position, that unless you are young, you need good nutrition and supplements if you are intending to follow a regular exercise program. I have some observations that you may agree with to aid in this position. For example, when studying I found that with proper extra supplementation, I was able to concentrate for longer and with greater intensity too. However, when I added exercise on a particular day, what followed was a decrease in my ability to concentrate and focus. This was very interesting to me. I then realised that vitamin C and vitamin B's are depleted with exercise. So I doubled to dose of those vitamins, including choline and to my surprise found that exercise no longer interfered with my study program.
explains in one of his YouTube videos that as a heart surgeon it was common practice to pinch the arteries closed, thus stopping the blood flow, for approximately 10 to 15 seconds and then release the clamp and let the blood flow through the pre-existing heart before commencing with a heart transplant, because it was found that following this practice heart operations were more than 50% more likely to succeed, compared with not pinching the arteries. Further research revealed that there is a physiological response to this negative stimulation, which is observable under the microscope. In my opinion this is some evidence that suggests just how important healthy stress is on the bodies’ future health. There are other studies that further support this hypothesis pioneered by
So how does brushing my teet and exercise come into this? Well in his book
says that after observing the results from a study on exercise and telemere length it was found that it did not mater too much whether the exercise was two hours a day or just 15mins. In conclusion it seems that if one treats 15 mins exercise as important as brushing one's teeth then the future looks good.
Step ten: Where energy mitochondria and keto and fasting converge?
10th: Next is how fasting will also give your body a kick in the right direction. How does fasting help with weight loss? Anything that takes your body closer to being in ketosis will ultimately go some way to help your mitochondria to burn fat as a fuel. Fasting is the fastest way to train your mitochondria to burn fat for fuel. Some people are thinking that intermittent fasting is good for weight loss. I am not so sure. Because, if after fasting you go back to eating carbohydrates, you are accidentally undoing all the gains achieved with fasting, from a metabolic perspective. The reason for this is that your body can store lots of calories as fuel in the muscles, in the form of a ready supply of energy, called glycogen otherwise known as sugar. This is always going to be used first by your body if you stop eating. This supply of energy is enough to last for almost an entire marathon, if you fancy running, or up to 3 days if you just wait around and do not do too much activity. It is only when this supply of sugar energy has depleted that your body will begin to look for other sources of food. This of course is fat. This transistion from sugar to fat does not happen like jumping off a cliff, but it can be quite dramatic. In runners and cyclists this is called the wall or the bonk. It is when you run out of glycogen too fast. With runners or cyclists if they have never trained their bodies to burn fat then they will almost come to a complete holt!
These participants simply looked like the plug had been pulled. This process in less dramatic for normal individuals sitting at home and under these circumstances is much more gradual. It can leave you in a very tired state, almost unable to do anything. However, it is at this precise moment when your body is struggling to find carbs that an opportunity has arisen, that of pushing your body to consider a fat source instead of carbs as an ongoing fuel source.
It is at this juncture of running out of sugar and your body looking to burn fat for the first time that all the difficulties hit at once. Like any addiction to sugar one may have or any withdrawal symptoms from additives or the change in the level of intra cellular calcium levels or if you are lucky, it will be just massive tiredness as your body begins the battle to find a sufficient fuel source to feed the brain. However, this transition can be eased and made as easy as possible if when you do eat, you decide to eat non-starchy vegetables like broccoli, cauliflower or resistant starches, which may contain a little more sugar like carrots, turnips or if you are really desperate to keep going with this almighty change, but just need to ease the way into ketosis, than one could start with a medium sweet potato a day and when you have got used to that, if you are not producing ketones yet increase the fasting period or reduce the sugar (sweet potato) or do more walking during your fast. This combined way to getting into keto does work. Keep easing the process so you stick with it, but at the same time push the variables that bother you the least. If you really do not mind walking do more and more of it. Or if fasting is your strong point, than fast for 23 hours a day and eat your one sweet potato with as many vegetables and olive oil or hemp oil or coconut fat as possible and keep doing this until you at least produce ketones.
Once you are producing ketones, the next thing is to keep this up until your blood fasting glucose levels return down to a safe level and then wait a little longer until your energy levels begin to rise. You can help the later, that of your energy levels, by adding beta hydroxy butyrate (BHB) these are exogenous ketones to your morning drink. These can be useful if you need to get stuff done. However, this will only work if your body has developed some way to utilise the ketones you are producing. Otherwise, just stick to the vegetables and some sweet potato (resistant starch) and make sure you cover all these with plenty of olive oil or fat of your choice. You can add cold showers at this stage too if you want to speed up the process, because this will help kill off any old and obsolete mitochondrial cells that you may have that are hanging on, when really, they need to go or die off. You want as many new mitochondria as possible as it is these new ones that are going to be most likely able to burn fat.
Step eleven: What can mole rats teach us?
11th: Next is gut bacteria and gut health. The expert in my mind on this subject is
He has not only read up on what clearly is our current knowledge and understanding of gut flora but has taken it to another level and brought it to all our conscience. The next level as I understand it is not just eating for the gut, but recognising that it in turn serves us, so as we change what we feed our gut it in turn rewards us with a consequence. He has shared with us all his discovery about mole rats. Yes, they live a long time. In fact, too long. They should only live about the same as a Guinee Pig or rat, when in fact instead of two years they can live for 35 years! This is too long for a rodent of that size. For example, every creature on the planet has approximately 60 heart beats a minute for our entire lives. Let's say we live until 70 years of age that is 2,207,520,000 beats. This rule applies to every creature on the planet. So, when one's heart has had this amount of beats it is about ready to keel over. This is called old age. This applies to mice, rats, elephants, fish, humans, pandas, everything, except mole rats! They are somehow able to beat for 10 times that of the rest of us. If we can find out why, then perhaps humans might be able to copy the mole rat and live up to 10 times as long! What has this got to do with gut bacteria? It turns out that gut bacteria love resistant starches and there is lots of evidence around the world that blue zones, area where people live to a hundred at 10 times the world average, tend to eat more resistant starches. However, you may be thinking that is it. You would almost be right, except that the mole rat just eats a very select group of resistant starches. Research suggests that the starches that they eat contain an ingredient that might be responsible for their longevity. I thought I am in. I will give you an update on what they might be as soon as I know. So gut flora is important. and the more resistant and the lower on the glucose diabetic index these are the better.