I’m a free man! Holy lord I cannot wait to crack open a huge box of krispy mf?n kremes and go to town! Finally this heinous experience is over!
Nah man, I don’t think so (read in LL Cool J voice).
I’m saving my conclusions for tomorrow, but I will say that this was probably the easiest restricted diet I’ve ever had to follow with the exception of Schwarzbein’s program. It’s easy to follow a diet that eliminates cravings, hunger, and addictive eating behavior, am I right?
And I will confess to eating some guacamole last night at a Christmas party, plus I did have those two glasses of wine a while back. But I’d say I followed it pretty darn close.
I’m not sold on it, nor do I plan to fully continue it. I am over very-low-carb phobia however, and plan to follow a very, very low carbohydrate diet in the immediate future ? especially during a Colorado winter where, if seeking carbohydrates this time of year, I would have to eat a lot of tree bark. I don’t think the Utes that once lived in the area ate much besides elk this time of year.
I will say that if you are a lamb living within a 100 mile radius of Carbondale, Colorado, you better run if you have hopes of becoming a sheep. Consider yourself warned.
My only concern is that, as far as towns go, Carbondale is very carbohydrate dense. There’s one whole CARB in CARBondale. Break out the glucose meter.
Until tomorrow?
Heya Matt! Congratulations on your successful foray into zc living!!!! I hope I am even modestly as successful in my experiment as you are, because if I am, then I will most likely continue it for an extra few months at least.
It’s been great to follow your journey and read of your adventures! You really sound so much healthier after this that part of me is sad you will be going back to vlc. Do you have any plans on how to accomplish this so as not to have the backlash that you could have from adding back carbs too quickly after zc?
Good luck on your move to Carbondale! I loved Colorado when I lived there. Great climate too!
Matt, can you describe your typical diet before the zero-carb experiment? My view is that eliminating fiber helped most of all. I take Monastyrsky’s views to their logical conclusion. The Hyper-Lipid blog also has many anti-fiber articles saying that fiber causes cancer, makes you fat, bloats the body, etc. Check them out.
http://high-fat-nutrition.blogspot.com/2008/02/fiber-inulin-and-cancer.html
http://high-fat-nutrition.blogspot.com/2008/04/fiber-sucrose-and-ulcers.html
http://high-fat-nutrition.blogspot.com/2007/12/fiaf-whos-fat-is-it-anyway.html
http://high-fat-nutrition.blogspot.com/2007/12/fiaf-starving-amidst-plenty.html
http://high-fat-nutrition.blogspot.com/2007/12/fiaf-where-next.html
Meanwhile, the author continues to eat a steady diet of 85% chocolate, because of addiction if you ask me. Getting rid of all coffee (including decaf), tea, dark chocolate, cocoa powder, and caffeine is the best thing people on low-carb diets could do to improve their health. Those foods are bad due, period. Decaf coffee spikes insulin just like regular coffee, causing hunger and cravings.
So, the benefits of zero-carb diet, esp like Charles’s, is is three-fold.
1) You eliminate fiber. This also takes out nuts and seeds, most of which are high in PUFAs and/or fiber.
2) You eliminate PUFA oils, mayonnaise, salad dressing, and other junk.
3) You eliminate all drinks but water – no coffee (including decaf), no tea, no milk, no cream, no diet sodas, etc.
Another benefit may be from eliminating
all dairy except maybe butter. Cheese is problematic for various reasons, as are milk and cream and so forth. I would be hesitant to eliminate butter, since it’s a good source of fat-soluble vitamins. I would go along with eliminating eggs, as many are allergic to them, and they have more PUFAs than red meat and butter.
Many low-carbers have meat-and-eggs, or meat-and-cheese. I believe mixing foods like that degrades digestion a bit, esp for modern people, who don’t have great digestion to begin with. I feel the old prohibitions against eating eating meat (mammal or fowl) with eggs or meat with dairy (except butter) makes sense. It’s better to eat simpler meals. This maybe another reason for the benefits claimed by people like Charles. By eliminating dairy, he stopped eating the dairy with meat. By eliminating eggs, he stopped eating eggs with meat. The problem may have been the combination of foods, not the foods themselves, but he never ate eggs alone, cheese alone, or eggs with cheese, or cheese with cheese, which is supposedly a “kosher” meal. These rules aren’t just arbitrary, IMO. Science can probably back them up.
Sorry, “cheese with cheese” should have been “cheese with fish”, which is often eaten by strict Jews (ex: lox and cream cheese). I also don’t think butter with meat would cause problems. Milk, cheese, and cream might cause problems if eaten with meat (fowl or mammal).
Bruce,
My diet prior to beginning this was extremely high fat. Probably 75% of calories most days, sometimes more. I ate a little starch in the form of potatoes mostly, or a corn tortilla, etc. with meals and a small portion of well-cooked vegetables here and there. There was some fiber in my diet, but not much. I’d guess 10-15grams per day, and a total of under 100g carbs per day. Call it 20 per meal on average.
I do think complete fiber removal is great to ease gastrointestinal inflammation, malabsorption, and other irritation. I have experimented with near-zero fiber diets in the past using white rice as a sole source of carbohydrates. It was quite different from the all-meat diet physically.
I agree completely with your sentiments on dairy, eggs, caffeine, etc., and particularly with simplicity. Simplicity of food is miraculous in today’s day and age when so many suffer from pitiful digestive capacity.
