When Dr. Peter Attia, one of my top Health Sherpas, is about to go into an extended fast, such as a three-day or seven-day water-only fast, he has found that a week of nutritional ketosis on either side of the fast makes it much easier.
He calls it a Nothingburger: the “meat” in the middle (the fast) is literally nothing, and it’s sandwiched between two slices of ketosis. Being in ketosis when starting a fast means his body is already using ketones because he has been consuming high levels of fat, very few carbs and a modest amount of protein.
So when he switches to fasting (the “nothing” part of the burger), he’s already in fat-burning mode, and his body smoothly moves from using the fats he’s been eating to using his stored body fat.
No wild fluctuations in blood sugar. No carb cravings. And when breaks his fast, he resumes his ketogenic diet, which helps prevent refeeding syndrome.
You can accomplish a lot metabolically without engaging in these longer fasts. We’ll discuss fasting and time-restricted eating in #BodyBabyStep Four.
But for now, as you’re getting started in your body makeover, another gastronomical metaphor will be more helpful.
Nothingburger vs. Satiety Sandwich
It’s helpful to think of the first three #BodyBabySteps as a Satiety Sandwich, but unlike the Nothingburger you “eat” them all at once.
All three are essential. Without stopping sugar and cutting carbs, your insulin will stay high and won’t lose weight. And if you don’t embrace filling dietary fats, your hunger hormones will eventually wear down your willpower, and you’ll overeat the carbs.
Filling fats from healthy natural sources such as beef, poultry, fish, dairy, eggs, olive oil, avocados and nuts will help you feel satisfied so you can resist the sugar and carbohydrate cravings.
So unlike Dave Ramsey’s financial baby steps or the three stages of the Nothingburger, you don’t take the first three #BodyBabySteps one at a time.
They’re a delicious and satisfying package. With filling fats you can drive the sugar and carbs toward Nothing.
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Until recently I haven’t really made use of Twitter threads or pinned tweets.
That changed a few weeks back when a friend commented on a post, saying “Lee — I want to know your plan!” So I wrote a post summarizing the top 20 weight loss and health tips I wish I had known 20 years ago.
I had seen lots of people using Twitter threads, or tweetorials as the doctors call them, and so I decided to convert that post into my first thread, which I pinned at the top of my profile.
I’ve become a fan of the format.
In essence it transforms Twitter, a microblogging platform, into a full-fledged blog. It lets people get more of the content little-by-little, without leaving Twitter.
These threads are a nice in-between way to summarize what’s in a blog post, reaching a bigger audience with more of the message, while still leaving something for those who want to click through and read (or watch) more.
I’m also gratified that Dr. Unwin and Dr. Noakes engaged with the threads, and that I was added to The Noakes Foundation Twitter list, which I’m now following for low-carb, high fat (LCHF) lifestyle information.
This increased activity and engagement led to a good-natured challenge last Friday from someone who goes by the handle @OftenContrarian:
Post up some pictures of your results. A lot of people on here preach special diets, supplements and exercise. Most of them look very average.
You can click through the time stamp on that tweet to see my response.
I do have some shirtless “before” pictures that would show quite a contrast, but let’s just say they’re not unseeable.
Often Contrarian’s challenge got me thinking, though, that another way of making the changes more vivid would be to take a picture now in my “before” dress pants.
Unfortunately, these aren’t my biggest. I had topped out at a 40-inch waist, but I sold all of those at a garage sale a couple of years ago. I wish I had saved a pair.
These are the 38-inchers:
I felt a major sense of accomplishment when I could get into pants with a 36-inch waist.
My waist was 34 inches when I graduated high school 40 years ago. I wouldn’t have thought it possible I could fit into those again.
Here’s my newest pair of jeans:
I’m not posting to boast, but to encourage YOU.
Four years ago I weighed more than 260 pounds.
I probably committed some kind of traffic offense by listing my weight as 250 on my driver’s license.
But at least if it was a moving violation, it was a slow-moving one.
I had tried to lose weight through exercise and the scale had barely budged. I had no idea if it was even possible for me to do it.
My Health Journey has links to posts that tell my whole story, and my wife Lisa’s, if you’re interested.
One thing you might gain through reading some of those posts is an appreciation that if we can do this, you can do this.
And while it definitely has involved making some different choices and giving up some things, it’s totally worth it.
But this is about you, not us. I want to make it as simple and straightforward as possible for you to achieve your health and weight loss goals.
