A typical keto diet for myself. I have not had a single cheat day in 33 months. I don’t eat any of the crap you mention. As I said though my VAT has come down. It is still higher at 1.5 pounds. I expect it has gotten lower and I will know this Saturday after my next scan.
Never fell out of ketosis. Glucose became elevated from 4.8 mmol to about 5.3. It ALL had to do with how insulin is affected by nicotine.
As to the choline which we discussed here ,I am sure that if nothing else I took them alongside of my coffee which included heavy cream. Lacking that my morning fare would have been sausages made with no preservatives by my local butcher.
Besides the choline I took B vitamins, L-Arginine , Acetyl-L carnitine etc.
Well if @marklifestyle has it right then the keto woe is surely not the right plan for healthiest… but why would the approach that suited our ancient ancestors have been healthiest? I don’t think evolution works that way at all. people around the world have always had radically different food sources and adapted to available regional foods. And what does that mean for today when I can buy a banana or a ribeye any day of the year? Sure some of our ancestors were hunter/gatherers…I ask so what? They didn’t have particularly long lives or even necessarily very healthy ones. Pretty sure they evolved to pass on the genes as efficiently as possible like all the rest of the mammals. What that meant for the ones who survived past 40 is hard to say but I doubt it is nearly as relevant to optimal health today as many would make it out to be. Just my $0.02
YES!! I have thought that for health reasons ( not aesthetics ) that adding a couple pounds as winter approaches is very reasonable. The hard winter and it’s uncertainty are approaching. Having a “pudge” would help ensure survival through some harsher times.
I think the notion of stable weight is very misleading. Anything within a 30 pound range when eating seasonally would be stable in my viewpoint and welcome if resources fell low. Natural fasting would take off the weight as it should. No chance of diabetes or the other metabolic diseases as the time spent under any one condition .
The Ancestral Health people have some good resources I particularly thought Miki Ben-Dor at this years Carnivory Con in Boulder was pretty informative.
“I have thought that for health reasons ( not aesthetics ) that adding a couple pounds as winter approaches is very reasonable. The hard winter and it’s uncertainty are approaching. Having a “pudge” would help ensure survival through some harsher times.”
I agree on the notion of stable weight being misleading. Now as to hard winters, few of us need the pounds to make it through the winter months as access to food is not (generally) much of a problem!
True, but I don’t know if our bodies understand that or not. Just speculation, some of it could be tied to the number of daylight hours,with longer daylight hours triggering a craving for fruit. I wonder if there’s ever been a study comparing eating habits at the equator compared to the Arctic Circle, specifically looking at number of daylight hours?
What an original thought!! I have looked at meal timing of the Mediterranean Diet…the sweets in the morning, larger meal mid day and light snack/meal at night usually comprised of some salad like food stuffs compared to similar ingredients in the States but reversing the meals. Light in the morning. Heavy in the afternoon or evening and then the sweets going to bed with a high insulinemic load.
But to consider then length of a day into that timing pattern? Wow. Great idea.
Except evolution would not have caught up with this ability to not need food stuffs in the winter. I also firmly hold that evolution would have adjusted to carbohydrates as we became more agrarian IF we had not sped up that process through refinement of grains into dust ( flours) and made them super absorbent- its the difference between coca leaf and crack.
So if we could have slowly introduced and kept agrarian food stuffs our bodies would stop reacting to sugar as a toxin and actually treat it like a food stuff.
I guess I didn’t make myself clear. I was addressing the “optimal health” issue. This involves some definitions. The WHO preamble defines health as a “state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.” I guess optimal should mean the best possible and presumably over a long period of time. Optimal health for me includes aging and functional ability well into my days (now) as a grandpa and who knows maybe much longer. Evolution doesn’t give a rat’s behind about old people. Optimal health isn’t just being able to pass on your genes to a generation capable of survival and doing the same. If that was optimal health I’d put more stock in the ancestral health/paleo concept. I think optimal health by any reasonable definition is not what evolution selects for. Well it makes for an interesting discussion.
Question is, was that omental fat (which surrounds the intestines and is involved with immune system), ectopic fat (globs of fat attached to organs), or fatty infiltration of organs? I think you’d need an MRI or similar to distinguish the difference.
If the fat is inflamed and swollen it’s going to look like it’s “fatter”.
If you mean in humans, then probably not. There is some interesting data concerning hamsters (also squirrels) which are triggered by the number of daylight hours to shift their eating habits.
In summary, a natural programmed state of fat catabolism was associated with increased FGF21 production in the liver and BAT, consistent with the view that FGF21 has a role in adapting hamsters to the hypophagic winter state. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0018506X14000543
As UN-luck would have it an CT & ultrasound was done…
First , for the uninitiated the DXA for VAT is based on mice. A single slice of the scan at a certain site is measured and an algorithm is applied. Then the mouse is autopsied and the measure is verified. This then is applied to humans .
This is accurate enough when looking at trends, not so much snapshots. Thus when I say I had an increase of 3/4 to over 2 this was a series of DXA.
No to the CT. I have had abdominal cramping since November 2018. I can no longer do abdominal exercises. Hard enough to not cramp doing ones that involve core. The cramping was so bad that once st work I cramped and passed out in my colleague’s office only to awaken to EMT s fiddling with EKG and a flight fir life called. Yo! It’s a cramp! Check my records…
Anyway after an ineffective ER visit I showed my doctor my nicotine cessation weight gain ( BTW he went keto because of my sucess & he is used to the fact I order my own blood labs) mentioned a worry about fatty liver & pancreas due to this and an elevated AST & bilirubin.