Low-carbers often don’t understand that that which triggers insulin resistance, spikes cortisol, etc. are just as harmful as pure sugar or worse – espeicially paired with a high fat, high protein diet. Caffeine, many food additives, no calorie sweeteners – artificial or natural same difference, all have addictive and overstimulating properties that can diffuse what might otherwise be a very successful weight loss and health enhancement program.
There is still fiber in white rice. Only way to eliminate fiber totally is to eat just honey, strained juices, milk, maple syrup, dextrose, and things like that. I eliminated fiber completely for a couple months and noticed many benefits, like a reduction of hunger, cravings, appetite, and weight. I felt the same thing as you describe with zero-carb. Food simply did not matter any more. As long as I stayed away from fiber, I could “take or leave” any food that I was eating.
Cool. I’ll give ‘er a try in the future. That would be pretty impressive if that were to happen to me on milk, honey, and other foods that I’ve had problems with in the past. But like we both know, change the variables, and the rules of the game as you once viewed them can change drastically.
It’s very important to remove fiber from juice if it has any. I bought the finest strainer I could find. Some juices, like lime, would give me unformed stools if I didn’t strain them. When strained, there was no problem at all. There is probably still traces of fiber in juices, but the total amount is probably near zero. Even milk may have a little fiber, There is a detailed analysis of raw milk on Organic Pastures website and it said there was a little under 4g of fiber per cup! May be an error, but I have wondered about that ever since. Fiber in milk? Their current details say there is no fiber.
http://www.organicpastures.com/nutritional.html
http://www.organicpastures.com/products_milk.html
You guys are talking about eliminating fiber as a detox sort of, right? It’s kind of confusing, really, since from what I read (very little yet) about Price, he said the cultures he studied did not refine any products. This would have to mean they had some sort of fiber in their diets. I haven’t read his book yet, but does he see different tribes with different levels of fiber – or do they all include fiber?
Fiber, in and of itself, is not harmful. It was present in huge amounts in many native diets. Some diets contained absolutely zero fiber. A baby’s diet contains zero fiber — it is not an essential nutrient.
Denis Burkitt noticed that refined foods such as white rice and white flour caused disease. One difference between refined grains and whole grains was the lack of fiber. Thus, he attributed all of the digestive problems and subsequent disease that refined foods induced upon lack of fiber.
Doh!
Turns out lack of nutrients and hormone disturbance leads to immune system inefficiency, susceptibility to infectious illness, and degeneration. It has little to do with fiber.
Unfortunately, we are told, because many primitive peoples ate fiber and had excellent digestive health, that if you have digestive problems you should eat tons of fiber.
If you suffer from malabsorption, intestinal inflammation, dysbiosis, and other abnormalities of the digestive tract that leads to disease – fiber is harmful. Fiber is an irritant. Fiber is not an elixir, but a contributor to illness in the majority of digestion-related health problems.
visit http://www.fibermenace.com for more on “how healthy foods kill people.”
You can eat unrefined carbohydrates that are fiber-free, like milk, well-strained juice, unheated honey, maple syrup, etc. But like Matt said the problem is a lack of essential nutrients, not fiber. Fiber is not an essential nutrient. There’s no disease caused by lack of fiber, no more than a low-carb diet will cause disease. Of course you can never remove the carbs completely, as there are traces in meat, eggs, cheese, etc. The important part is low-residue, IMO. Avoids foods which can produce a digestive residue, like fiber, large amounts of milk/cream, etc. Here’s some info on low-residue diets.
http://www.nmh.org/nmh/pdf/pated/lowfiber-diet07.pdf
http://www.wchob.org/gi/low_residue_diet.asp
“Fiber, in and of itself, is not harmful. It was present in huge amounts in many native diets.”
I don’t think any healthy tribes ate as much fiber as Joel Fuhrman suggests. He tells people to eat 77g of fiber a day! That is ridiculous. Do you think any of the groups Price and McCarrison studied were eating 77g of fiber a day? I think Fuhrman is totally insane. he certainly has no grasp of reality, because he has blamed all disease in America on animal foods and saturated fats, even while he admits that refined sugars, flours, and vegetable oils are problematic.
Atkins Facts – Joel Fuhrman, M.D.
Supposedly the African tribes that Burkitt studied ate 50-100 grams of fiber per day and had excellent digestive health and freedom from gastrointestinal illness just like the groups Price, McCarrison, etc. observed.
And then Burkitt was like, “gotta get your fiber or else.”
Oops.
See Cap’n Cleave on that topic.
But did they have 32 straight teeth free of cavities as well? Price was unable to find a highly vegetarian tribe that did. They might have had better teeth than a modern person raised on large amounts of refined sugar and white flour and PUFAs, but not the immunity to decay seen in a tribe like the Masai and Eskimos eating zero-fiber diets virtually.
I never had any cavities for the first 18 years of my life. My diet was very low in fiber and PUFAs, no more than 5g a day of each, most likely. I ate some sugar, like ice cream (Breyer’s all natural) and semi sweet chocolate chips, maybe one soda per week. But my diet was mainly orange juice, milk, beef, potatoes, butter, liver, lean chicken, carrots, beets, white rice, etc. Virtually devoid of fiber and PUFAs. Very little white flour products. I never even brushed my teeth except with water.