Six common beliefs addressed, Part 201

1. Increasing muscle is the "cure for diabetes".

The healthy who have plenty of muscle mass, can ward off diabetes for a long time. The greater the muscle mass, the more time they allot themselves from succumbing to the condition. This is because muscle is very metabolically active and so it’s a buffer against blood glucose dysregulation. So muscle can be a great antidote for diabetes. It only has one caveat - it must be taken before the poison begins to take effect. In other words, it works like a vaccine, not a medicine.

Many people, who do not understand what diabetes is, usually resort to "the opposite must be good" solutions. For instance, diabetics always have low muscle mass, so they assume that high muscle mass would “cure diabetes”. Or, diabetics have high body fat, so they assume that low body fat would “cure diabetes”. Not so fast.

Diabetes was not directly caused by the low muscle mass or the high body fat. The pathological metabolic adaptation that caused the body to break down muscle and spare body fat is what eventually leads to diabetes. Once that ball is set in motion, both the low muscle mass and high body fat work in unison to progress the condition.

Diabetics will not magically increase their muscle mass. They do not have proper insulin function for glycogen and amino acid synthesis. All of their insulin is actively working on their fat mass instead and not anywhere else. In order to increase muscle mass, you need to be in a metabolic state that is cooperative for this effect to take place.

This is why I get a kick out of watching diabetics "lifting heavy" for absolutely no reason. All they do is get winded and give up in about a day. A healthy person can "lift heavy" and see gains rather quickly. A diabetic can "lift heavy" and see high blood glucose rather quickly. This is because the heavy lifting is stimulating their adrenal stress response more than activating their muscle building. Worse, whatever little muscle they do gain, is quickly broken down, by that very same stress response, for even more glucose creation. The diabetic is simply melting into a puddle of glucose except for their fat. That will always remain intact.

This is why the hormonal environment that is perpetuating the diabetes must be stopped first. Until it is, the diabetic will not gain muscle nor lose body fat as only healthy people build muscle and burn fat.

2. A lot of low carb advocates say that meal timings do not matter and you should just "listen to your body". They say to eat when you're hungry and don't eat when you're not.

When the body is delusional, it cannot be listened to because you would only be listening to the ramblings of madness. You only listen to your body if you are experiencing some sort of health problem. We all know when something "just isn't right" and that's when you have to seek the care of a healthcare professional. As far as hunger/no hunger is concerned, the obese should never listen to any of it. It's all a lie.

The reason low carb advocates are giving out this silly advice is because they are just like calories in/calories out (CICO) advocates. Their diets are only focused on one thing. For low carbers the only focus is carbs and for the CICOs, the only focus is calories. This is why neither one has been able to successfully tackle obesity because treatments fail when they are incomplete.

There was never a time in our history when we were allowed things out of sheer will or want. Food is one of those things. We didn't get to eat just because we were hungry. We ate when food was available to us and that was dependent on a lot of things. For this reason, you need to have specific meal timings because that's when food will be available to you. You cannot guide yourself by hunger because hunger is subjective. Take solace that in modernity, you can at least designate meal timings because hunter/gatherers usually can't even do that.

Hunger either means there is something wrong with your diet or your experiencing it when you shouldn't be. If there is something wrong with your diet, then you are either not eating enough during meal times or eating the wrong macronutrient composition. If you are experiencing hunger when you shouldn't be, then this is a psychological/behavioral issue that needs to be dealt with other than by eating. This is a "pseudo hunger" which is more akin to cravings than real hunger and usually has to do with dopamine dysregulation in the obese.

This is why meal timings are so important. They should be adhered to diligently. If it's up to the obese, they would either eat all of the time or none of the time. Both disrupt proper blood glucose regulation. Do you know what doesn't disrupt blood glucose regulation? Consistent, predictable meal times. This is one of the main recommendations given to diabetics and there is a reason for it. It is much easier to control blood glucose regulation when food availability is consistent and predictable. Of course, this should be done with proper meals, not snacks.

Adhering to meal timings helps:

• Ward off hunger. When you eat at specific meal times, the body's circadian rhythms follow suit and you will become hungry at those predictable times and not hungry when you're fasting. Hunger during fasting only ends up interrupting the fast.
• Avoid spontaneous food items. When you know what your meals will be and what times you will have them, it will prevent you from grabbing something "to go" or "along the way". You will be able to prepare meals ahead of time and schedule activities around those times so there are no interruptions.
• Better hormonal control. When you eat at predictable times, your hormones work as they should - in a pulsatile manner. This allows for better blood glucose control.

