No one wants to hear it

(Murphy Kismet) #43

Had lunch with Mother today. Last time she saw me I was 160lbs. First words were, “where did you go??” lol
Of course, her.mind closed up when I mentioned low carb. She couldn’t grasp that carbs become sugar. She used to be a nurse. Believes totally in the Doctor and the System.
It was rough, like my overcooked steak :roll_eyes::crazy_face:

(PSackmann) #44

My co-workers have noticed a difference and have asked me what I do. They know I do short fasts and that my inflammation and arthritis pain have gone down. They see what I eat at team lunches, yet there’s something that just doesn’t click for them. So, we order in lunch, I get the lettuce wrap, extra meat, add pickles. They get the sandwiches, chips, cookies, soda. Then follow it up a couple of hours later with more chips and mini candy bars to stay awake. I just shake my head and ask if I can have their pickles. When they’re ready, they’ll get it.

(Val) #46

SOOOO trues in many aspects of life. As a 15 year nurse, I can attest to seeing many a patient come through the ED & ICU for varied “addictions”

(Val) #47

Sooooooo True!!! But that is very typical in medicine and even today’s society. Everyone wants the magic pill for everything, all their challenges in life. But a little hard work and determination makes for a sweeter victory over whatever struggles are out there… at least I have found this to be true!

(Libby) #48

I took care of a few end stage emphysema patients. I just kept imagining them chain smoking in their pre-sick days and saying, “well, ya gotta die from something” you know, how smokers do. But wrastling a tight fitting face mask onto someone who can’t breathe is not a happy thing at all. Not at all. They weren’t so philosophical then.

Sorry, off topic, kind of. Except not being “able” to give up sugar and starch seems like not being able to at least try not to smoke. “you should quit smoking” “well, ya gotta die from SOMETHING.” Right.

(David Cooke) #49

Absolutely. Don’t want to work on it, just gimme a pill doc.

#50

“you’ve gotta die someday, and if i’m gonna die, i’m gonna die happy eating a cheeseburger”

(hottie turned hag) #51

I mean, this is such a simple statement but really sums it up.
When I got fat for the first time in my life postmenopause, and was fat in total around 3 yrs, (2014-2017) without increasing what I ate, I had a resigned outlook at first. I figured oh well, endo changes cannot be reversed, I’ll just be fat now, no bigs. My former vanity in my hourglass figure had vanished with menopause along with my sex drive/desire to look hot so it was all good.

THEN the symptoms of hypertension and I am sure, diabetes, started. THAT was what made me say hellnaw. I’ve never had health problems, never. Looking bad, I was fine with. FEELING crappy, no.

So I kinda don’t get the folks who feel horrid yet refuse to change. Ex one of my daughters who has started feeling lousy since getting fat(ter) last year yet refuses to adjust diet, while acknowledging the benefits thereof.
#thingsIdon’tunderstand

(Door Girl) #52

I too would love a link to the keto Ethiopian blog. :slight_smile:

(Val) #53

I must be cheating too!! I eat cold bacon from a bag some days… just store it in my work bag with some individual cream cheese. YUM

(Murphy Kismet) #56

It’s the customers who would ask for “that keto diet pill”. :roll_eyes:
Ain’t so easy there, Sugah.
(see what I did there? :smiley: )

(Jenny) #58

the problem (for me) is that diseases overweight or metabolically unhealthy people die from arent quick. I have watched relative’s with diabetes as I am sure most of you have and to me it seems like a slow torturous decline of including the loss of limbs and eyesight. The same with alzheimers. The same with “metabolic syndrome”… no one wants to die but for me quality of life is almost more important. Not to mention the costs of getting sick. I just want to be spry.

my own dad is going to turn 74 and he’s in good health. I wouldn’t call him low carb but maybe more paleo + calorie counting. More importantly he exercises daily and swims and isnt afraid of protein. hes running laps around other people his age! :two_hearts:

#64

I enjoy those responses. Then it gives me the in to politely pick at all they don’t know.

(David Cooke) #65

There are already a heap of products using “Keto” in the labelling that could be replaced with proper food.

(April Harkness) #68

And to bring it back to topic…ppl always ask me how i got my abs so cut. They are so cut i now get stopped in the street…daily. I tell them “keto”. With me they think its exercise. It is NOT. I have trained in the past. I never looked like i was a hardcore gym devotee, even though i was. All that exercise did not do a damn thing. I just looked “normal”. But abs are made in the kitchen.in the keto kitchen! Now ppl think i am a trainer! When ppl ask how many crunches i do (ZERO) they get disappointed when i say Keto.

#69

The ones who reject it, I believe, just don’t want it bad enough. They can’t commit to something because they’re either afraid they can never eat their junk food again; or Keto will be too restrictive. In either scenario, their health must not have reached a crisis point (at least, in their own mind), to warrant the change.
My own health hadn’t reached that “crisis” point either. Watching my brother die in front of me was waaayyy more than what I needed to motivate me to make a change in my own life. Additionally, seeing the agony he left his wife and two young children in - yeah. There are no words for what that does to a person. Its hard to fathom the hold that certain foods (carbs) have over a person. And, when that hold is so strong -that not even the premature death of loved ones can’t cause a person to pause, and consider their own situation - that’s one wicked addiction. I have relatives like that, still. It breaks my heart and sickens me at the same time. I resolved not to be one of them. My hope is, that my own success might be helpful in motivating them towards healthy choices.

(Hyperbole- best thing in the universe!) #70

Psych meds and weight gain/loss link here.

Sorry about the delay! Times zones and such.

