Category: health

ຕີເນດ

One of these nuts is a meal for a man, both meat and drink.

– Marco Polo

I’m going to talk for a little bit about the glories of the coconut. Feel free to turn away at this point.

I never grew up eating them. East Tennessee is remarkably free of coconut trees. I saw some in China when I moved there, but I didn’t know much about them, didn’t know how to open them, and didn’t really bother looking into it.

Then in the course of studying up on my high fat, moderate protein diet, I kept running across coconuts and coconut oils. Lots of people swear by it for energy, for skin care, as a cancer cure, as an HIV cure, for curing the plague, for regrowing limbs, etc. Some of the claims were so far fetched that I didn’t pay much attention to this little fruit.

But I did note in my reading that some of the people groups whose traditional diets involved very high levels of saturated fat–and yet who did not have heart disease, obesity, diabetes, or cancer–got their saturated fat from a daily diet of coconuts rather than seals or cattle. The Tokelauan diet in particular was over 50% fat, most of it saturated. If you look at the very end of the study I linked to, you see that when the Tokelauans migrated to New Zealand their overall and saturated fat intakes sharply declined: and then they started developing arteriosclerosis.

Continue reading ຕີເນດ

A Mess of Greens

I don’t want any vegetables, thank you. I paid for the cow to eat them for me.

–Doug Copeland

I’m going to say some things about vegetables now. It might hurt their feelings, but I’m not going to say it to their faces. I’d appreciate if you wouldn’t repeat it to your asparagus, either. Hang on, here we go:

Continue reading A Mess of Greens

Criminal Negligence

That’s not a lie. It’s a terminological inexactitude.

–Alexander Haig

If we hadn’t all been fed a bunch of never-proved hypotheses about fat, calories and exercise as incontrovertible fact; by people who thought we were too stupid to be healthy and wanted to stick their big noses in and tell everyone else what to do, we would never have ended up with something like this:

She seems like a sweet lady, and I’m sure she thinks she’s helping people. But this isn’t useful, it could be dangerous–especially for large people–and she didn’t get thin doing it. She was already thin and is active because she’s thin. She’s not thin because she’s active.

Dare I say it? If God had meant us to prance like horses, He would have given us four legs. We’re not meant to eat like horses, either. Put down that grass drink and go grill up a steak.

 

Plato says he’s hungry

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Insanity

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

–Albert Einstein

I woke up this morning to see similar headlines blasted all over the web. I would love to quote it for you, but I just can’t decide which particular headline to use.

The upshot of all the headlines is that the FDA has finally approved a new obesity drug, Belviq, for sale in the USA. And there are so many things to mock here that my head is swimming. It’s like that time I got dragged to go “fishing” at a fish farm. The pond was about 3 feet deep, 20 feet widem and 10 feet long and contained approximately 1,546,453 fish.

You could just put on your apron, grab one with your bbq tongs, and stick it right on the grill.

Continue reading Insanity

Bad News With Benefits

Anticipate the difficult by managing the easy.

–Lao Tzu

Have you been waiting for the other shoe to drop? Well don’t worry: it won’t. This bad news is some of the easiest bad news you’ll ever get.

Eating this way–avoiding grains, sugars, vegetables oils, and excessive amounts of fruit, while embracing real animal fat, meat, and other fresh, real foods–has been one of the easiest things I’ve ever done.

It was certainly easier than spending half my life kneading my “healthy” whole wheat bread dough.

Continue reading Bad News With Benefits

Objections, 2

It is of no great difficulty to raise objections against another man’s oration; nay, it is a very easy matter; but to produce a better in its place is a work extremely troublesome.

–Plutarch

In the previous post I listed a common objection I hear to eating very-low carb: your brain needs glucose! In this post I deal with another common objection:

But all that saturated fat is very bad for you.

Continue reading Objections, 2

What Do You Eat? Part 2

Eating rice cakes is like chewing on a foam coffee cup, only less filling.

–Dave Barry

In What Do You Eat part the first, I ended with a short diatribe on why I don’t prefer the whole gluten-free, low-carb, pre-packaged food movement. You know: things like low-carb pancake mixes and heritage grain gluten-free bread. Carbs-that-aren’t-carbs, I call them.

Let’s review, shall we?

Continue reading What Do You Eat? Part 2

The Beginning

“Begin at the beginning,” said the King gravely, “and go on till you come to the end: then stop.” –Lewis Carroll

Who am I?

No one in particular. I’m American, but I live in Asia. I’m a woman, but I really like football, cars and barbecue. I have blue eyes, but sometimes I wish they were brown because they’re sensitive to sunshine and bright lights. I love to talk to people older than I, but I also love playing soccer with kids nearly a fifth my age. Oh, and I used to be fat.

Really fat.

But that’s been changing. In the course of (at the date of this writing) seven months, I’ve lost 115 pounds, packed on muscle and dramatically improved my triglycerides, my HDL count, my blood pressure and my resting heartbeat. I’ve also gotten more alert, ended spring allergies and have energy and to spare.

Continue reading The Beginning