Okay, it’s late and I’m way too tired to write much.
I did experience some nausea last night in the middle of the night. It was not pleasant. I didn’t hork but the feeling I had was so disgustingly awful. It didn’t beckon me to eat carbs or anything, heaven forbid. It did make me want to steer clear of pork for a while though, which reminds me?
I forgot to mention my menu du jour yesterday. To the best of my memory, it was:
Breakfast: 5 eggs fried in 1T butter. 2 ounces Brie
Lunch: 1 pound pork belly
Dinner: 1 pound pork belly
Today I hit some low carb irritability. It was beyond rational. I’m lucky all my personal possessions are still intact. It was very reminiscent of Michael J. Fox as he leans forward across the counter at the liquor store and says, slowly, ?Give me a keg of beer. This is a perfect comparison, especially seeing, as I mentioned yesterday, that my ears are now pointed and I have hair growing out of my forehead. OWWW-OWWW! Wolfman!
Today’s menu was very nice. I’d say I enjoyed it thoroughly. Say what you want about an all-meat diet’s appeal, but I promise you, I don’t care what you ate today, my lunch was better than yours ? the best thing I’ve eaten in a long time:
Breakfast: 7 scrambled eggs with 2T butter. 2 cups shrimp head/crab tomalley broth with 2T butter
Lunch: 10 ounces super-tender fatty ribeye, sliced raw, seasoned with 2T macadamia nut oil, 1t Poggio Antico white truffle oil, cayenne pepper, sea salt, and a few fresh thyme leaves (Plant! Yikes! C?mon, even dogs eat grass sometimes).
Dinner: 6 soft-boiled eggs, 4 ounces Fontina cheese
And that’s all folks. Feeling more normal with the exception of waking up as if I’m on speed at precisely 5:55am every day now, and having massive nausea attacks in the middle of the night. Yesterday’s headache is pretty much gone, but still lingers ever-so-slightly.
My bet is that your nausea was not so much from the pork per se but the amount of fat in pork belly. I am surprised it happened in the middle of the night. Most experiences with too much fat that I read about on LC forums is the nausea comes while eating.
Perhaps, but keep in mind that I’m fully accustomed to eating enormous amounts of fat. My typical diet has included anywhere from 200 grams when inactive to 300 grams when active, every day for the last 2 years with rare exception.
Forget the nausea. A better question is, How’s the poop?
I would use the word “solid,” but that might confuse you into thinking that is descriptive of my poop instead of meaning, “things are going well.”
So far so good. Like I mentioned one day, I had slight fecal compaction one morning. This seemed to clear up a little over the next two days.
Trouble is brewing now though. Instead of having my religious morning squat, I was too rushed to get out the door, and that adrenaline was enough to tie off the lil’ tiger.
I can’t imagine an extra half day or even full day of hangin’ out it gonna help me out. Keep you posted.
Did not know you consume 200 to 300 grams of fat daily. So yes maybe it was the pork. I am not a doctor but play one on the internet so I was wondering if it could be gastroparesis for which nausea is one of the symptoms and could explain the delayed reaction.
Oh you better believe I’m watching out for gastroparesis. If Doc Atkins admits that his low carb diet can induce hypothyroidism, and hypothyroidism can induce gastroparesis, then it is certainly something to keep an eye on. Thanks for the heads up. A friend of mine, after eating very low carb for a couple of years, ran into serious problems with what I believe to be hypothyroidism-induced gastroparesis. Damn the neuropathy of that vagus nerve!
I can eat 200g butter with no ill effects but too much pork fat causes nausea.
I used to get really fatty (Bigorre – fattened on acorns) pork chops which taste really good. After a couple of nausea-episodes I lost somewhat my interest in too much pork fat.
By the way: Cool blog Matt!
True, when you reach a certain point with the pork fat it’s like hitting a wall. This seems to especially be the case with bacon and pork belly. Hopefully Bruce cand shed some light on this, as he made several mentions about pork belly the other day…
Regarding Atkins and hypothyroidism. I understand that if Atkins said to be aware of low carb and hypothyroidism one makes the link. However, given the rampant diagnosis of this condition that seems to prevail these days this condition cannot all be blamed on low carb. Heck the most famous person with hypothyroidism these days is Oprah and AFAIK she is not low carb. So is it something else like a drastic change in diet that does it?
Oh I think there are dozens of ways to induce hypothyroidism. Dieting (meaning trying desperately to eat less and exercise more) is the most efficient means to get that going. Oprah is the poster-child for hypothyroidism.
It probably is the stress of reducing carbs that causes the problems, or the “rapid weight loss” that so many diets induce. Another could be poor oxidation of fatty acids which must replace those carbs for usable energy.
Dietary deficiency can also induce hypothyroidism.
Infection can do it.
Mental and emotional stress can do it.
