Breaking bread: keto-logic
Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead
Foreword If you are one of the many - replete with bad eating habits and ready to defend them - please go away. I have no interest in trying to persuade privileged overgrown children to access my insights. I have carefully and lovingly put this together. Best, then, if it is read by its intended audience - those who, with an open mind and a genuine willingness to learn, carefully and lovingly approach self-improvement. I have helped transform many peoples lives. But for every one of them, I have engaged in futile arguments with another ten media-brainwashed ego-maniac children dressed as adults. Whole days of my life I'll never get back. Save us both the hassle, please.
Many words are written on the topic of nutrition that make bold reference to recipes, foodstuffs and complicated medical terms. Here I try to engage with the reader with reference to the thing that we all best understand and face each time we prepare food – the kitchen – it’s hardware and the stuff that fills the cupboards. When I use a nutritional term, I try to explain it and its real world manifestations. Because comprehension is all. Empty your mind and stay open. Insight likes a blank page.?
Stop and think about the following paragraph after you have read it. It runs contrary to all commercial operations and so it sounds counter-intuitive. It is the core of everything that follows. It is the essence of my perspective so join me now in the early stages of the lesson;
Diet is not a behavioural issue. It is entirely an environmental one. How we behave reflects our surroundings. This is born out in every major population study and controlled experiment - from the shops that line our streets to the items that bedeck the inside of our homes.?If we give up on trying to behave better in our existing environs - and start changing the environ itself - we can rest assured that our desired outcomes will thereafter flow effortlessly.?Not behaviour. Environment. Got it?
We cannot easily control the make-up of the street outside and certainly not in the short term. Yet if we view the kitchen as a domain over which we can be master, things start to look up.?
Clarity begins at home.
About two years ago I reconfigured my kitchen with some terrific and very immediate results. Here is a snapshot of my food cupboard this morning. It contains a small range of foods in high volume. This pattern is typical of people who lose weight and successfully keep it off. It is also typical of athletes and fitness gurus. In Diet Cults, author Matt Fitzgerald identifies a handful of traits common to healthy eaters and this is one of them.?
It's a gradual thing - so if you just copy this set-up overnight from a position of high-carb consumption - you'll hit problems - namely that you'll have a cupboard full of stuff that you don't like eating. The idea is to introduce new foods and ditch old ones slowly over time to reconfigure your taste buds. Your kitchen follows suit. Yet from the outset, your kitchen has to lead.
Fibre libre
Above, you'll see high fibre everything - from brown rice to whole grain crackerbread (a bread substitute) to the ground zero of fibre - Shredded Wheat - the ONLY cereal on the market that is all good and that you can eat without monitoring volume. Fibre is like oil for your car engine. It simply runs right the way through your digestive tract and comes out in bowel movements - cleansing all your organs and bloodstream on the way. It's an absolute godsend. Period. There are no exceptions.?
Food fat is not body fat
This is a high fat treasure trove too. From tinned mackerel, kippers and sardines - the uncool larder fare of yesteryear yet very, very healthy and worth getting your taste buds tuned up on. There are pecan nuts here. Fish and certain nuts deliver massive doses of good fats called Omega-3 EFA's (Essential Fatty Acids) that make your brain encode your genes to strip excess body fat from you (regardless of exercise) and to inform your nervous system that you do not feel hungry (regardless of how long it is since you last ate).?
The word "essential" in this context veers away from its meaning in common parlance. It is a medical term which refers to the fact that these fatty acids, although required, are some of the few that your body is incapable of making for itself or substituting with the consumption of like-for-likes. Think about blood. You don't drink it but your body makes it from the other stuff you do consume. But EFA's need eating because your body cannot make them from composites. Iron puts oxygen into your blood which goes all round your body. Iron is essential. So eat it then. It's not rocket science. Vitamin D (sunlight, dairy) etc. You get the picture.
Oil slick
Teas. Noodles. Oils. Polenta. Miso soup. Sushi home-rolling ingredients and hardware. And coconut oils. If you cook with coconut and olive oils you are instantly healthier on the inside. They contain lauric acid and MCT's (Mid Chain Triglycerides or "good cholesterols"). This means you are giving high blood pressure, heart disease, atherosclerosis, hypertension?and obesity the long wave goodbye. Cancer, diabetes,?dementia, Alzheimer's?too. Wow! Madness huh ??