That’s why I’ve distilled what we’ve learned, and how we would do it differently if we were starting over again, into the #BodyBabySteps page.
A lot of the posts you’ll find linked there include videos featuring some of my Sherpas, including those I mentioned above. These are the experts from whom we’ve learned so much, and they’ve been on the journey longer than we have.
Tomorrow I’ll write about how the first three #BodyBabySteps go together and reinforce each other.
Dr. Peter Brukner, an Australian physician, was inspired in 2012 by his friend, Prof. Tim Noakes, who I profiled yesterday, to try a three-month experiment with a low-carb, high-fat diet. Here was Dr. Brukner’s “before” photo:
Dr. Brukner is second from right, with an ample platform on which to rest his arms.
In just three months he lost 14% of his body weight, along with other impressive results.
In the video embedded at the bottom of this post from the Low Carb Down Under YouTube channel, Dr. Brukner describes how his personal experience inspired him to dig into the research behind dietary recommendations. It revolutionized his thinking and medical practice.
I’ve pulled out some teaser quotes from Dr. Brukner below, and interspersed with some of his slides, in hopes you will check out the whole video.
“What happened? The first thing is I stopped being hungry.”
“The more fat I ate, the more fat I lost.”
“Not a bad 13 weeks work, eh? What would people pay for a pill that did that? 100 bucks a week? Probably more. There is no pill. And yet I did it so easily.”
“So basically, everything we’ve been doing for the last 40 or 50 years, the way the whole of western society has been eating, is based on a fraud. No scientific evidence for it at all.”
“Type 2 diabetes! What is it? It’s a disease of carbohydrate intolerance…. So your lecturer asks you, ‘Well, what do you think the recommended diet would be for a type 2 diabetic who’s carbohydrate intolerant?’ Duh! And what is the current recommended diet for type 2 diabetic? Low-fat, high-carbohydrate diet! We were so obsessed about fat, all based on fraud, for 50 years, that we put type 2 diabetics on a low-fat, high-carbohydrate diet. So someone who’s carbohydrate intolerant, we’re telling him to have lots of carbohydrates! ‘It’s OK, you can just take more medications and then get on to insulin!’ …. Honestly!…It just does not make any sense at all!”
Dr. Brukner and Dr. Noakes are among my Health Sherpas, a group from whom I’ve learned much and drawn great inspiration and encouragement. I’m grateful for the leadership of these guides. Their collective wisdom and insights have given my wife Lisa and me confidence to make lifestyle changes that have been immensely beneficial.
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Check out My Health Journey for the full story of our health improvements, and my #BodyBabySteps for an approach to how I would do it if I were starting today, based on what I’ve learned.
Professor Tim Noakes had a long career in sports medicine and exercise science at the University of Capetown in South Africa, and for several decades was aligned with the orthodoxy that athletes depend on carbohydrates for peak performance.
He even was an inventor of a commercial glucose goo used by marathon runners, and was an advocate for carbohydrate loading. He invested 30 years of his research career on the pro-carbohydrate side.
Then he dug into the research on low-carb, high fat diets and came to the conclusion he had been wrong.
It’s difficult to admit publicly that you have been wrong for three decades.
It’s even harder when you face withering public rebukes from colleagues and former allies, and even professional license revocation.
Professor Noakes is a giant figure with immense courage to have done so. This documentary tells the story of his trial in South Africa when he was accused of giving irresponsible and harmful medical advice via Twitter.
We all should feel indebted to him for his fortitude. He is of course one of my Health Sherpas.
Conventional and government-backed wisdom have said for more than 50 years that dietary fats, and especially saturated fats, are dangerous and increase the risk of heart disease.
Professor Noakes and other low-carb proponents have argued that evidence is lacking in the case against dietary fat, and that consumption of carbohydrates that exceeds our tolerance is instead responsible for increased prevalence of the metabolic syndrome and a host of associated diseases, including type 2 diabetes and heart disease.
As he says in the video below, “We can’t both be right.”
If you have any doubts as to whether a low-carb, high healthy fat diet is better supported by science than the current low-fat dogma, you owe it to yourself to watch this video.
Here’s just one slide from his talk, in which he describes a study that showed that a high-fat diet reduced all coronary disease risk factors across the board as compared with a high-carbohydrate diet.