Always eat at your specific meal times, even if you aren't hungry because you will be hungry later. That's why back in grandma's time, kids had to eat dinner even if they wanted to play instead because no one was allowed to eat at midnight. Grandma knew that the kids will get hungry at some point and if they got hungry at midnight, then cookies would be the only option for them since no one is cooking a real meal at midnight. This is why the midnight sandwich, which is so bad for health, became so popular. So kids ate dinner at dinner time or not at all.

Skipping meals for the obese is not a good habit to have so the "not at all" option is off the table. There would be no reason to not be hungry at your meal times considering that you would be fasting for 16 -18 hours a day. But, if that is the case, it only reinforces that you have active obesity as many obese have such slow metabolisms, that they are never hungry.

If you have never had a consistent meal timing pattern, you will experience this non-hunger in the beginning but it will wane as the body becomes used to food availability at a specific time. Your meal time will eventually become the bell of Pavlov's dogs.

3. Since "eat less, move more" doesn't work, you can eat as much as you want as long as the foods are “healthy”.

The way to avoid metabolic syndrome/obesity/diabetes is to avoid what causes them - blood glucose dysregulation. Period. Eating less and moving more causes blood glucose dysregulation because if you aren't burning body fat, while exercising and starving, then your blood glucose will suffer from a stress response. Eating as much as you want of anything, healthy or not, causes blood glucose dysregulation as well because excess eating affects insulin to glucagon ratios.

When we say that "eating less and moving more" doesn't work, we are referring to calorie deficit diets. Counting total calories and keeping them at a deficit does not cause significant nor sustained weight loss because of its negative effects on leptin. Obesity is chronic leptin under expression. Starvation further reinforces this. This does not mean you can eat as much as you want as long as it's healthy. This just means that calorie deficits do not work for obesity.

You have to follow the right macronutrient composition alongside their right amounts. Remember, over eating of anything, interrupts insulin to glucagon ratios which affect blood glucose. This is much more prevalent in people who already have metabolic syndrome as they usually have hyperglucagonemia when they don’t require glucose (postprandial) and hypoglucagonemia when they do (fasting).

So you have to not starve but not over eat. Both starvation and overeating interfere with proper blood glucose regulation just like a high carbohydrate diet would. In order for you to live an antiobesogenic lifestyle you have to target all things that interfere with proper blood glucose regulation.

4. I consistently eat a clean, low carb diet but I am still having issues with feeling sleepy after meals. My doctor told me this was normal as the body is trying to conserve energy for digestion. Many people who follow low carb, claim they have been "cured" of their after meal sleepiness, but I haven't been. I don't think this is normal.

It is but it isn't. Feeling sleepy after meals is not uncommon and it's not necessarily abnormal but there is a general similarity in the people who experience this. They are usually elderly or obese/diabetic. This makes sense because people who are elderly or obese/diabetic are in an energy crisis. They simply cannot use energy properly or efficiently and so they become tired quickly. Digestion takes a lot of energy and so you might experience feeling more sleepy after meals if you have metabolic conditions than if you didn't.

5. Low carb people have resorted to eating insects. 

This is a gimmick.

Aside from that, insects are completely fine to eat if you like them and can sustain that type of diet. Insects are eaten liberally in many countries around the world. After all, they are the easiest prey you can ever hunt.

When it comes to metabolic syndrome/obesity/diabetes, no one food item or diet can prevent it. Only one thing matters - blood glucose regulation. As long as your chosen diet can sustain proper blood glucose regulation, you will not develop these metabolic abnormalities whether you eat dragon flies or buffalo.

So, all of these low carb people will tell you to eat this or eat that but, if you listen to them, the only thing you're eating is BS. Insects are fine but fecal matter is not.

6. Low carb advocates claim that "keto" is not a fad diet because it has been around for a long time.

First, let’s define what a fad is. According to the dictionary, a fad is "an intense and widely shared enthusiasm for something, especially one that is short lived and without basis in the object's qualities; a craze". That is pretty much what "keto" is. You can break it down for yourself. Is there an intense and widely shared enthusiasm for it? Yes. Is it short lived and without basis in quality? Yes. Is it a craze? Yes.

Classic ketogenic diets have been around for a very long time and they are used for the treatment of intractable epilepsy and other neurodegenerative conditions. These diets have been successful because of the way the brain utilizes energy. Ketogenic diets change the way the body uses its energy, including the brain.

