Open Future Health Blog

Your habits when you are in your 40's and 50's are the foundation for your good health and fitness at 85. Improved diet is the low cost alternative to extensive medical intervention later in life. The body has the ability to heal itself, if we treat it with respect. ANYBODY who adopts a healthy diet, at ANY AGE, will benefit, and as the months go by, those benefits will multiply.

Use Your Hybrid Fuel Capacity

Each of us has a capacity to metabolise two alternative fuels. Glucose or fatty acids/ketones.

Unless we are accustomed to fasting for long periods, four days or more, or unless we are eating a very low-carbohydrate diet, we've only ever used the glucose metabolism.

The Women's Health Initiative Dietary Intervention Study, showed that at least for older women, the recommended low-fat high-carbohydrate diet was NOT a healthy diet. This surprising finding is still being denied by some experts. Dr Tim Noakes, suggests why older people in developed societies put on weight, while eating a wide variety of "quality food" that's supposed to be "healthy."

Tim Noakes says that because we've eaten carbohydrates 4 to 10 times a day for 50 years, that our bodies respond to an excess of carbohydrates by becoming carbohydrate intolerant. This is the beginning of the same process that creates type 2 diabetes in individuals. To some extent, we are ALL somewhat down the track to developing carbohydrate intolerance. From a medical point of view, it appears as metabolic syndrome, six metabolic problems that occur as a cluster. They can be recognised before type 2 diabetes is diagnosed, and are part of the same chronological development pathway.

Recognition of carbohydrate intolerance is evident in the number of people who benefit from a gluten-free diet. Taking that a stage further, some people benefit from being wheat-free. Some people (perhaps myself) develop autoimmune conditions that are diet related. In an effort to find the cause of a persistent red and itchy rash, I started cutting things out of my diet. My objective was not to discover a way to easily reduce my weight. The discovery of the field of ketogenic diets in general, and the Banting diet was for me an accident.

Carbohydrate intolerance is damage you have done to your body because of your dietary choices. If the amount of damage is small, you can continue to eat a mixed diet, restricting sugar severely, and carbohydrate somewhat, to successfully regain control over your weight, and correct your blood pressure and your fasting blood lipids. Going a stage further again, is to strongly reduce the consumption of all carbohydrates, adopting a full ketogenic lifestyle. When you do that, you mimic starvation, (but you never feel hungry) and you engage the alternative fuel source, fatty-acids and ketones.

If you restrict the amount of carbohydrate you eat, you need to eat more fat for energy. This additional fat CANNOT become fat on your hips in the absence of extra insulin in the blood. You need to understand what causes an insulin spike in your blood. Learn to eat in a way that keeps insulin turned off, and you will lose weight. Hormones ARE responsible for the excess weight many of us carry. Learn to control insulin, and the fat you eat will become fatty acids and be converted to energy.

The take-away is this: Your body is a hybrid fuel organism. You can run on glucose or fatty acids and ketones. The scientific way to reduce weight is to eat as little sugar as possible and to reduce carbohydrates quite strongly. That leaves you with an energy deficit, so at the same time you need to eat more saturated fats, or mono-unsaturated fats like olive oil, for energy. We've been indoctrinated for all our lives to avoid fat in our diet. So all of us struggle with that wrong idea and many others. Our wrong ideas make us fat, and make it difficult to eat in a healthy way. Pruning your mind of these faulty ideas is your key task. When you've done that getting your weight right will be easy.

John Stephen Veitch
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