Challenges
Dieting Challenges
All diets have plateaus. The 5 keys quest for wellness is no different. Depending on how seriously you follow the provided opinions you can experience half-a-pound or more of weight loss per day. This is common on most LCHF (low carb high fat) diet protocols. This rapid weight loss is mainly water. This is one of reasons why tracking your progress by weight loss alone is not a good idea. A better way to measure your quest for wellness is provided in the [Guide].
The limited food choice means you are eating the same food over and over. True, this is where the creativity comes in. There are hundreds of keto or LCHF receipies freely available on the internet. Your challenge is to come up with enough variety to make the same food appealing.
Eating LCHF and lectin free limits your food options. Does this mean we are not getting all of the nutrition needed? This is controversial and why you should have your doctor help monitor your wellness progress. This is especially important for those suffering from an autoimmune disease or [leaky gut] who must remove all lectin for an extended period to let the body heal itself. For everyone else, the cheat day, one day per week, where you eat with moderation anything you want is the time to include a wider variety of foods.
To prepare whole foods, especially keto meals takes time. Yep, no getting around this challenge, it is what it is. Fresh whole foods spoil quickly, unlike heavily processed foods which can last nearly forever. Ask yourself, is it healthy to eat something that can sit for years on a shelf unrefrigerated?
If your gut microbes are accustomed to sugar, fasting is horrible. Yep, fasting can be tough. It may take several attempts to train your gut microbes to accept fasting. Once you do, fasting is simple and a non issue. Hundreds of millions of people around the world regularly fast as part of their faith. If they can, so can you.
It took years to get into poor shape. We have unreasonable expectations that we can turn around unhealthy habits and eating in days and weeks. The five keys will show results in days and weeks but as in the moral from the race between the hare and the tortoise, “slow and steady wins.”
Diet Myths - True or False
Fats are bad.
Some are some aren’t. For example trans fats found in margarine are bad, mono unsaturated fats like virgin olive oil are good.
Counter to popular belief we absolutely need fat in our diets. The term low fat, actually means the fat has been replaced by something, usually sugar. Sugar and hidden sugars are one of main culprits in weight gain.
Eating too much will make you fat.
Maybe. Eating foods with a high glycemic index, high glycemic load and are full of lectins will certainly make you fat. No one has ever become obese eating only vegetables.
Eat less move more
Could not have been more wrong. Any drastic reduction in calories or increase in calorie expenditure forces your body into starvation mode. To compensate for the reduced calories your body will reduce its basal metabolism rate (BMR). It appears that this is an asymmetric process. BMR decreases much faster than it increases. This is why 99% of all diets fail long term.
To lose weight you have to exercise
Kind of. Some exercise (30-60 minutes) is beneficial in weight lose programs. Too much exercise will lower your BMR and is NOT an effective long term method to lose weight.
It’s about will power, diets fail because people don’t stay on them
Nope! Obesity is a hormone and inflammation problem. Fix the insulin and inflammation issues and you will lose weight, no matter what diet. People don’t stay on diets because the gain versus pain equation doesn’t balance.
It’s all about the calories in/out.
Nope! It is about when you eat, what you eat…ate and how your body uses and processes consumed calories. Protein and carbs contain the same amount of energy (4kcal/gm) but your body processes them very differently.
Highly processed foods are good for you.
NO! NO! NO! Never were, never will be. Highly processed foods are full of junk our bodies are not built to process. The high carb, high sugar, high bad fat content, preservative loaded ingredients play havoc with our GI tract and metabolism. In short, these foods provide too much energy too fast for the body to burn. Our bodies are smart they don’t throw away unburnt calories. Unburnt calories are stored as fat. Whole, unprocessed foods are a far better choice.
Organic is better than non-organic.
Maybe. Look at the ingredients! How it was grown doesn’t matter for some foods. Whole grains and vegetables that are full of lectin and GMOs are harmful to wellness no matter how they were grown.
Breakfast is the most important meal of the day.