They have never been fads. In fact, most people have never even heard of them. They have never been marketed as a "weight loss hack" because they are actually extremely difficult to follow. The only people who follow such extreme diets are the ones who have no choice. It’s either try to take control of epilepsy ketogenically or have brain surgery. These diets have also been much more successful in epileptic children than adults. This is probably due to adherence factors. Children do not have a choice on what diet to follow. Adults have the choice of whether they can sustain the diet or not.

Ketogenic diets for "weight loss" and metabolic health have also been around for a long time. They have just gone by a different name, other than "keto". They have simply always been known as low to moderate carb diets.

"Keto", on the other hand, is a bastardized version of a low carb diet. It is completely without basis because it is not addressing metabolism at all. It is just producing ketones from the burning of dietary fat. The diet is short lived because sooner or later the people who follow it realize they are still obese and whatever benefits they experienced initially begin to wane and reverse. Those people leave or alter the diet and new suckers are drawn in. This is why the diet is still around.

There is always a new sucker that can be enticed with empty promises. The advent of social media creates an endless crowd of suckers so unlike diets of the past, which have all come and gone, "keto" will be around until the end of time because it is not dependent on magazines, books or the news to stay alive. It can live happily, just sitting online, waiting for the right fool to come across it.

Six common beliefs addressed, Part 141

1. "Keto" followers love "keto" doughnuts because they make a great "healthy" snack. 

Of course people love them. They are all overweight/obese. When have you seen an overweight/obese person that doesn't love doughnuts? 

The question you should be asking yourself is not whether the doughnuts "are okay to eat", but whether you're okay with remaining fat. Some people are okay with that. In fact, more and more low carb advocates are settling for the idea that leanness should no longer even be the goal. This is because they can't let go of their doughnuts. 

Don't be one of those weak people that have decided to be victims of their fat for the rest of their lives. If you are here, it's because you want to actively do something about your fat. Doughnuts, of any kind, are never okay. 

2. Getting older does not effect metabolism.  

It does. Unfortunately, the advice that could have prevented this should have been given to you when you were in your twenties. The older you get the harder your journey. This is because: 

• The older you are the more insulin resistant you become irrespective of diet. Once the body no longer needs insulin to grow, a lot of its organs and tissues develop a natural inclination towards insulin resistance. This effects glucose homeostasis especially when the diet has a substantial glucose load. 
• The older you are the harder it is to grow and maintain lean muscle mass as the body continues resisting insulin making it difficult to synthesize protein. This causes a continuous loss of lean body mass and a difficult time rebuilding it. This is even worse when it's coupled by an over expression of catabolic hormones which is the case for people with metabolic syndrome/diabetes. 
• The older you are the harder it is to lose body fat as body fat is a tissue which maintains insulin sensitivity until the end. So, expect to continue building fat mass just fine well into old age, even if everything else deteriorates. 
• The older you are the more hormones will work against you. The loss of sex hormones causes for the body to shift its metabolism and promote even more fat storage. This is detrimental for males, but females don't have it any easier. Females begin having a male pattern fat storage, where they begin accumulating fat around the middle and in the viscera from the loss of estrogen, while males experience the opposite effect and become more estrogen dominant causing man boobs. Though man boobs can be embarrassing, they aren't the problem. The problem is the loss of testosterone. 
• The older you become, the more health issues you develop and this can affect your mobility, ability to adhere to a specific diet and/or have to use medications that can affect blood glucose further in order to treat chronic conditions. Also the older you become the more reluctant you will be to make a lifestyle change.
  

As you can see getting older means a much more difficult time trying to stay healthy. The only thing you can do is be consistent with your low carb diet and fasting protocol while staying as active as possible. If there is one thing that is helpful for staying young and managing weight, in older adults, it's exercise. Get an exercise regimen if you don't already have one. 

3. Feeling tired on "keto" is normal. 

Negative. Get off "keto" and go to a normal low carb diet. 

Though many things can be causing this, and you should consult a doctor if you haven't already, in the context of diet alone you might not be using fat for fuel efficiently. This is the result of poor leptin expression. This effects your ability to burn fat for fuel. 

Being tired on ketosis is also the result of the loss of lean muscle mass. You are either not in taking adequate amounts of protein or ketone presence in the body is causing it to go into stress, breaking down its lean muscle further, or both. For this reason, reformulate your diet so that it is adequate in protein and only causes mild/cyclical ketosis. 

4. There are no health advantages to consuming dairy on carnivore.

Dairy has always been advantageous and this is why most of us can still digest it well into adulthood. 