Skip the next paragraph if you cook with coconut oil and olive oil only: job done.
Lauric acid in unrefined high-quality coconut oil is an Omega-12 fatty acid. A big piece of data that your brain receives and has it instructing your other bodily organs to make changes. Lauric acid converts to a compound called monolaurin. Four very good things happen immediately. First off, your metabolism speeds up (without you having to move around more) so you burn more excess fat and get energy boosted. Second, your hunger centres reframe themselves and align with natural laws so you only ever feel hungry when you need more data. Third-up, your heart is flooded with a fleet of the highest quality data transmission vehicles known as high-density lipoproteins. Fourthly, your immunity system changes qualitatively, reducing and eliminating your chances of picking up anything from influenza to carcinogenic free radicals. My arthritis and asthma have all but disappeared – confounding my NHS consultant who is not trained to acknowledge Omega-12 fats. After two knee operations from sports injuries, they told me?that I couldn’t run again. I was running 25 miles a month at the time. Now I’m running over 75 miles a month. Omega-12 is heart and brain hunger-free bodily energy gold in a Duracell wrap.?
Knowing that food is information – not just a dumb energy mass – is an insight to take from this. This school of nutrition is founded upon the metabolic hypothesis of food. The conventional school is built upon what is known as the energy hypothesis. Calories in. Calories out. It doesn’t work. Proof ? Look around you.
The bad guys are the good guys
When I use a phrase like "good cholesterol" I'm aware that I sound like one of the vanilla ad campaigns that I am often found criticising. Yet cholesterol has always been good for you. It is a molecule of fat that sits on a protein (like a raft) and travels through your blood (like a river) to deliver vital information to your organs. Other cholesterols travel from your outer organs back to your heart in the opposite direction. We have invented bad cholesterols that block up our main veins and arteries.?
On the whole, when you eat fat it doesn't turn to body fat. When you eat cholesterol it doesn't turn into the bad stuff that blocks your passageways. These foods are good and necessary for you. That body fat and those dangerous cholesterols are produced by your liver when you eat sugars. This process is known as lipogenesis. When I say sugars, I do not mean the stuff you put in your cup of tea (sucrose). I mean hidden ubiquitous evil. It did not start as sugar beet or sugar cane. It is an industrial compound that somehow they legally allow to be called sugar. Sweet huh? Because if there are two peacetime industries that keep the taxman in clover, its groceries and health treatment.
The culprit is always dextrose. Sometimes referred to as HFCS (High Fructose Corn Syrup). This is the name for lethal sugar that is used in all frozen and microwaveable foods, all bread, all condiments, all cakes. All fruit juices. All takeaway meals. Most breakfast cereals. Porridge. Sandwiches. All dirty killers. All absent from my kitchen for this reason. I can't eat them if they are not there.
Here's my fridge right now. It's a high fat heaven and an oasis of sugar-free water. Cheeses (Stilton, Yorkshire Blue, Lancashire Dew-Lay, Le Roule, Wensleydale), full-fat houmous, eggs, duck rillettes, stuffed peppers with feta and couscous, broccoli, carrots and grass-fed butter. Only blue top milk. Why on earth remove glorious body-stripping brain-feeding nerve-loving fat from your milk ?
An important note on bread & butter
The Inuit tribes of North America and Russia eat butter sticks off slabs. They have one of the lowest (nearly zero) rates of heart disease and obesity on the whole spinning planet. Like my wedges of full-fat cheese, there's a cruel truth you're gonna have to ride. So deal with it now. Very high-fat foods such as grass-fed butter and grass-fed cheese are very good for you. Unless you add bread. Then their chemistry alters and they become very bad for you. Soybeans are subject to the same rule. A lump of butter and a slab of cheese is healthy. A buttered cheese sandwich is A&E express by the time you are sixty and when it's too late it's too late. Make the change now. The breadbin does not sit on your worktop. It is on the floor in the corner and accepts all other trash too. Sandwich is just a town in Kent.