When you see a study showing 14 of 14 risk factors changing for the better with a high-fat diet, you should at least consider whether the science really justifies the current low-fat government guidance.
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Most of what Tim Ferriss recommended in his Slow-Carb diet aligns with what Lisa and I have found to be effective for weight loss and health.
I no longer eat beans daily as he suggests, and we don’t do the cheat days every week either. We have occasional pizza nights, perhaps twice a month, and we enjoy holiday meals to the fullest without guilt or regret.
One Ferris tip I’ve continued to follow to this day, however, was his suggestion to “Eat the same few meals over and over again.”
What that really means from my perspective is that I need to identify some go-to meals I can make at any time, and which I know will be satisfying.
Doing that has an extra benefit of making it a lot easier to skip meals and move toward intermittent fasting, #BodyBabyStep Four.
And because I don’t have to overthink my meal choices, I’m not spending time focused on thinking about food. That reduces temptation. I can just pick one of my standbys and know I will be satisfied.
Here are some of my favorites.
Top Choice: Scrambled Eggs
I probably have this at least five times a week. My concoction typically includes four eggs and some kind of meat (bacon, diced ham, sausage or steak) cooked in grass-fed butter or bacon grease. I usually add guacamole and a few Brazil nuts, and lately have been including cream cheese, too.
Last week for the first time I decided to count the macronutrients in this hearty meal. My estimate: 133g fat, 37g protein and 16g of carbs, but with 4g fiber that brings net carbs to 12. Total calories: 1,393, with 86% from fat, 11% protein and 3% carbs. Clearly ketogenic.
That may seem like a lot of calories in one meal, but because it is so filling it can often be my only meal of the day, and with almost no carbs I don’t get blood sugar spikes or crashes, and hence have no cravings.
Grilled Steaks or Bunless Burgers
Having a mini-Weber charcoal grill enables me to have delicious steaks year-round, even in December or January. Just add a few more coals to make up for the frigid outdoor air.
This whole stack wasn’t for me. We had company.
I have come to appreciate fattier cuts like ribeye, and whereas I previously would have trimmed off the fat thinking it was a healthy choice, now I do my best to eat the whole thing. Fat is our friend.
I typically grill an extra steak and then save it in the refrigerator, cutting it up to put in my eggs for the next two or three days.
For a lower-cost option, I grill four burgers with bacon and cheese, and eat two of them without a bun. I save the others to warm up for the next day’s meal, and that has the added benefit of reducing my thinking about food.
When I have steak or burgers I’ll often accompany with frozen broccoli warmed in the microwave, with grass-fed Kerrygold butter melted over it.
Beef Stroganoff
For this one I’m kind of at Lisa’s mercy, although I guess I could learn to make it. It’s my youngest son’s favorite, so she typically makes it when he’s home.
With regular rice it’s high in carbs, but riced cauliflower has a consistency I’ve come to find acceptable at least, and that keeps it ketogenic.
Other Favorites
Lisa has found these low-carb recipes and occasionally whips up a double batch that lasts us a few days. If she’s only cooking every two or three days that makes it easier for her as well, not having to be thinking about food constantly.
Being an empty-nester has its advantages!
Salmon Chowder
Chicken Curry Salad (leaving out the raisins)
Baked granola made from with pecans, almonds, unsweetened coconut and raw pumpkin seeds. It’s seriously addictive.
Meaty chili with cheese and sour cream
Baked cheese crisps
Every week Lisa typically tries one new recipe (often from The Everyday Ketogenic Kitchen) and if we like it she adds it to our rotation.
Filling and Tasty Dessert
As part of our last meal of the day, we’ll typically have our awesome more-than-full-fat yogurt and berries. I’m in charge of making that.
I usually have raspberries or blackberries, while Lisa prefers blueberries.
Along with the yogurt, I often have smoked string cheese and a small 85% cacao dark chocolate bar.
Lisa never has more than two meals in a day, and I rarely do.
Often we just have one, in the mid to late afternoon. My teleworking due to COVID-19 has given us more flexibility in mealtimes, enabling us to have a narrower eating window and more prolonged periods with low insulin levels.
Making it Work for You
You need to find what’s appealing to you, and that is relatively low in carbs and high in good fat. And by good fats I mean saturated and monounsaturated fats from animals, avocados, nuts and olive oil, not so-called vegetable oils, the polyunsaturated fats.
What hearty and healthy meals are your favorites? Tell us about them in the comments!
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