Ten Week Update, Thoughts on Florida, the Cholesterol Myth, and a new Trailblazer added...

Ten weeks on this WOE and I thought I should share some new insights that have been impacting my thoughts about the High fat, low carb way of eating. (HFLC WOE).

I'm in the midst of a very heavy workload right now with tons of travel, and large kettle corn events almost every weekend for the past 6 weeks. I'm in Jacksonville FL this week, training at Blount Island Marine Corps Supply Facility. It is a pleasure to work with our military personnel and I have the opportunity to observe the great work that these people do to ensure our security.

Despite my heavy travel schedule, and my crazy weekend schedule, I'm holding up and have experienced strength and vitality on this WOE. A couple minor bugs have come through the home over the past couple months and this is normal with 3 boys in school and the change in weather from high heat/humidity, to cooler Fall temperatures. I have avoided each illness, despite the wear-and-tear and fatigue of my current schedule. Thankfully, November should calm things down as I'm currently only scheduled for 2 trips, and 2 kettle corn events.

I am holding at 229 lbs, but have noticed that on this trip I have been slacking on my diet and allowing some carb-creep. Carb-creep occurs when you make little concessions to yourself to allow things that you know are high-carb. E.g. As a frequent traveler I have a few perks that come with various chains. Here in Jacksonville, my hotel gives their frequent guests access to a lounge that is stocked with: fruit (not tempting), soda (not tempting), coffee/hot chocolate from a machine (yuck), and a freezer display full of every conceivable ice cream treat (VERY TEMPTING). I'm a huge fan of all things ice cream. Last night I went to the lounge for no good purpose...just to "look around". Truthfully, the woman at check-in mentioned a stocked ice-cream display and that had been on my mind all evening.

After a fairly healthy chicken dinner from Pollo Tropical, (had a little of their sauces on the chicken and a couple plantains (major carbs in those plantains...might as well be sticks of sugar!!) my mind kept reminding me that just upstairs, a few seconds away, was ice cream. So, I confess, my little visit to "look around" was a recipe for failure. I ended up back in my room with my contraband...two mint chocolate ice cream bars coated in a thick chocolate shell. They tasted absolutely heavenly! I examined the label and then began to try to justify going back upstairs for another visit to "look around"...AGAIN. Thankfully, I managed to get myself under control but I expect to experience the same desire to go wandering upstairs again tonight. You see, for the previous 3 years I have rewarded myself and dealt with the emotional pain of being separated from my wife and kids by eating in the evenings...often ice cream. This is the definition of "emotional eating" and I need to be very careful not to slip into this habit, especially after last night. When I feel down, sad, angry, lonely, discouraged etc., I decide I "need" a treat, and ice cream is my favorite. Perhaps it isn't just me? It seems every hotel now has a little ice cream freezer in the lobby where you can purchase the delightful Ben and Jerry's or some other sweet concoction. To be fair, ice cream is probably less damaging than alcohol, drugs, or other vices that people use to self-medicate when they are feeling low. The solution that I need to get back to this evening is a high-fat meal (chicken last night was too lean), followed by an early bedtime. This cuts down on the loneliness and provides less opportunity to sit alone and feel sorry for oneself. Tonight it is back to a ribeye steak and an early bedtime.

While I have intentionally avoided exercise of any kind over the past 10 weeks, I am going to do 3 light weight routines this week. It isn't that I'm going to try to lose more weight. This experiment has taught me that exercise is almost useless when it comes to losing weight. If you need to know why, go to the "Trailblazers" page and read the section on William Banting. I just feel like lifting weight and since this hotel has a nice large fitness room, I am going to do some light weight lifting with dumbbells and see how it goes.