Fats do not like carbs. Fats are our salvation but carbs contaminate. This chemistry presents us with an ultimatum, informing our kitchens of their only sane response. Accept this and the opportunities are boundless. Get to work on this cognition. Natural health does not mix with industrial food. Your call. I know this is a big ask. Saying farewell to an old habit deeply embedded within our culture is never gonna be "easy". But it's easier than you think. Pure magic is your reward (See GNG and keto-logic further down).
My kitchen is bread free and not a crumb and that includes brown bread. I love bread. Yet I love me more. Bread-lessness is the hardest part of the environmental makeover I am recommending. So strap on a pair and read on.?
Time heals.?Although I still love my taste memories of bread I don’t miss it. It is no longer on my mind. I’m just saying that this was the hardest part of the journey for me at the outset.
Kerrygold is an organic grass-fed butter. Get stocked up. Never eat margarine. It is an industrial invention from wartime when we had no butter. It is entirely toxic (vegetable oils) and will have you dementia’d up good and fast in your latter years. Just end it. Like removing a band-aid. Right off! Ignore the packaging which is bordering criminal with it’s “Omega 3” claims. Heroin. With added fruit. Part of your 5-a-day! Yeah yeah. Ker-ching.
You are what the animal?you eat ate
Grass-fed animals deliver healthy meat and dairy that isn't loaded with corn polyunsaturates that will ruin your health. Real grass-fed milk is a vitamin, calcium and full-fat creamy work of art. Even if you don't drink dairy milk, try and steer clear of the latest alternative doing the rounds. Soya is a PUFA 6 (polyunsaturated fatty acid with a double carbon bond six links from the end of the carbon chain). This is really bad for you. This is one of the bad fats that you need to avoid. Although fats are naturally good for you by default, we have introduced bad ones and this is such an example. It will make you put weight on and block up your arteries too. Soy blocks mineral absorption. Soy inhibits protein digestion. Soy hammers your thyroid gland with big adverse weight-gain consequences. Soy promotes unopposed oestrogen. The soybean producers are hawkish multi-billion dollar businesses like soft drink sweetener producers and I dare not name them nor give this point it's own paragraph and sub-heading (that's why it's hiding in the animal feed section) because last time I did they came at me with their keyword tracking PR armies hammering out the old "toxic sludge is good for you" mantra. They have the finances of a small first world nation and they mean business. They churn this product out with powerful marketing teams to catch you off-balance with ill-founded and devious health implications. Don't be fooled.?
The ONLY scenario where soy milk is OK is when your Omega-3 to Omega-6 ratio is 3:1 or higher AND you are carb free. In other words, aside of geeks like me, it isn't. Stay clear. This is all well documented and not that controversial. The marketing boys are busy having you believe otherwise - so if it reads a little radical - that is all that's going down. The wool pull.?
Proteus
Both the above shots are riddled with high protein products. Each fish tin contains a massive 20 grammes of protein. Eggs contain so much protein that if you left them to their own devices they'd hatch, sprout legs and start ambling around in the form of full blown chickens. The yellow bits are just as good as the white. If you heard otherwise, switch your media. Nuts are protein rich. Protein feeds your muscles just like fat feeds your brain and nervous system. With a healthy muscle mass, you'll burn calories in your sleep. No need to look like a meathead. Even slim lean muscles are a metabolic paradise and you'll be happier and healthier for it.
Don't think muscles just give you a certain "look" or allow you to be strong in a physical sense. They each are little ovens (mitochondria) that assist with breathing and energy burn. They are working when you sleep at night, burning the excess body fat off you - much as most people imagine the act of jogging or running does - even though jogging and running do?not, in fact, do this - that's just a line spun by the big gym chains and sportswear manufacturers and sports drink producers. To date, I have run 375 miles this calendar year with many weeks out blighted by injury. So I should know. (Running is great for injuring yourself. No argument from me there.)
Coming to fruition
Everyone who knows me is familiar with my legendary fruit bowls. It's like a harvest festival in here all year round. Avocado. Cantaloupe melons. Oranges. Pears. Tomatoes. Apples. Kiwis. Bananas. Organic bliss. Organic means the food you eat doesn't have the pesticides, hormones and fertilisers on it that gives you cancer later up the road. It's that simple.?
I'm having problems with my browser loading some shots onto this article right now but to check out my fruit cornucopias just visit my articles on BigSugar and Food that are archived both here and on my blog The Cognition Den. When a version of this post hits The Den later it will have all the shots on I originally intended.?
