The ultimate way to good health is through changing your eating habits. You can change your eating habits with some conscious decisions, and your body will follow. Start with a clean slate. The easiest way to change is to change your environment first, and your human body will find its way through the new maze.
Your brain is hardwired to solve problems in the quickest and easiest way. Remove the choices you don’t want to make. If you leave tasty bread crumbs, your body will follow them to an anticipated feast.
If you don’t have it in front of you, it’s hard to eat it.
Clean out your kitchen first. Eliminate all boxes of processed foods and all vegetable oils. Go through your refrigerator and freezer and all the hidden places where you might have a stash of hidden candy.
Also, engage all of the people around you.
Undoubtedly, if your dietary pattern is poor, it’s also poor for everybody around you. Humans are social creatures, and we use food to bond and as a shared form of communication and pleasure.
If you change and they don’t, either they will sabotage you or you will outgrow the relationship. Admittedly, some people will not change, so an online community is where you can head to gain additional support.
It’s about creating a new paradigm, a mindset that fits in the new environment.
You are creating a new vision of yourself. Your new vision incorporates what you are and what you do. Your environment reinforces your mindset, not the other way around.
You do not eat processed foods, refined grains, and vegetable oils.
You are concerned about your future self.
Your health determines your financial stability.
You know that movement is what makes the body healthy.
You know that sleep restores the body.
You know that Big Food and Big Pharma have their own agenda — to increase your consumption.
You know that most healthcare providers are educated through industry-sponsored events. There is no industry sponsorship for reducing consumption.
Practical tips through the day
Limit your food choices for the first few weeks to one or two different kind of foods for every meal. Variety will artificially and unnecessarily increase how much you eat, overwhelming your satiety signaling. Limit your seasonings, too, because even if the protein source stays the same, your taste receptors respond to the flavor, texture, temperature, and smell variance.
Your goal is to restrict your feeding window to a shorter part of the day and not feel hungry. When you start the day with a meal, you prime yourself to eat again in 2-4 hours. You are retraining your body to listen to your true hunger symptoms and your satiety signals. This means you need to slow down when eating, and should stretch a meal to 45 minutes, because it takes about 20 minutes for your leptin (satiety hormone) to be produced and recognized.
As a practical tip, have a glass of water before every meal and wait about 10 minutes before starting the meal. Then, have a glass of water at the end of every meal, and take a walk for 10 minutes after every meal.
Tasting a food, smelling a food, visualizing a food, or watching a show about food is only increasing your insulin production. This food porn will only cause you to become more insulin resistant. Don’t watch or participate in food porn.
Snacks beget more snacks. Don’t buy snacks or participate in snacking. If you must have a little something to take medication or feel that you can’t go snack-free yet, save some leftover protein from a previous meal to buffer your stomach.
Don’t eat when distracted by a TV. This is called mindless eating, and you are practicing mindfulness.
Have a consistent bedtime and get at least 7 hours of uninterrupted sleep. Sleep is needed to reset your cells. True sleep, initially, is probably more important than exercise for your metabolism.
Start the day off right and skip breakfast altogether. Unless you are truly hungry, or your metabolism has not yet adjusted, breakfast is a waste of calories and time.
If at first you “need” breakfast, then stick to a protein-rich source like eggs and healthy fats. Some suggestions are eggs, meats, fish, nuts, or salad with olive oil dressing.
You should avoid these foods altogether
(remember you don’t even buy these things, they don’t exist in your new Universe):
Oatmeal, cereal, bagels, bread, granola, breakfast bars
Fruit juice, fruit smoothies
Waffles, pancakes, muffins
You should re-think lunch and dinner. Eat only real food, nothing processed.
Forget about foods that never fill you up.
Always avoid food variety inside a meal. Limit yourself on one food type per meal.
For now, avoid food variety between meals until you can retrain your brain for real hunger and satiety signals.
Focus on protein and healthy fats
Focus on getting meals that are rich in protein and healthy fats. Eat all types of meat like beef, fish, chicken, lamb and seafood. Yogurt & cheeses are also nutritious and filling, but increasing variety will make your brain overeat. Fill up on olives, peppers, cucumbers, and avocado, and eat as many green leafy vegetables as you please.