Nope! Stuffing yourself full of calories at the start of the day makes no sense. Think of car. If it is 40 below, the car has to warm up a bit before you can drive it hard. It’s better to have something light at breakfast and allow the body’s metabolism to fully wake up. Large meals are best left to lunch or dinner.
I want to keep my Blood Sugar (BS) constant, therefore three meals a day and snacks are ok.
No. Hormones were never designed to be delivered constantly. This is how tolerance and resistance are built up. Ideally, one or two meals are all that is required with 4-6 hours of fasting in between. If you cannot control your appetite and feel the urge to eat all the time, this is a solid indication that your gut microbes love sugar and you don’t have enough healthy fats in your diet.
Drinking alcohol makes you fat.
Yep, not a myth. Alcohol is a special form of sugar that is easily absorbed by the body. At 7cal/gm alcohol is only exceeded by fat 9 cal/gm in terms of energy content. Worse, it can only be processed by the liver. If the glycogen (long chains of glucose) storage of your liver is full, then alcohol is stored as fat. Alcohol consumed with fruit (fructose) is especially challenging for the liver to process.
Artificial Sweeteners don’t cause weight gain.
Not directly. While artificial sweeteners don’t increase blood sugar they can affect insulin levels by up to 400% and indirectly increase cravings for calorie dense foods. Some studies have shown artificial sweeteners have an adverse affect on gut microbes.
Fruit is a healthy alternative on diets.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Out of season fruit (full of lectin) should be treated the same as candy. The sugars (fructose) found in fruit is NOT your friend on a diet.
The Health System
We call it a health system, but it is anything but. The sad truth is the health system does a lousy job of keeping people healthy. Why? If you will pardon the cynicism, illness not wellness is where the money is. Where the creator of AnAverageJoes lives the single payer provincial health budget is over $22B, less than $200M is spent on preventative health measures. The health care budget consumed in 2017 44% of all government expenditures in 1980 that figure was 18%. An aging population means health costs will substantially increase. Eventually the skyrocketing costs will become unaffordable to anyone other than the 1 percenters.
Thanks to excellent chronic care and the elimination of pandemics , we are living longer, but are we living better? The health system likes to boast we are, yet for many people the answer is no. No one wants to be in their eighties and bedridden, yet many are. Worse, your care depends unless you’re a 1 percenter, wholly upon the altruism of governmental officials. To remain independent, active and pain free as possible, you need to protect your wellness the best you can. Yet, still have the flexibility to occasionally eat bad things. A healthy lifestyle cannot be so restricted that it is not fun at least once in a while. There are already enough constraints in life, food in one of the few pleasures left.
Health Research
Someone has to sponsor and fund medical and nutritional research. Unsurprisingly, those funding the research often have a bias in the outcomes. Many of the nutritional studies that form the basis of the government published food guides were industry funded. Coincidentally, the results were outcomes favorable to the sponsor. The most obvious, soda pop is part of a well balanced diet or AnAverageJoes favorite from the 50s and 60s, smoking is part of a healthy lifestyle to reduce stress and control weight. The less obvious, many studies don’t have long enough sample periods. The illness symptoms may not show up for many years.
Diseases which have a long gestation period are not only difficult to diagnose they encourage the belief that the traditional treatment approach is the correct one. Beliefs are hard to change, especially those based upon scientific facts accepted for years. Yet, science constantly changes.
Beware of the so called experts claiming their scientific proof is irrefutable. History is full of examples where the experts were wrong. Heliocentrism, the belief that the solar system revolved around the Earth existed for over a thousand years before Galileo proved in 1604 that the sun was the center of the solar system. If history is any indication, the odds are good something similar will be discovered in the quest for wellness.
Pharmaceutical Companies
Pharmaceutical companies have nothing but our best interests at heart. Maybe? Bringing a new drug to market can cost billions. Many more promising drugs fail than succeed during development. Yet drug companies still make huge profits in the hundreds of billions. These profits only occur if drug companies can sell lots of their approved drugs. This has led to a culture of a “pill for every ailment.” AnAverageJoe believes that the quest to wellness includes both prescription medication and non-prescription alternatives.