It’s really the activation of excessive stress hormones like cortisol which induces hypothyroidism, as well as insulin resistance and compensatory hyperinsulinemia.
Russuell Farris’s The Potbelly Syndrome is actually a worthwhile read on this topic, despite his misunderstanding of infectious pathogens.
Two pounds of pork belly is like 480g of fat, 51g of PUFAs, and 4,700 Calories. I would guess that the PUFAs were a factor in the nausea. Beef fat wouldn’t do this because it has about 1/6th as much PUFAs as pork fat. That’s how Herman Taller’s diet worked. He told people to eat 5 oz of safflower oil, corn oil, or margarine per day (1350 Calories). Plus all of the meat, eggs, butter, cheese, seafood, and nuts they wanted. His diet was virtually zero carb. Eating 10 tablespoons of PUFA oils would cause marked nausea due to an excess of lipid peroxidation in the gut. In the absence of carbs, PUFA oils would be largely wasted and burned off because the body takes what it needs and wastes the rest. However, this is also going to age you fast, and it’s a waste of money. Eating more suitable fats (from mammals, pref ruminants) makes more sense. Using PUFA oils is detrimental to health and a waste of money. Tropical oils are best.
Regarding hypothyroidism, I think that’s more a result of chronic under-eating on low-carb diets. A cyclical diet is a lot better IMO. Like eating low-carb on week days and higher carbs on the week end to prevent the body from turning catabolic. Low-carb diets are catabolic, insofar as they make a distance runner lose muscle, if he stops exercising. I don’t think it is normal to rapidly lose muscle just by not exercising. Running is stressful and catabolic. Aerobic exercise is unhealthy like the low-fat diets that are promoted to accompany it. If Charles didn’t run, he’d be scrawny and puny like the people eating raw paleo diets are. I don’t even waste my time with running. Better to do walking, heavy infrequent weightlifting, and Tabata intervals. Art DeVany has the right ideas about exercise. Charles does not. Running is a great way to make the body catabolic and weak, so that it will lose muscle at the drop of a hat. Eating zero-carb helps enhance that effect
Zero-Carb’s good if you want to weigh as little as possible, and don’t care about anything else, like health. I prefer the physique of Art DeVany to that of Geoff Purcell, Lex Rooker, and Charles. Art is about 211 lbs and 6’0″ tall. Clearly an overweight man (BMI 27). Unlike Charles, with his BMI of 23. LOL.
http://www.arthurdevany.com/webstuff/images/artRun.jpg
http://www.arthurdevany.com/webstuff/images/artStand.gif
Thanks for insight on Herman Taller. I wondered what in God’s name would make people feel full on 1300 calories a day.
Long-distance running and any high-intensity exercise that lasts hours in duration would definitely rank 1st for most harmful forms of physical activity next to being a stuntman. No argument there. It’s much healthier to do no exercise at all than run marathons assuming your diet is right.
Burning fatty acids more effectively, which I’m sure Charles can do on his diet or he wouldn’t have made it to the finish line in the first place, does have a muscle-sparing effect and an endurance advantage. It is well-known that enhanced fatty acid oxidation is what separates a good distance athlete from a great one, as glycogen supplies just don’t last that long.
Charles is pretty cut. To get muscle definition like that you can’t be that catabolic. I’ve lost 20 pounds with endurance exercise before without getting an increase in definition due to my once high-sugar diet. Going low-carb allowed me to efforlessly build a very well-defined physique doing the exact same type and quantity of endurance exercise. It was night and day.
If Charles eats enough excess protein, he probably won’t have muscle catabolism. He will probably have far less than he would on a high-carb diet assuming he was producing too much insulin, which starves the lean tissues and catabolizes an unusual amount of lean tissue.
Many bodybuilders are more muscular than Charles and many athletes eat carbs and have better endurance than Charles. Most body-builders eat high-starch, high-carb, low-sugar, low-fat, and high-protein, so they have more in common with your low-sugar, so their diets have more in common with your normal diet htan they do with Charles’s.
Here are several blog posts arguing that low-fat, high-carb, high-starch, and low sugar is ideal for building muscle. That is nothing new, but I’ve seen people who eat raw paleo with all wild or grass-fed meat and no sugars who are not muscular. Then there is the question of health. It may have been healthy to have a low body fat in a pristine natural environment, but that doesn’t mean it’s healthy to do so in today’s world. I don’t believe all the groups Price studied had visible ab muscles. That doesn’t mean they were any less healthy than you or Charles.
http://veganmaster.blogspot.com/2008/07/elevating-insulin-and-minimizing-fat.html
http://veganmaster.blogspot.com/2008/08/ideal-mnp-diet-is-high-in-starches-low.html
http://veganmaster.blogspot.com/2008/08/mnp-100-muscle-and-34-selected.html
http://veganmaster.blogspot.com/2008/08/muscle-gain-during-energy-deficits-good.html
Jan Kwasniewski’s diet is almost exactly the same as your normal diet – high fat, low carb, high starch, low sugar. Jan K. isn’t very muscular or athletic, nor is Peter on the high-fat blog, who eats the same type of low-fructose diet.