About drinks: Sweet drinks will only drive up your hunger. Whether they have sugar in them or just artificial sweeteners, both will spike your insulin and make you overeat later.
- Juice
- Soda
- Smoothies
- Shakes
- Protein supplements
- Energy drinks
- Sweetened coffee/tea
Instead drink:
- Water
- Seltzer
- Unsweetened iced tea
- Unsweetened coffee
Snacks are unnecessary when your body habituates to real food.
If you must snack, pick from a variety of nuts, macadamia, brazil, pecans, almonds, and walnuts. Leftover protein from the previous meal is also good.
Desserts:
If you are going to eat dessert, what are your best options? Stay away from the ice cream, cookies, cakes that are all full of sugar. They only increase your appetite and your blood glucose levels.
Instead, eat delicious & convenient low carb desserts.
Consider Halo Top or another low-sugar ice-cream. The perfect keto almond butter brownie bar can be an amazing rescue for a desperate sweet tooth. Remember dessert is a special occasion, not a routine.
Many people can become overwhelmed or nervous at the concept of time-restricted feeding, but by following these four steps, you can have success at following this recommendation and reducing weight.
Step 1
Before you start a time-restricted feeding schedule, you should talk to your doctor or health care provider.
Get medical advice from a professional who is aligned with your health goals.
You may have medical conditions that need close monitoring. Likewise, you may be on medications that may need to be adjusted. It is important to have a strong understanding of your medical history and the medications you take prior to initiating a fasting program. Please talk to your doctor or healthcare provider.
Step 2
Stop all sugars, including all artificial sweeteners.
Many sugars and processed carbs just aren’t satiating — they don’t make you feel full. Stop all sugar and artificial sugar-sweetened beverages. Before you start your protocol, you should eliminate sugars and processed carbohydrates.
Also, stop all sources of vegetable oil and replace with healthy natural oil and real butter. Replacing industrial seed oil with real oils is easy if you are not eating processed foods. It even makes the food taste better.
Stop all processed foods. Processed foods are engineered to make you eat again and again and again, every 2-3 hours.
Step 3
Focus on getting meals that are rich in protein and healthy fats. Eat all types of meat like beef, fish, chicken, eggs, lamb, and seafood. Yogurt and cheeses are also nutritious and filling. Fill up on low-sugar vegetables like olives, peppers, cucumbers, and avocado, and eat as many green leafy vegetables as you please. This approach will help you get better adapted to fat metabolism and may make fasting easier to adopt.
Step 4
Start slow. This metainflammation didn’t happen in one day, and it won’t go away in a day.
Consider a liberal 8-hour eating window on your first day to see how it feels. Eat as you please during your 8-hour time frame and see how your body and appetite feel during the remaining hours of the day.
Then, slowly narrow your eating window.
As you feel more comfortable assessing your hunger, and understanding the nature of hunger pangs, you can slowly decrease your daily feeding window. Consider decreasing by one hour a week, until you reach a 4-hour window.
Things to think about:
If you haven’t made adjustments to your diet beforehand to include more satiating foods filled with protein, healthy fat and fiber, you may notice hunger pangs. If you are experiencing hunger pangs, consider drinking some hot tea, coffee, water or seltzer. This will fill your stomach up and give you enough time to realize that maybe you really aren’t as hungry as you initially thought. Some people use lemon in seltzer water.
This should be a fun experience, not a miserable experience. If you are having a miserable experience, something has been overlooked. Remember that time-restricted feeding is a great way to limit snacking. Eating filling real food during your eating window will restore and realign your hormone system.
Need more help? We have more to offer. Just contact us.
Some people ask the questions: What happens if I stop eating carbohydrates and sugars? What is the minimum daily carbohydrate intake requirement for health? These answers might not be what you think, and your body can be healthy without these.
The lower limit of carbohydrate consumption is likely zero, and there are no essential carbohydrates required for living. According to the Dietary Reference Intakes for Energy, Carbohydrate, Fiber, Fat, Fatty Acids, Cholesterol, Protein and Amino Acids (2005), the Recommended Dietary Allowance (RDA) for carbohydrate, considered to be the average minimum amount of glucose needed by the brain or central nervous system (CNS), is 130 g/day for adults and children.