Food Manufactures
The food industry lives by the unwritten motto: faster, cheaper, longer shelf life. For this to happen, food needs to be highly processed, which replaces all the healthy stuff with sugars, unhealthy fats and preservatives. The food with the highest profit margins are those containing high levels of carbohydrates. These foods are cheap to grow and process. Best of all, they are highly subsidized by government (i.e. corn and soybeans)
Our bodies have a limited ability to deal with the high concentrations of sugars, unhealthy fats and preservatives found in highly processed food. In AnAverageJoes opinion, diets high in the above food stuffs lead to metabolic syndrome which can be a precursor to chronic disease. The most common metabolic syndrome is type II diabetes. The center for disease control predicts 1 in 3 Americans will be affected by 2050. The sad part, in AnAverageJoes opinion this disease if caught early can be fully cured by diet and moderate exercise.
Unfortunately, like a car motor that has seized due to an oil leak, changing the oil after the fact won’t help. The trick is fixing the problem not just the symptoms before catastrophic damage occurs.
Supplement Industry
This is a highly controversial topic.
On one hand, experts claim, “eat good food and it has all the nutrients that the body needs.” On the other hand, soils are becoming depleted and poisoned with chemicals, so food has nowhere near the nutritional value of past years. In the last ten years there has been an explosion of herbal remedies to supplement the lost nutrition in our food. Many herbal remedies have doubtful benefits, in fact, some are dangerous depending on the quality and quantity taken. Beware of all extraordinary health benefit claims by any supplement manufacture. To quote Carl Sagan, “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” Supplements can play a role in good health, but you have to know which ones are needed or helpful and which ones make “expensive pee.”
Enemies of Wellness
Dr Gundry in his book, “The Plant Paradox” identified a number of disruptors to our health. AnAverageJoes like to call them “enemies of wellness.”
The truth is we are living longer, mainly because of better hygiene and vaccines which have reduced infectious diseases. The real question is “are we living better?” Judging by the number of prescription drugs needed to be taken every day. Maybe not. In Canada from 45-64 yrs of age, 54% take at least one prescription drug, 11% take five or more. From 65-79 yrs of age 80% take at least one, 30% take five or more. The US spends on average $8300 annually per person on health care but only $2200 on food. Japan spends $3300 on health care and $3200 on food. Admittedly it is a comparison of only two countries but a trend is visible never the less. What are the chances that healthy whole foods will reduce health care costs?
Grains
Gluten found in all grains is a type of lectin. (corn, soy and wheat). Watch out for gluten free foods. Replacement for gluten grains are full of lectins and sugars in the form of flours made from corn, oats, buckwheat, quinoa and other pseudo-grains. Whole grains are three time losers due to the fact that lectins are found in the fibrous hull, husk and bran. Whole grains were sold as healthy because of the fiber, nothing could be further from the truth.
All grains have the lectin WGA – wheat germ agglutinin. This lectin CANNOT be destroyed by a pressure cooker unlike many other lectins. Grains advertised as “Whole” are full of WGA. WGA is thought to cause gut leakage of lipopolysaccharides (LPSs) bacterial into the bloodstream which causes systemic inflammation and incites hormone mimicry, where the WGA binds to the insulin receptor on a cell wall preventing glucose from entering. Since the glucose cannot enter the cell, insulin stores it as fat.
Cows fed corn and soybeans instead of their natural diet of grass and other forage gain weight quicker. However, corn and soybeans cause the cows heartburn. 50% of the world’s production of calcium carbonate is used on cows. The lectin in the corn and soybeans end up in the animals meat and milk. Same applies to farmed fish fed a similar diet. Casein A-1 (Holstein) in dairy turns into lectin like protein beta-casomorphin. This protein attaches to the pancreas’s Beta cells which causes the immune system to attack. (rumoured to be a cause of type 1 diabetics. European cows still make casein A-2 (Guernsey, Brown Swiss and Belgian Blue)
Broad-Spectrum Antibiotics
Broad-spectrum antibiotics are miracle drugs capable of killing multiple strains of bacteria simultaneously. Unfortunately they also kill the good bacteria in your gut. Once gone, without intervention, it can take years for the good bacteria to return.