Dairy is a fermented food so it has helpful probiotics for gut health. Whey protein stimulates insulin for lean muscle mass growth. It is also a great simulator of glutathione, the most powerful antioxidant in the body. The fatty acids in diary, especially decanoic acid can cross the blood brain barrier. Dairy is a great way to increase ketones in people who have epilepsy and other disorders where they must keep ketone levels high. Dairy is also extremely nutritious, milk being the most nutritious food on the planet. 

As you can see, you get a lot of bang for your buck consuming dairy, sort of like when you consume organ meats. 

5. "Stress" and lack of sleep will effect blood glucose and insulin.

Stress effects insulin through the over expression of counter regulatory hormones, which release glucose into the blood stream. The more advanced your metabolic disease, the more exaggerated this effect is. Diabetics can dump quite a bit of glucose into their blood stream, driving their postprandial blood glucose well into the 500 mg/dL range and beyond, while dipping their fasting blood glucose to very low levels. Some diabetics are able to maintain high blood glucose all of the time. 

This of course, effects insulin levels as insulin will respond to this fluctuation in serum blood glucose to try and help clear it. The more blood glucose, the higher the insulin levels will have to be and the longer it must remain expressed in the body. This keeps insulin chronically high and over expressed. Keep in mind that the "stress" I am referring to is not "emotional" stress but metabolic stress. Such as when you eat a candy bar. The erratic ups and down in blood glucose, with high disparities between postprandial and fasting levels, are the main stress that the person with metabolic syndrome has. That is the pathological stress that they have to take control of. 

Emotional stress can effect blood glucose, especially when it is already not well regulated but no one becomes diabetic and/or obese from emotional stress alone. Emotional stress does not cause that type of pathology. Lack of sleep has been shown to effect insulin levels because it is a stressor for the body and also if you aren't sleeping, blood glucose will not lower enough as the body is still active and requiring fuel. Again, this keeps insulin levels higher than normal, when they should be low. 

Too much importance has been given to lack of sleep in blood glucose control, but again, insomnia does not cause diabetes/obesity. Just like emotional stress, it contributes to already poor glucose control but it is not the main driver of it. The main driver that effects blood glucose and insulin is lifestyle. 

6. You should never do a low carb and low fat diet at the same time. 

Of course you can do a low carb and low fat diet at the same time. That is basically the description of a protein sparing modified fast, the most powerful diet for body fat loss known so far. It is also the complete opposite of the Standard American Diet (SAD) which is both high in carbs and fat. Whoever told you that low carb and low fat shouldn't be done together is out of their mind or is selling another type of diet.

Six common beliefs addressed, Part 68

1. I am reluctant to try low carb or ketogenic protocols because of all the misinformation online, even though I know these diets have incredible results if they are followed correctly.

I really dislike that carbohydrate restricted diets are caught up in this fiasco. I just want to make it clear that this whole "eat fat till you drop" scam has nothing to do with low carbohydrate diets. I know many of these cons try to hide behind low carb diets, but these are all charlatans, who do not representant true low carb lifestyles. Low carb diets are just that: low carb. They have nothing to do with eating tubs of fat.

You can blame "keto" marketers for these shenanigans. The diet industry is a billion dollar industry and it is always looking for the "next big thing". Their hunt will only result in finding something just as useless, as all the things that came before it. This new "keto" thing, that is going around, is solely the fault of very obese people who came up with the great marketing technique of appearing on camera, eating sticks of butter and chugging down cartons of heavy cream. The stunt worked. They received an incredible amount of attention, especially from other obese people who were looking everywhere for the promise of a "free food". Fat became that "free food". But the obese followers, who became hoodwinked by this ploy, soon saw that they continued to be as fat as the proponents of these protocols and they started jumping ship. For many, it's too late.

I would definitely recommend that everyone make the distinction between real low carb and fad low carb/"keto", when choosing a diet. You need to become educated on following low carb correctly.

2. What keeps diabetics sick, will not make healthy people sick.

But it eventually will. People who have metabolic disease, were once healthy as well. The outliers set the rules and the obese/diabetic are outliers. So, studying their metabolism allows us to better understand human metabolism in general. Not only does it allow us to see what affects their disease progression, but what initially caused/contributed to it to begin with. So, you are not exempt from following a proper diet, just because you happen to be healthy now. You are also not exempt from knowing what will make you unhealthy. It doesn't work that way.

What is known is that blood glucose dysregulation sets the stage for the onset of metabolic problems and everything flows downstream from this initial abnormality.

The consensus is that the Standard American Diet (SAD) eventually leads to health problems because of its affects on blood glucose regulation, but as they say, individual results will vary. Just like the consensus is that cigarette smoking causes heart disease and lung cancer, but there are people, who have smoked their entire lives, without developing either. The risks are yours to take. The information is mine to give.