Fruit delivers all the micronutrients (minerals and vitamins) you need and just like the milk in my fridge it is one of the very few places where you can enjoy tasty sweet sugars that don't harm you. Lactose and whole fruit fructose. That's it. Beyond this, all sugars are lethal. So this is the real go-to deal. Honey is surrounded by stinging bees for a very good reason. The sugar cane plant, all vegetables and all fruit are all bound up with fibre for another very good reason.
Nutrients give you clear skin, truer eye colour, full-bodied hair, less wrinkles. You know, ladies and gents – all the stuff you’re spending a fortune on in the chemist that doesn’t quite achieve. It’s right here for free and the authentic deal. Make-up is just that. It makes you?look?younger. The thing is, it ain't true. It is "making it up". Good nutrition is genuine youthfulness. You?are younger when you eat well long-term.
Free will cost you
Avoid fat-free foods. Fat is essential for your mental health and physical health. Unless you are Celiac, avoid gluten-free foods. Gluten is neutral yet many vital grains that house vitamin D, calcium, manganese and potassium come with Gluten and fibres bound up in them. You wouldn't walk around with a white stick if you didn't suffer visual impairment. Gluten sympathisers that one is for you. Doh! The gluten-free marketers are unscrupulous. But come on, don't tell me this is news. Money is money and they make it.?
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Should you be diabetic later in life or have dementia or Alzheimers - guess what? You're then yet another huge money opportunity to BigPharma that sells copious amounts of "treatment" drugs to the NHS to keep your low-quality life extended?and to keep them rolling in dollars. Again, don't tell me you hadn't figured. It just means that they ain't got your back. Gary to the rescue, huh ?
Feel the heat
Use heat to cook. Your microwave is not the oven you have been calling it. It does not apply heat to food. It leaves the food hot by sending radiation through it, smashing up the atomic structure of its subjects. If you eat nuclear-powered food and you then act all shocked when you get any number of hideous diseases later in life - well, need I go on ?
Freeze! At ease.
If you regularly eat food that is so processed with toxins that it is capable of being long-term frozen, defrosted and then nuclear radiated by the microwave such that it then winds up resembling and tasting like real food - and then you act all shocked when you get any number of hideous diseases later in life - well, need I go on ? Fish have gills not fingers. Hamburgers are people from Germany.
No shots of my freezer or microwave on here. My freezer is empty. I don't own a microwave "oven". I only own a freezer because it is welded onto my fridge.?
This is ketogenics and nutrigenomics
Yeah, there are some fancy long words in good nutrition. But you needn't be an expert. How about this as a rule of thumb: Don't eat with your mouth. Eat with your brain.?
There is no need to do loads of exercise. There is no need to check the volume or frequency of your food consumption. None of this has much impact on your weight, hunger, health or state of mind. I'm not nuts. Almonds are nuts.
If the volume and frequency of food consumption have any contribution to make to your weight, hunger, health or state of mind, how come everyone who eats more food more often is getting bigger, hungrier, less healthy and more stressed while at the same time everyone who eats less food less often is getting bigger, hungrier, less healthy and more stressed too ? Come on. Out with it, Einstein. I'm intrigued.?
Calorie counting is the favourite pastime of people trying and failing to get healthy. To count calories is to make the latest move in a game whose rules have been designed by the carb manufacturers. Only the quality of food is all. It really is all there is to it. I'm not quoting many books today. That's because I'm speaking from long term personal experience. And yes, it really annoys me when I think of what is happening. There is not one human on earth that is not highly precious and utterly valuable and truly deserving of the happy life that nature intended. There are no exceptions.?
Look away now
Imagine going to your GP because smoking cigarettes is making you ill. Instead of advising that you stop smoking she tells you to carry on smoking but to count the cigarettes and only smoke ten a day. She also gives you an oxygen mask and tells you to wear it three times a day. Oh yeah baby. The system is so riddled with commercial corruption that this seemingly ridiculous analogy perfectly describes what modern NHS diabetic treatments and high profit clubs like Weightwatchers are actually all about.?