(Murphy Kismet) #71

@SecondBreakfast I think the really sad part is that they are completely and/or voluntarily ignorant of the actual reasons why their health is deteriorating. It’s like the children’s book Emperor Has No Clothes: they refuse to look at the obvious reasons why: it’s the carbs!

The elephant in the room is us, and our health regained, our inflammation lowered, our excess fat gone, our mental state cleared of the fog, our elevated energy levels (that can leave them sucking our dust lol). We are proof-positive that reducing or eliminating carbs can, and does improve health markers, whether numbers on paper to please a white coat, or simply our own sense of well-being.

But they don’t seem to want to do any sort of work to achieve this. Why? I have so many possible reasons running amok in my head, from childhood and parents doing everything for them (tying shoes, dressing, cooking, etc) so they grew up accustomed to people doing everything for them (Wall-E, and the humans in wheelchairs?) image This is what we’re moving toward with sugary products everywhere, and screens to dull our panicked brains that we’re not moving. Totally mental apathy.

If not parents, then what? How have we become so freaking lazy that we are now putting out movies geared toward children that normalize being so obese we’re going to need glorified wheelchairs to get around? (Don’t get me started on the battery-operated ride-on kids toys being bought instead of human powered bikes.)

Ill health is being normalized so as to not make the average sick person feel less than normal. This is propagating a very twisted belief which is sending us down a very dark, sugar-coated path from which many of us never return. We get comfortable in the communal act of self-destruction. We look around and find we are not alone in our choices, and our ill health is seen as normal.

But it’s not natural.

People can’t seem to wrap their heads around normal vs natural. High crab low fat is “normal”, but not natural. It’s normal because everybody is doing it, but it’s not natural. But we’ve become so far removed from our continuum that we no longer ‘know’ much of anything natural. We are in the process of re-teaching ourselves, and each other, about how to Live. We are Remembering what we used to know so many generations and eons ago. We are re-learning to Listen to our bodies, to Hear what is being whispered to us by our gut, our intuition.

But, like in the movie Matrix, some people have been “in” for too long, or too deep to free them of their mental constraints without destroying their flimsy sense of reality. Do we accept this and leave them be? Can we help them at all? Or do we just sit back and watch them make bad choices, all the while seeing the inevitable end result, and being able to do nothing about it?

I have no answers, as it mirrors watching a drug addict shove poisons into their veins in order to suppress their pain. It is said an addict needs to hit rock bottom before they’ll come up and out of this hell. What is rock bottom? Like you said @SecondBreakfast, even watching a person die (OD, disease) doesn’t always change a person’s decisions. Now it’s just more pain to hide from via drugs/carbs.

I hope I haven’t rambled myself away (yet again) from the topic :slight_smile: :upside_down_face:

(PJ) #72

I was thinking about this recently.

For most people on SAD, carbohydrate-heavy foods are energy. And the more fat and/or ill they are, the more they desperately need energy. And so the more they definitely feel the lack of it.

It’s like being desperate for money – single mom, kids and pets depending on you, very little income, second part time job – anything that even seems like it might be a threat to your money supply causes a degree of panic.

Anybody with metabolic syndrome is fighting a terrible energy battle. Whether it is conscious or unconscious, every part of them is suffering – from their body systems to their ability to feel like doing much of anything. And whether they consciously know it or not (most only do a little bit), carbohydrates are their energy.

Because that’s what carbohydrates are.

Add to that, that many people get brain opioid effects from grains and sometimes also dairy, which cause a tiny bit of pain-relief, even at the cellular level.

So basically, the modern food supply, while gradually making people energy-deficient and in pain (initially internally and eventually consciously), is also the thing that is (oh-so-temporarily) GIVING them energy and REDUCING their pain.

So of course they are so frantically in need of those things, that their mind and belief systems react with extreme evasion, and even rejection, when someone is telling them of an idea which begins with giving up their energy source.

In fact since they live on carbs, and they know our foods, they have no reason to expect eating steak is going to make them feel better, because right now, eating pizza is what does it, at least temporarily. Steak doesn’t give them much energy when their insulin-resistant body just stores those fats. Pizza gives them energy because it’s a massive surge of carbohydrates – energy, glucose is energy, they have some for awhile. And some low-level pain relief. (And for many, then a ice nap, if possible.) So nobody on SAD has any reason to expect that eating steak instead of pizza is going to in some way make them feel better. Right now it doesn’t.

I think this operates at a very powerful, primal, subconscious level for a number of people. Suggestions of giving up their foods becomes a perceived threat, invoking their survival response. Sometimes the worse off they are, the stronger this response is likely to be.

I don’t know the solution, to help the people we love. Maybe in the future, greater affordability and ubiquitousness of MCT powder and exogenous ketones will at least give us something to suggest/bribe someone with: you’ll feel really great right away! As opposed to, you have to give up every food you love, that gives you energy, that gives you opiates, and suffer through craving it and feeling crappy and having reduced energy for anywhere from 8-21 days depending on the person, and then I promise, you’ll feel better.

I weighed over 520 pounds when I went lowcarb. And I stared at before and after pics and recipe pics for a long time first. I finally had a vision of sorts – literally I woke up at 3am and my subconscious in a ‘voice’ told me that I would do that lowcarb diet or I would be dead within three months. Like the voice of God or something. I had a book, I had a website, and I did it – right then at 3am – the next day I took 14 copy-paper boxes filled with carby food to my grandmother’s for the family to take as they wished. And I lived. But would I have ever gotten there without the vision-dream? I don’t know.

(Allie) #73

My boyfriend makes a joke of it all and says he’s trying to get diabetes. He would soon change his mind if it actually happens to him, but for now, there’s no changing him as he doesn’t want to be changed. When (if?) he’s ever ready then I’ll help him.