All animals (including farm raised fish) raised on a diet of grain, corn, or soybeans instead of grass or algae or other fish, require antibiotics to remain healthy and to grow fatter quicker. Trace amounts of these antibiotics remain in the meat and eventually end up in you. (you are what you eat…ate).
Animal drugs often are similar to human ones. A common poultry antibiotic to treat E. coli is Baytril a derivative of the human drug Cipro. Eating animals treated with Baytril leads to drug resistance in humans to Cipro. Long term exposure to even small amounts of antibiotics is not good for a couple of reasons. Widespread antibiotic use promotes super bugs and kills off your good gut bacteria, allowing macro molecules to cross the intestinal barrier into your blood stream. Once in the bloodstream your white blood cells will attack the invaders causing inflammation. Inflammation causes the body to store energy as fat.
NSAIDs - Non Steroid Anti-inflammatory Drugs
NSAID non steroid anti-inflammatory drugs. (ie Mortin, Aleve, Advil, generic ibuprofen)
Aspirin was found to destroy the stomach lining. NSAIDs were hailed as a solution as they did not affect the stomach but were found out only much later to destroy the mucosal barrier in the small intestine and colon. The damage can occur in as little as month of heavy NSAID use at the recommended daily allowance (RDA). A possible cure is high doses of vitamin D (10,000 -40,000 IU daily), prebiotics and probiotics. The RDA of vitamin D is 4000IU, exceeding this amount should only be done under medical supervision.
Stomach-Acid Blockers
Anything like Zantac, Prilosec, Nexium and Protonix should be avoided.These drugs are proton pump inhibitors (PPIs) designed to reduce stomach acid. Stomach acid is critical in killing bad bacteria, in fact as we age our stomach acid decreases. This is why if you are over thirty you should have a teaspoon of apple cider vinegar before every meal, otherwise bad bacteria will overwhelm your good gut bacteria. Worse if you don’t have enough fiber in your diet, the bacteria in the colon will look for a home in your small intestine. Where they can cause havoc punching holes in the mucosla barrier and allowing macro molecules to enter the blood stream causing inflammation.
It gets worse. PPIs such a Prilosec and Nexium once into the blood stream can poison the brain’s mitochodria by interfering with the cells proton pump, dramatically increasing the risk of dementia (44% increase). Kidneys are at risk as well for the same reason. Another side effect, without strong stomach acid (1.5 to 2.5) proteins will not break down into amino acids resulting in protein malnourishment. The condition is called sarcopenia or muscle wasting and is common in senior citizens.
One symptom of weak stomach acid is low protein levels in the blood. A friendly substitute is Rolaids or Tums. (calcium carbonate)
Artificial Sweeteners
When you eat something sweet, your body needs a bit of time to spin up insulin production in the pancreas. The signal to spin up insulin production comes from the taste receptors in the mouth. This means it is not only important as to what you eat but how it affects blood sugar and indirectly insulin levels. Two scales were developed to measure the impact of different foods on blood sugar, called the glycemic index and glycemic load.
Artificial sweeteners play havoc with the insulin signals by tricking the body. The brain senses it is eating sugar because it “tasted” something sweet but the sugar doesn’t arrive into the blood stream. Because insulin levels spike (increasing up to 400%) you become more hungry and may crave high caloric foods. Since insulin is a multi function hormone, elevated insulin levels will store any extra glucose as fat.
Artificial sweeteners such as sucralose, saccharin, aspartame are rumored to alter your gut holobiome, killing good bacteria and allowing bad bacteria to take over.
Endocrine System
Highly processed foods contain many chemicals that are believed to disrupt hormones functionality. Here are few of the more wide spread ones.
Butyl hydroxytoluene (BHT) – Stablizing agent found in processed foods, ie whole grain otherwise it goes rancid. Believed to be an estrogen disruptor. Estrogen encourages fat storage.