I wasn’t saying Charles’s leaness was a sign of health, just that to be that defined you can’t be overly catabolic.
Agreed that high-starch, high-protein yields maximal building. The sumo have the most muscle mass of any known humans, moreso than bodybuilders, on something like 600g starch and 350g protein per day.
Although I choose starch over simple sugars on my “normal” diet, it is still low in starch – about 25g of carbs per meal. It’s this regimen that gave me spontaneous muscle restoration without exercise, and also kept me from losing any muscle mass on high-endurance exercise (40 hours per week), thus making me look quite lean. I attribute most of it to lack of sugar though, which is muscle sparing for those who may be suffering from hyperinsulinemia.
Agreed that you don’t have to have visible abs to be healthy, it’s just a fascinating study into the dynamics of human fat loss to make note of this key indicator of overall body fat levels.
Also, you maybe more muscular because of dairy and eggs, which are better quality protein than meat. Try eating just meat, no eggs, no dairy, and no exercise. Then see what happens to your muscle over six months. I think you will lose muscle and have difficulty gaining much.
Why should we assume that a low body fat is healthy? Lots of unhealthy people are lean. Did all of the people Weston Price studied have visible ab muscles? Or, did he bother to consider that, as they were healthy by objective criteria?
What if AV’s right that we need more fat to protect us from pollution, chemicals, and so forth? He argues that when you’re lean those toxins will go right into the organs, instead of body fat. Which would you prefer? I’ve noticed a clear pattern in people like Charles and Anthony Colpo and others who eat a similar diet (paleo or zero-carb in particular). They’re all very hostile and vain.
Here are some quotes from Charles, that reveal his personality. This is how Mr. Washington talks to complete strangers, that he knows nothing about.
“Don’t be jealous because you don’t have a six pack. Most people like you don’t.”
“Face it, you want to be me.”
“Be honest. Without me, you have absolutely nothing to write about.
You have no ideas, no life, and you’re probably obese. You need me to
be relevant. Your gravy train has now been derailed.”
Yeah, we are all envious of Charles. We want to be him, so we can put down total strangers on the internet. He’s so much better than everyone else. More muscular and more healthy. LOL. I think you’re a lot healthier than Charles, judging from your personality and intelligence. He’s more narcissistic than Anthony Colpo and that is really an accomplishment.
I’ve also heard that the sumos don’t get diabetes, because they don’t eat refined sugar. But they do have cellulite and an extreme amount of fat along with all the muscle. They look grotesque. And if your insulin function works, I think you will create muscle from eating natural sugars like milk, honey, juice, etc. People ask me if I work out even though I do mainly short hard infrequent exercise.
Here’s an article talking about how sumo wrestlers eat to get fat. The rules are simple: skip breakfast, exercise with an empty stomach, take a nap after eating, eat late in the day, go to be full, and eat socially, not by yourself.
http://tinyurl.com/qkjoh
Yes, I love studying the sumo diet. The overweight are almost always breakfast skippers who eat the bulk of their calories late in the day, and are hungry when they should be sleepy.
I don’t think having a six-pack says anything about overall health. The only time I had an absolute ripped set of abs was the most insane I’ve ever been. Definitely read my “Wind River Diet” post if you haven’t already.
I will say that health isn’t everything. Many people would rather have a mean six-pack, be a little hostile, and die at 60 than be soft and nice until 85. I think if you interviewed the average male and asked, “would you like to look like an NFL running back even though your life expectancy would be 55?” the majority of answers would be “hell yes!”
You may view vanity negatively, but looking good has an evolutionary purpose. Being male has an evolutionary purpose. Face it, we are programmed as males to want more than anything in the world (including health and longevity) to give women orgasms just by lifting up our shirts.
Funny, but true. I don’t know anyone who is capable of doing this, but this is the highest aspiration most of our gender seeks.
I do admit, if I get insanely ripped in 30 days on this diet, healthy or not, that’s a tough thing to give up. Eating a diet that gives you some nice insulation is easier said than done when the answer on how to be a god of sexual studliness is right at your fingertips.
Most women aren’t attracted to huge body-builders. They like guys with balanced muscle and fat, who do not look like push-overs. I doubt most women would snub a buff guy, like Aajonus. Put Charles or Anthony Colpo on a football field, and see how long before they are crippled or killed. Being “ripped” doesn’t mean you are irresistibly attractive to females. In fact, I suspect Charles is his own biggest admirer. Narcissism…
Maybe these hostile lean guys are frustrated that they can’t go into a bar and pick up a hot woman and they’re stuck with a wife who does not look like she did before kids. Maybe they’re angry loners. One of these “ripped” individuals said he would “rather be dating” his wife than be married to her. That says a lot about his current level of happiness and fulfillment. If she read his comments, I would think she either has no self-esteem or backbone, because I would divorce his ass for saying that. Wouldn’t you? He’s basically saying that he wants to cheat on his wife or end his commitment to her.