3. You can eat all the fat you want, as long as it's "healthy fat".

The only "healthy fat" that exists, is the one that's not in excess.

Let me be clear about something, because I see this everywhere online. People seem to not understand that it doesn't matter if the fat is "healthy" or "unhealthy", excess fat will make you fat, regardless of where it came from or what it is.

You want to consume healthy, natural fats, because it helps you avoid many health conditions related to the consumption of unhealthy, unnatural fats (vegetables oils), but this has nothing to do with weight loss. If you eat excess "healthy" fats or excess "unhealthy" fats, the result will be the same = obesity. The unhealthy fats will just have additional confounding effects on obesity, but the healthy fats will not prevent obesity.

So, on this blog, excess fat consumption, of any kind, is not advised. Sugar disrupts blood glucose raising bolus insulin levels. Excess fat must be stored, raising basal insulin levels. Raising of insulin levels further deteriorates blood glucose homeostasis, perpetuating metabolic syndrome.

4. Kids are obese because of sugar consumption.

Though this is a complex subject, with many nuances, the bottom line is that kids are obese, because something in interfering with their normal blood glucose regulation. Many things can do this besides sugar. Other dietary factors such as fat, starch and snacking contribute to this problem. Still, there are even other factors aside from diet such as interruptions in circadian cycles, not enough exercise and medications which also have a hand in this problem.

5. Kids are not getting enough of the fat they need to grow.

Yes they are. They get so much of it that they are growing outwards, as well as upwards. Children need protein to grow. We know this, because it has been extensively studied. There is always a correlation between small stature and weaker children in countries that are protein starved.

No one in Western society is "fat starved", much less kids. Believe me, everyone is getting plenty of their share of fat. Very few people in this society have ever followed a true low fat diet. They followed a low saturated fat diet, but not a low fat diet. They followed a low protein diet, but not a low fat diet. This is precisely why low fat diets have failed. Low fat diets are actually very difficult to follow, so few people have ever truly followed one.

Food manufacturers simply swapped saturated fat for polyunsaturated "vegetable" oils, but fat, by any other name, is still fat just the same and so will you become. So, don't get caught up in this "keto" myth that the world is "fat starved". The world is protein starved, not fat starved. Chairs, beds and pants can attest to that, if they could only speak. He who is "fat starved" can simply eat from his own behind.

6. Can "keto" affect sleep?

Some people have a hard time going to sleep and/or staying asleep, while on a very low carb diet, like a ketogenic diet. Others even experience sleep walking, nightmares or other sleep disturbances. There are many reasons attributed to this problem. All of which are not well understood. On this blog, we try to stay focused on what is understood - the stress response.

Going into ketosis is a stressor, for the body, period. It doesn't matter what any online "keto" guru states. It doesn't matter what any "keto" group claims. The body can care less about what any of these people say. It only reacts, as it was meant to, and ketosis has always been a trigger for stress in the body.

Ketosis is a state that the body develops when it is starving. That's how it evolved. So, ketone presence is always a signal to the body that it is starving, whether or not that's truly the case. This causes a stress response, which activates adrenal counter regulation (stress hormones) and these hormones can be quite nasty, depending on your metabolic state. People who have a compromised metabolic state, where the body has a difficult time producing its own glucose when needed and produces an excess of it when it doesn't, already have an abnormal stress hormone response, which overly stimulates the central nervous system. This means they have a dysregulated sympathetic nervous system, amongst other abnormalities, which produce many uncomfortable symptoms, from any event that can cause stress (illness, blood glucose disturbances, injury and yes, ketosis). This can interrupt sleep, cause nervousness/anxiety, increase depression and interfere in blood glucose regulation, all of which do not better your metabolic health, but worsen it instead.

To reduce these symptoms, or avoid them all together, a well formulated ketogenic diet must be followed. This includes the consumption of adequate protein, tracking of electrolytes, keeping fasts short (no longer than 16 -18 hours), eating enough (no one meal a day - OMAD - protocols) and not over exercising, but still exercising enough to keep normal hormonal expression. All of these, combined, eliminate or help reduce the stress response. The only ketogenic protocol that this blog recognizes is from Virta Health.

For some people, their stress response never lowers. These people should avoid very low carbohydrate diets, because even though they are beneficial for metabolic health and weight loss, they aren't necessary. Low to moderate low carb diets work, just as well, as long as the carbohydrates are whole and not in the form of sugar or grains. These people will also have to shorten their fasts even more, to only 12 hours, overnight. Every other recommendation (protein, electrolytes, exercise) remains the same.