All post are my opinion, which come from my experiences, and may be different from yours. All of us have differences, but lets face it, all of have more similarities than not. 🙂
I met the love of my life a few years after I left the Navy. Since I was a Navy man, I had to do what I thought were manly things, like smoke and drink, you know, unhealthy things. Its amazing how a good Woman makes you want to stop being stupid, and start caring for yourself and her. So that’s what I did. I stopped smoking, I started eating “healthy”, and I started drinking “healthy”. Well, at least I thought I did.
Some numbers. Before becoming “Healthy” I weighed 180 lbs, and was around 18% body fat. I stopped smoking, which I absolutely have no regrets about. I switched to drinking diet soda or pop, and also drank sports drinks if I didn’t want soda. I also ate “healthy” meals from sandwich shops and pizza with salads. Close to 6 months after all this “healthy” eating and drinking, and non smoking, I was close to 240 lbs, slightly over, and over 30% BF. I thought it was because I quit smoking and I assumed I could work it off at the gym or by jogging. I switched to smaller meals and more “healthy” whole grain breads. I worked out as hard as I could, often injuring my knees, shoulders and or back. I blamed it on getting older, I had turned 30 not too long before.
I started to try dieting. I found that a calorie in doesn’t equal a calorie out, yet that is what almost every diet uses to achieve weight loss. Almost all of them work in the beginning too, but then my body just finds a way back. I, like most people, would get discouraged and go on to the next thing. Its a vicious cycle, and it can be hard on you mentally and physically. The truth (my opinion) is that all calorie restrictive diets will fail, unless they deal with regulating hormones. If you don’t lower insulin, you are never going to lower your Body Fat. You may loose weight because of a calorie restrictive diet, but I strongly doubt you loose body fat, in fact, I would bet in a lot of cases BF % goes up just because overall weight has gone down.
So how did I gain so much weight and fat by eating healthy. 1. Stopping smoking has a way of making you want to eat more often. Eating more often makes your body produce more insulin. 2. I started drinking chemical sweeteners (diet soda) that tricked my body into producing insulin, even though there wasn’t a rise in blood sugar. Yay! I got to store more fat because there was no sugar to drive down, and diet soda make me hungry a few minutes after I drink it. 3. I ate more often, even though they were smaller meals, it still messed up my hormones. 4. I switched to breads that have a higher glycemic  index than sugar does. All because I was told they were healthy. The good old food pyramid, or better named, the fooled you pyramid. 5. If I wasn’t drinking diet soda, I was drinking sports drinks, because they have elctrolytes and stuff. (That stuff is mostly sugar)
Fast forward almost 10 years, Â after reading about different diets and carb cycling and thermogenic supplements that rev up your metabolism, to finally the question of why? Â Why is my generation the most obese yet? Why do we have more diabetics than every before? Why is heart disease still increasing after a all out attack on FAT? Â What did generations before us do differently? Years of reading blogs from Bio hackers, natural nutritionist, research about MCT’s helping treat premature babies and Alzheimer disease, I came to the conclusion that we are jacking ourselves up. My Great Grandparents had butter, whole milk, and very little if any processed vegetable oils. If you would ask them how you get fat, they would tell you sugar and starchy foods. They were right, but if they had chemical artificial sweeteners, I think they could have added that to the list. Our generation has to look hard to find the whole milk, butter is hidden behind the hydrogenated oil AKA margarine, Â and if you buy anything that doesn’t say “low fat” you risk the chance of somebody telling you how “unhealthy” for you it is.
So I did something I thought was pretty stupid at the time. I started eating as much FAT as I could. A stick of butter in a day, olive oils, Coconut oils, and as much beef and green veggies as I could handle. I overdid the oils a few times and found myself sitting on the toilet a little too often at first, but I became used to it (not the toilet, but eating MCT’s). I fasted for 12 to 16 hours most days, but yet I ate more calories in a day than I did in a week on some of the diets I tried. I lost FAT. I lost a lot of it in about a month from 230lbs to 210lbs and over 30% to right at 20%, but then I stayed there, didn’t go up or down. So I did more research, I mainly started searching Ketogenic diets, and how to get into ketosis. I looked back at my diet and realized, I ate too many carbs to put myself into full ketosis, but with intermittent fasting I was reducing my insulin levels. I found exogenous ketones that claimed ketosis in less than 59 minutes. I tried them. They worked. I am below 190 lbs now, but my BF is close to 10%. I can fast and use KETO//OS if I want to go bel0w 10%, but I feel my best right around where I am now.