Think about it. Sugars make your body produce insulin in order for your liver to survive the sugar rush. When you eat so much sugar in your lifetime that your insulin producing organ (pancreas) shuts down forever (diabetes) your doctor, rather than telling you to stop eating sugar (which could now kill you), suggests you continue to eat it and she also gives you your own insulin injection kit that you are to administer ASWELL.
Dwell on that for a second. I am self-abusing and instead of getting me to stop, my doctor advises me to keep running head-first into walls and sells me some bandages that I must wear after the daily smash up. Is my doctor, by any chance, commercially incentivised in a way which compromises their take on my best interests ??Don't get distracted by the fact that NHS patients in the UK do not pay for services received at the point of receipt, if ever. The drug companies extract money from the public tax purse and your local friendly GP - who has NEVER been a constituent part of the NHS - GP's operate on private high value contracts. and they always did - gets pay-related bonuses for every single pill you pop. All drugs off-patent, like Diazepam -offer no opportunity for personal profit to your GP - so they are resticted for nefarious reasons. Potential addiction is often cited. Yeah. Sure. The GP surgery is on my high street next to the off-licence, the casino and the loan shark. Am I seriously expected to expect them to be authentic? Running the anti-addiction line in the middle of addiction street? Fiction Street. Am I to take their claim that they take addiction seriously, seriously? Like, seriously? Meanwhile killer drugs like most SSRI's or what are commonly termed "anti-depressents" are chucked at all and sundry for any old reason, over-reaching medical depression by a country mile: because doctor wants to play house and the holiday home in France won't pay for itself. I have personal GP confessions, by the way, so this is not conjecture.
It matters not that the war on disease is won. All that matters is that the war continues. Very ill and still alive - this is the perfect patient for Big Pharma, HMRC and Big Sugar.
You need to think teleologically about who the system in its current format serves. Dead patients offer no opportunity to BigPharma and its acolytes. Patients restored to full health offer no opportunity. You see, if I'm selling pills I'm gonna be wanting to chain you to the bathroom meds cabinet every morning for half an hour. I'm gonna be having you take ten pills not one. Say I give them fancy names and packaging and separate boxes to make my art look scientific and to make the human cash cow feel special and grateful. Worthy, even. And I'm gonna be keeping you alive but never curing you. Because I'm a buisness with a fiduciary legal duty to maximise shareholder value and for this read I'm the kinda guy who's keeping the cash till ringing. The government takes a huge cut. Corporation tax and income taxes. So I'm ring-fenced. The guys in the riverside palace in London with the Big Ben tower on the end of it have my back because they're all on the payroll I generate. I'm titanium. Safer than houses.
In the thick of this diabetes epidemic - happening still but shaded out of the now trending charts by COVID19 - people spend their first forty to sixty years consuming non-food foods from such as Tesco and their last ten to thirty years consuming the same PLUS zillions of insulin tablets and the like, from (BigPharma) the NHS. Your consumption of the former directly causes your consumption of the latter. A smart business move would be to manufacturer all the E numbers in your supermarket trolley AND all the anti-depressants and MRI scanning machines in the place you're headed later. And you are going to hospital as sure as eggs is eggs, as we say up north. Just as no human ever did not die, no modern era long-term processed food consumer failed to get metabolic syndrome. Not one. (evidence of strategic design if you know your Game Theory). When I first had this insight, boy did I feel special. Thing is, I'm behind the curve. Many global super-corporations have been doing precisely this for years. You know, selling to the grocers and the health sector. I used to name such antagonists in my articles and blogs and videos until I received cease and desist notices from lawyers. Usually American.
Do not be their fodder. Wake up. Get some self-respect.
Who makes money from sugar ? Who makes money from insulin medication ? This treatment, by the way, kills you slowly. And your slow demise is intended. You are now a dual channel cash cow for years to come. Diabetes can simply be reversed by good diet. But money talks. Who cares about your long term suffering ? If this is not the modern commercial version of evil, find a name for it.
Perversely, all this is good news because if you are aware of the rules of the game you can play better in future. The cards are stacked. But right here in this article, it's my table and I'm dealing. And I'm playing it straight. And you have been reading. Hope springs.