Speaking of exercise, I have noticed that many seem to be getting really involved in the extreme aerobic activities, and/or marathons. A cautionary tale from yesterday when two marathoners collapsed while running a marathon in Toronto. I believe one victim was in his 40's and one was in his 20's. I haven't heard an update, but both were basically dead until rescuers shocked the heart back to life. Here is a link to the story:
2015 Toronto Marathon Runners Collapse-Critical Condition

A couple of thoughts on Florida:

1. I know that many, many people absolutely love Florida. I'm not one of them. I have traveled extensively throughout the US and Canada and I have to say that Florida ranks right near the bottom of my list of favorite states. Reason #1 is the weather. Now I know that many people dream of moving to Florida for the weather, but to me it is just too much heat, too much humidity, too many swampy lagoons, and the absolute lack of the Fall season (which is my absolute favorite). While much of the country enjoys the spectacular Fall colors, Florida is blah...swamps, bugs, lizards, snakes, sunshine, thunderstorms, downpours, humidity, repeat...and speaking of lizards. I left the classroom at on my lunch break today for a short stroll in the beautiful sunshine. Humidity actually wasn't too bad and there was a nice breeze. As I crested a small knoll on the path, I glanced to my left and there...at the edge of the water, was a great example of why Florida is not a personal favorite. To give this guy credit, he quickly left me and jumped into the water, but it just seems wrong for a reptile of this size to be just hanging out near a public path. I told my students about my encounter and they just shrugged and said, "They're everywhere..." Well, isn't that special...how nice. Must be interesting walking your dog when just being in the wrong place at the wrong time and oops, there goes Fido, right down the gullet. 

1. Homeless people everywhere. I know it is reasonable for the homeless to gravitate to the warmth of Florida, but it seems you can't go anywhere in Florida without being solicited or accosted by a homeless person that has "their story" about why they need $4.50 for their mother's diabetes medicine etc. etc. Now I don't want to appear callous, but when you are repeatedly solicited, it just gets old and tiresome, and depressing, and sometimes dangerous. I used to give to the homeless people, but in Florida you can't afford to...they're everywhere.
2. While there are extremely high-end areas of Florida, much of the state is run-down and just plain depressing. For every West Palm Beach-like mega-mansion-filled neighborhoods, there are dozens and dozens of run-down slums. 

So, sorry to rain on all the Florida-lovers...but you can keep this state. I'll suffer through the heat/humidity of a few months in Virginia, and enjoy the gloriously cool Fall weather with the amazing colors of the Blue Ridge Mountains in October.

To close this post I want to share some stunning information that just blows my mind. I have spent the past few months reading, studying, cross-checking studies related to this WOE and my recent discoveries about the role of cholesterol in the human body has been life-changing. The research is simply overwhelming and it is diametrically opposed to the prevailing medical advice which strictly advocates lowering cholesterol in the body to avoid heart problems. I'm going to list several quotes from a book that is full of revolutionary thinking about diet, and that blows the lid off the scam that has lined the pockets of the drug companies to the tune of billions of dollars (over $900 billion in 2011) worth of statin drugs...and probably killed a multitude by depriving their bodies of life-sustaining cholesterol. Here is the book, by Nina Teicholz. The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet

The following quotes regarding cholesterol come directly from her book which is extremely well-documented with a wide variety of studies that all go against the prevailing medical theory that cholesterol is damaging to the heart.

Here is a very interesting study to compare a tribe eating high fat vs. a tribe eating very low fat...both in the same geographic area in Africa.

"Decades before George Mann arrived in Kenya, the British government commissioned scientists in 1926 to compare the Masai to a neighboring tribe, the Akikuyu. They had lived side by side for many generations, in “very similar”conditions, according to the researchers. However, whereas the Masai ate mainly animal foods, the Akikuyu subsisted on a near-vegetarian diet that was very low in fat, with the “great bulk”of their food consisting of “cereals, tubers, plantains, legumes, and green leaves.”Investigators spent several years in detailed examination of 6,349 Akikuyu and 1,546 Masai adults, and in the end, found that the health of the two groups differed dramatically, though not in ways one might expect. The vegetarian Akikuyu men were found to be far more likely to suffer from bone deformities, dental caries, anemia, lung disease, ulcers, and blood disorders; the Masai were more likely to contract rheumatoid arthritis. The Masai men were on average 5 inches taller than the Akikuyu and 23 pounds heavier, and much of that extra weight was apparently muscle, since the Masai had narrower waists and broader shoulders and possessed far more muscular strength than the Akikuyu, who were generally less fit and had little capacity for manual labor.VIII"