The tests were done. No fatty organs. Plus the VAT from DXA continues to trend down since December 2018.
All in all the 30 pound weight gain due to nicotine cessation took about 12 months to work though. I quit chewing as I stepped off the plane returning home from Ketofest 2018.
As to the cramps. Bro science led me to Taurine. Taurine supplements have decreased cramps. When I forget taurine I start to tingle the same way and immediately remember to take some.
This led me to at least 8 good papers on why Taurine is a CONDITIONAL Essential Amino Acid.
Dr. Katherine Chauncey is a low carb doctor specializing in cancer & taurine
Excellent point. I was having a conversation about taurine and heart health after seeing the recent problems with dog food. Maybe some of my rib cramping is really a cry for more taurine?
If you need heart health & Taurine ask @tdseest . Hes more on FB but think he cruises the forum once in awhile. He has to fight his cat for his Monster beverage which he claims is his taurine source.
My kitty is an excellent source for information on Taurine, but she tends to quietly sleep all day; in spite of the increase in caffeine consumption.
From my standpoint, I increased my consumption of Taurine up to 15 grams per day while I had my heart issues. I’m nowhere near that now. I honestly don’t know if it helped me, as I’m not sure how I could measure outcomes for Taurine for my little heart experiment, but I certainly felt better taking it. I used Life Extension’s version in capsule form.
I never made an association between Taurine and lack of cramping, but that could be true.
I’ll quit trying to source information from my kitty, and I’ll read the articles that you linked.
Our hunter/gatherer ancestors were actually pretty long-lived, assuming they survived the childhood diseases and suffered no accidents. The Plains Indians of the U.S., for example, were known for the number of centenarians in their populations—until, of course, they adopted the white man’s diet of refined grains and sugar.
Dr. Michael Eades has fascinating lecture on the metabolic and health effects of the advent of agriculture, which is available on YouTube in a few slightly different versions.
As for seasonal variations of weight, I would expect them to be diet-related. Berries start ripening in August in the Northern Hemisphere, which would be the metabolic signal to the body to start putting on the pounds. During winter, when game would have been scarce, the extra fat from fall gorging would permit easier fasting. I wonder if we descended from animals that hibernated, or whether hibernating animals developed that ability after our lines diverged?
“assuming they survived the childhood diseases and suffered no accidents” both assumptions that were exceptions to the rule for hunter gatherers. This point is also debated at some length for our more distant h/g ancestors as we don’t have a lot of bones from any elderly among them…that could be for a variety of reasons.
As to the last question I have to assume that you mean hibernation like bears rather than daily torpor as in hummingbirds. Plenty of birds have short term torpor to help then survive and maintain fat stores during migration. some rodents and bats have short-term torpor for periods where they are not reproducing or for cold snaps.
Hibernation or more rarely whatever it is called in the summer…(something like aesthivation) is pretty common among rodents and there are variations on a theme there is no known primate and only one tropical mammal that show the behavior. As far as I can tell none of our ancestors are known to have hibernated as the whole of rodentia is another branch… so it kind of looks like a post-divergence adaptation…
I blame @tdseest for getting me hooked on Monster White Label and Sugar-free Red Bull a couple of years ago. That stuff is way too sweet tasting for me now.
Thinking of our ancestors eating adventitioualy, does the idea of extra weight for the winter have parallels with post-menopausal women having extra weight?
Humans, as far as I know, are the only species where grandmothers take active care of the youngest generation.
So, is there an advantage for grandmothers being heavier so they can take care of the active young?
What is the weight of extant hunter gatherer grandmothers? Are they heavier than younger hunter gatherer women?
And so, are today’s grandmothers only heavier because of SAD eating, or because there remains the effects of a biological advantage that would have been important for our ancestors?
(And of course, we are proportionally much heavier today).
I am the primary caregiver for my 3 year old grand daughter that lives with us (so does her mom) but she is a main motivation for me to get healthy, slim and trim and in shape to be able to walk her back and forth to school in the fall of 2020 (30 min each way for that is a total of about 2 hours walking for me a day). I might not be at goal weight by then but I hopefully will weigh a lot less then now). I need to be less weight then I am now to “take care of the active young”.
I was 293 (in February) I am now 248 and my goal weight I am not 100 percent sure on, but for sure I need to lose another 120 or more pounds to look and feel healthy.
Lot’s of interesting points in this thread, I’ll add a few more from memory, without digging into my files.
Paul is right about Paleo longevity, with the Mean of life expectancy being fairly close to what it is today. The Australian Aboriginal people were also very long lived, even having a specific name for their elderly. Most mortality was accident related, childhood diseases were fairly rare as nursing typically went to three years or more. Young kids were not exposed to the immuno suppressive effects of a carb based diet.
A fascinating study done about Plague survival has been done on an English village tracing survival with a genetic link. One thing overlooked is an account of a woman that was stricken, became delerious for several days, and then woke up famished and consumed a large amount of bacon fat. The scientists presented this as an insignificant anecdote, but I consider it indicative. Since she had been delirious for several days, her body was nutritionally depleted. Her consumption of the fat immediately threw her into deep lipolysis with high ketone numbers etc. IMO, this massively boosted her immune system and reduced her viral/bacterial load and enabled her to survive. I doubt she would have if she had had bread or gruel available instead of fat.