Transglutaminase used as a rising agent instead of yeast. Unlike yeast it does not ferment, leaving the lectin intact. Sourdough bread because it is fermented and made with yeast is one of the least damaging breads.
Bisphenol A (BPA) is used in plastic water bottles make them tough and heat-resistant. Believed to have health effects on the brain, behavior and prostate gland of fetuses, infants and children. Banned in Canada but not the US.
Parabens in cosmetics and sunscreens. Believed to be an estrogen disruptor.
Methylparaben, estrogen-like compound found in most multiuse drug solution containers.
Tert-butylhydroquinonet (tBHQ) a synthetic food preservative found in bread, waffles, crackers and other baked goods. Believed to stimulate t-cells, which release proteins that can cause an allergic response.
Antibacterial chemicals all destroy good bacteria in gut and interfere with the liver’s ability to create vitamin D. One sign of leaky gut or autoimmune is low vitamin D levels.
Phthalates – synthetic compound used to soften plastics. (found in plastic wraps). Found in grains, beef, pork, chicken and milk products. Mimics the thyroid. Believed to cause a whole host of health issues from asthma, cancer, type II diabetes, neurodevelopmental issues, to fertility issues.
Azodicarbonamide – used to bleach flour and condition dough. It is a foaming agent used in plastics. Believed to cause asthma and allergies. Subway banned, but used in MacDonald’s and Wendy’s bread products.
Telfon – polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) and Perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) are man-made chemicals in commercial use since the 40s to make near frictionless surfaces. While no definitive health risks have been identified, believed to have a potential health concern due to the length of time the chemicals can stay in the environment and human body.
Triclosan and triclocarban (mouthwash and hand sanitizer). Digestion starts in the mouth, destroying all of the mouth bacteria delays digestion. The wide use of the anti-bacterial soaps has been linked to the growth of super bugs.
GMO Good or Bad?
GMO seeds are designed with two features to increase yield. Force the plants to make more lectin to prevent insect damage and be more resistant to herbicides like roundup which allows the entire crop to be sprayed with pesticides , simplifying harvesting. The problem is residual roundup in left on the grains. Roundup’s main ingredients are 2,4, D and glyphosate. Glyphosates work by interfering with the plant’s shikimate pathway.
Whole grains have the bran and germ left intact. If the crop was sprayed with pesticides then trace amounts of roundup will remain. Glyphosate impact a number of critical body functions such as interfering with key liver enzymes (cytochromoe P450) which convert vitamin D used to recycle cholesterol. ie makes your cholesterol go up. Glyphosates can bond with gluten making it inflammatory and block our gut microbe’s ability to use the shikimate pathway to make the essential amino acids, tryptophan, tyrosine and phenylalanine. Tryptophan and phenylalanine make serotonin (the feel good hormone). 90% of serotonin production comes from good bacteria in the gut. Tyrosine and phenylalanine are essential for thyroid hormone production.
Fun fact – 90% of all soy, corn and canola crops in North America are some form of GMO.
Fructose
Fructose is rare in nature. Normally it was found in summer mainly in the following foods: fruits, sugar cane, honey, maple syrup, sugar beets and maize. To encourage the body to eat sugar and store fat for the winter, fructose stimulates the brain’s pleasure centers. Food manufactures know that sugar helps to sell their products and as a side benefit increases shelf life. Since sugar is considered bad, there are 61 common names used by the food industry to obscure the sugar added to heavily processed foods. Our body’s cells were never intended to process the high concentrations or easily digestible hidden/added sugar found in 77% of processed foods. (sugar is 50% glucose and 50% fructose).
Fruit which has high fructose levels is not your friend on a diet. Fructose can only be processed by the liver. If the liver is already full of glucose then the fructose is immediately stored as fat. Fructose unlike glucose does not stimulate the hunger-blocking hormone leptin. So no matter how much fruit you eat, you never feel full. But fruit is natural and healthy it doesn’t promote weight gain. Wanna bet?
What do bears eat to store enough energy to last five months of hibernation? (fruit – in the form of berries)