GNG magic
Worthy of an article in its own right no doubt, because it is simply so astounding - is the fact that your body can make its own glucose so it gets to enjoy all the energy benefits of sugar without you ever having to buy it or eat it - thereby bypassing all of the downsides of sugar consumption. No one will tell you this because?let's face it - no one makes money if you can make for yourself what they are presently selling you, minus the bad side effects. Without blinding you with science (and we both know that I could) all you need to do to get your body to "switch over" to this amazing system is get your kitchen to the same state as mine. Eat what is in it and do not eat what is not in it. Within three weeks, no more, you will be in GNG (gluconeogenesis) and bingo. You're now untouchable. Isn't that something worth working toward ??
Your mind will be clear and positive as your brain will be running on the best thing for it – molecules called ketones. Your body will be strong and highly energetic as it will be running on the glucose that your liver is making out of non-carbohydrate carbon substrates. Lots of physical and mental energies. A full-tilt immunity system. Natural highs. Happy living.
Welcome to keto logic
And no false hungers. I mention this at the end because people just cannot believe it but it’s true. I eat every other day or so and usually once at that. About 5 pm. I eat whenever I am hungry and since my body is permanently hooked up to its food supply like being on a drip – namely- my body fat mass – I am constantly just nicely full. You know that light nausea feeling when you are really hungry ? That’s not real hunger and if you’re my age (mid forties) you’ll remember being kids when hunger NEVER felt so urgent even when you were “starving” as we’d call it. Modern sugars have redefined both your frequency of need and your withdrawal sensations.
These days being really hungry, for most people, feels like having to go to the loo or sneeze. It carries a real sense of urgency. Back in the late ’70’s if I’d been playing in the fields all day and Mum said tea was still a couple hours off, I’d pull a face and make a whining sound but that’s all. I’d hang in there. I wouldn’t hit the sweet jar or the larder like some Huckleberry Finn parody. And this is how natural hungers work. You’ll truly see how much BigSugar has transformed you into its Frankenstein when you break the cycle.
Your new metabolic pathway is loading......
When you starve your body of all refined carbs and most unrefined carbs, your brain instructs your whole digestive system to start running on fat. A sea-change. A whole new metabolic pathway. Even if you’re in shape you have about 20,000 calories of fat to tap. If you are carrying a little extra?that’s an even bigger pool?of fuel and all the more reason to make the metabolic switch.
Yet when you carb-load to fill your glycogen stores you can only ever hold 2,000 calories as fuel. The rest just turns to body fat. You eat and eat and eat and your hunger follows you around all day like a bad smell.
My metabolic pathway is known as ketogenesis (running on fat) and offers a total alternative to your lipogenesis (running on carbs). Welcome to keto logic.
This diet is 80% fat. 15% protein and 5% refined carbs. You can vary the fat to protein ratio. You need to consume, on top of this, as much volume of two other things as you can manage. Water and fibre. They don’t count in the percentages because they both leave the body. Don’t worry. You’ll naturally consume more water and fibre because you’ll love them. Your taste buds are your friends and will intuit your evolution.
My body mass of 75 Kg consists of 61Kg of muscle, 10Kg of fat and 4Kg of bone. Water runs through all cells, tissues and organs, overlapping these values and I have 46KG of water in this context. I'm just one in billions. Yours and everyone's values are in this ballpark. This is pretty much all that we are. Muscle, fat, bone and water. We are a simple, very complex animal. Intelligent and dumb. Good and flawed. All at once. Yet in terms of the physical constituent, this is our lot. So we must come to know it.?
The ignition chamber
Happiness and good health in longevity are the end result. Changes to your mind and your metabolic engine (your body) are means to the end. Yet the ignition to all of this is the kitchen. So go figure. Rather, go reconfigure.
Unlike sugar, I don't bite
Leave EvilCorp for dust. Come join in the fun and get happy for good again. I'm here to help if you need me. I've kept it simple, but if you want to look deeper, get in touch. If this was too intense and you want me to simplify - again - get in touch. I'm always delighted to hear from you. There are no daft questions in nutrition. My advice is free, friendly and made for you. Together, we are stronger. What's in it for me ? Your health and happiness.?
The idiots are winning. But it's not over and we can fight back. The fat lady was never singing. She was moaning with indigestion.?
You are amazing. At some point they have convinced you that you are not amazing. You down wit' this shit or you fighting, bro? Yeah. More like it. Think of your kids innit.
So let's do it! I am with you every step and I mean it.
Thanks for reading.
We are one
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