The CNS comprises less than 2% of total body weight, but consumes roughly 20% of the total daily calories. Historically the brain has been considered the only organ that required glucose as a fuel source, utilizing approximately 100-140 g glucose per day. However, with ketoadaptation, the CNS reduces the obligatory glucose requirement by approximately 80%, resulting in a true utilization of 20-28 g glucose/d.
However, traditional civilizations (Masai, the Greenland and Alaskan Inuit and Pampas indigenous people) survive on a “minimal amount of carbohydrate for extended periods of time with no apparent effect on health or longevity.”
Research goes on to state that “In the absence of dietary carbohydrate, de novo synthesis of glucose requires amino acids derived from the hydrolysis of endogenous or dietary protein or glycerol derived from fat. Therefore, the marginal amount of carbohydrate required in the diet in an energy-balanced state is conditional and dependent upon the remaining composition of the diet.”
Endogenous glucose production through gluconeogenesis is approximately 2.8-3.6 g/kg/d, or approximately 210-270 g/d in a 70kg human, far greater than the obligatory requirement of 20-28g glucose/d of the ketoadapted human.
According to the Food and Nutrition Board of the Institute of Medicine, “The lower limit of dietary carbohydrate compatible with life apparently is zero, provided that adequate amounts of protein and fat are consumed” (pg. 275). There is no essential need for dietary carbohydrate, provided that “adequate amounts of protein and fat are consumed.”
Carbohydrates are necessary for metabolism, but it’s not necessary to eat them. Your body will manufacture the carbohydrates it needs.
Why do we care so much about food and diet and its impact on your health? We own and operate chronic care health-related companies, but also own and operate restaurants. We have been fascinated with the intersection of health, dietary intake, and lifestyle. We view nutrition as a program, or a subroutine, that informs and instructs the body to specific action. A corrupted program leads to a corrupted outcome.
Our clinics evaluate and treat several thousand patients per year for chronic and acute pain, in an urban setting where access to high-intensity healthcare is readily available through several large academic centers as well as government-sponsored outreach clinics. Unfortunately, despite the availability of cutting-edge medical treatment, the health of individuals and populations continues to decline year over year. Over 90% of our patients have untreated metabolic syndrome, and over 80% have undiagnosed prediabetes or diabetes type 2. The symptom of pain is the final common pathway for the human body to signal impending tissue damage, and most patients avoid contact with the health delivery system until they develop a symptom that they can no longer ignore. Unfortunately, our clinical practice is not unique. Pain is the leading reason for patients seeking medical care and is one of the most disabling, burdensome, and costly conditions in the US. Overall, pain care/treatment and lost productivity costs $635 billion per year. The commonality in metabolic syndrome and chronic pain is the hyperinflammatory state or metainflammation.
As we have treated this patient population over the last 20-plus years, we have discovered some common threads that trouble us. About 80% of the patients have either obesity, prediabetes or diabetes, with the vast majority remaining undiagnosed. More than half of these patients go on to have significant expensive complications and about 20% eventually require dialysis. By 2026, the Medicare system will be so overwhelmed with the diseases of metainflammation that it will literally run out of money. We must engage individual patients in improved health outcomes in order to change the community. We have fewer than seven years.
We are passionate about returning this patient population to health, and avoiding bariatric surgical procedures, which are costly and carry significant risks of organ injury, death, and long-term disability. We have found that academic institutions avoid this population until extraordinary and expensive complications set in, requiring hospitalization. It is our opinion that there is a fundamental cultural disconnect between the ivory tower of the institutions and the actual communities where these patients reside. This cultural disconnect prevents patient engagement in lifestyle changes. Additionally, the Medicaid system does not reimburse for lifestyle and dietary modification for obesity but does reimburse for bariatric surgery. The overwhelming marketing from processed food manufacturers targets the urban minority communities with disingenuous messaging, suggesting health benefits for obesogenic foods. This combined with supplemental nutrition benefits and game theory promotes the hyper-consumption of farmer-subsidized high fructose corn starch as well as industrial seed oils. It is our opinion that the overconsumption of hyperpalatable, nutritionally deficient food is a major contributor to reduced academic success, reduced employment opportunities, increased incarceration rates, and progression of metabolic dysfunction. It is a root cause of the social and economic disparity.