Ever wonder why all the focus is on lowering the LDL Cholesterol instead of raising the HDL Cholesterol (here's a hint...statins can lower LDL, but the best way to raise HDL Cholesterol is eating saturated fat from animal sources.)

"The choice to favor LDL-cholesterol over HDL-cholesterol was also probably fueled by the megabillion-dollar pharmaceutical industry, which heavily favored LDL-cholesterol as a target for therapy. Drug companies had made quite a few attempts to find a drug that raised HDL-cholesterol, but those efforts had all failed. Lowering LDL-cholesterol, however, was something they could do— very well. The first such drug, lovastatin, was discovered in the 1970s, and a world of billion-dollar “statin” drugs followed from there:"

"Worldwide, statins earned $ 956 billion in 2011."

This next one is shocking...and it makes me angry that women are repeatedly told that a low-fat diet is healthy. For my wife, my mother, my sisters, my daughters-in-laws, my granddaughters...I hope you will consider the benefits of adding fat to your diet!

"Yet although these results were unpopular, they were not an anomaly: other trials have also found that women on low-fat diets tend to see their HDL-cholesterol fall by about a third more than do men.XVI In Knopp’s trial, women also saw their triglycerides rise more. And whatever the low-fat diet’s benefits—notably, its power to reduce LDL-cholesterol—these tend to happen less in women. Knopp summed up all these gender differences in a review paper in 2005, concluding that the low-fat diet could not really be recommended for women, and that they might consider exploring “alternative dietary interventions”instead. Maybe women need a diet lower in carbohydrates and higher in fat, Knopp suggested. Knopp’s study could very well have been a watershed. After it came out, experts might have alerted women to the possibility, at least, that adopting a low-fat diet was, for them, a premature and inadvertently harmful piece of advice. Women, after all, have been shown to be especially conscientious about reducing calories since the 1970s, and according to government data, have cut back on fat and saturated fat more strictly than have men. Knopp’s findings implied that women were actually betraying their health by eating a low-fat diet. And yet among the nutrition elite there was no reckoning with these disturbing implications. Most women didn’t know—and still don’t know—that a low-fat diet may possibly increase their risk for heart disease." 

Everyone on both sides of the argument agrees on one thing: High HDL is good for your heart. However, notice how few people are aware that the best thing you can do (and the easiest thing) to raise your HDL is eat saturated fat from animal products...high-fat dairy, butter, fatty beef etc.

"Nutrition experts also ignored the research showing that what raised HDL-cholesterol more effectively than anything else was not red wine or exercise, as we commonly think, but saturated fat. Eating animal fat was found to raise HDL-cholesterol and was the only food known to do so. “This is an important issue. Neglect of the saturated-fat-induced rise in HDL-cholesterol has made saturated fat (in general) look worse than it really is,”Meir Stampfer, a nutritional epidemiologist at the Harvard University School of Public Health, wrote in 2004. A growing number of researchers agree with this view, yet in the 1990s, when these highly uncomfortable discoveries by Knopp and others were just coming out, the predominant response to anyone who raised the topic of HDL-cholesterol and the low-fat, high-carbohydrate diet was basically to cough politely and look elsewhere."

Well, that's all for today. I'm absolutely loving Nina's book and I will post more in the days to come about more "secrets" that the drug manufacturers don't want you to know, including this: Children need to eat more fat...not less! Until next time...wishing you BBB (Butter, Bacon, and Beef...3 of my favorite things in life!)