Also, most football players are not ripped. They have a thick layer of fat to cushion the blows. Maybe the quarterbacks are ripped, but other players are buff or husky. Having a 55-year lifespan also doesn’t mean much when you consider their health after retirement. Most of them are then obese, diabetic, and unhealthy because they’re no longer training, but still eat like they were: high fat, high carb, high everything…
You crack me up man. There’s no way they’d catch Charles on the football field though man. Haven’t you heard about his super secret ninja-gazelle toe-running form? All the well-insulated players would be like, “damn, CW got game!”
In that case, why is he wasting his time doing menial labor by comparison? He can join the NFL and make easy money. I will look forward to seeing that! Also, he is not running marathons, like you said. He only does half-marathons or less. So his endurance doesn’t have to be that great. You don’t hit the wall until 20 miles or so, while he runs 13 max. That’s easy by comparison and doesn’t really prove that his diet gives him phenomenal endurance. He doesn’t blow the others away, either.
What’s all this Charles-bashing about. I think he is a nice guy overall.
If someone is hostile than it’s you, Bruce. Your are not in the same league as A. Colpo but not far behind.
You say there are a lot of (high carb) body builders who have more muscles than Charles. Maybe, but with the same effort? I don’t think so. You can’t compare 20 hours a week weight lifting with someone who lifts about 1 hour per week.
I wouldn’t mind having Charles? body composition. But I aggree he is too much focused on his weight for my taste.
There’s no bashing, just poing out facts that are documented. Many people do less exercise than Charles and are more solid and muscular. Matt, for one. Art DeVany, Clarence Bass, and Olympic sprinters are more muscular than Charles and do vastly less exercise. If Charles doesn’t train, he loses weight (muscle). This is caused by under-nourishment. I’ve heard of many people like Charles who “lose muscle” if they don’t work out. He also has a very hostile and narcissistic personality. To feel good is one thing. To say “you want to be me” is as pathetic and lame as you can get. I don’t want to be anyone else. I agree with J.P. Sartre, “Hell is other people.” Charles can have his runs. I do high-intensity exercise. I’d rather have a body like Art DeVany than Charles. So, Charles can go back to stroking his ego, pretending I want to be him. What a good natured guy. What a winner.
I have nothing against Charles. In fact, I think his blog is excellent. It’s the only blog on the entire internet that I take the time to read from start to finish. He is highly intelligent and a real pioneer in nutritional experimentation. In many ways, he’s the man.
However, I am exceedingly fond of making fun of people, myself included, whether warranted or not. I also think niceness is a facade that people wear as an outside shell and try to pawn off on others as if they are angelic beings. I prefer realness, emotion, anger, jealousy, and other true human emotions that we express around loved ones and family members (who we are our true selves around) and hide from the public for fear of people discovering what irrational, temper-tantrum-throwing assholes we really are.
So I appreciate Bruce’s comments and open expression. I appreciate Charles’s self-gratifying comments as well. They are hilarious. When he told Bruce to go eat his “monkey food” I almost had to be hospitalized I was laughing so hard.
Everyone is nice and mean. Everyone has a heart and an asshole. Some show more of one than another on the surface, and save the opposite of that for their loved ones. We have private personas, and public personas.
In the words of John F. Demartini, “the master is one who has learned how to take his privates public.”
So let’s get along AND fight. Doing a combination of both is what produces real insight, growth, learning, and development.
But Matt, you’re nice compared with guys like Charles and Anthony Colpo. I’ve yet to see you belittle anyone like they do. You give as good as you get when someone attacks you, but they pick fights for no reason and make assumptions about people who are complete strangers, even if they know very little about how someone eats, how they exercise, or how they look. You conduct yourself on a level far far away from Charles and Anthony, where the most typical argument is “you suck and you’re a loser if you don’t have a six pack.” I have higher standards of health than how much someone weighs or what percent body fat they have attained. Like Schwarzbein said, I believe you must “get healthy to lose weight,” not vice versa. Maybe it’s not healthy for your brain and emotions, to be extremely lean. Nobody even thinks about that, because people just “want to look good naked” (to quote a movie). The question is whether that’s healthy and I don’t think the answer is obvious.
“However, I am exceedingly fond of making fun of people, myself included,”
That’s a trait I really admire. There are only a few out there who can have a good laugh about themselves.
You are probably right about niceness. I haven’t thought about it from this perspective yet.
Bruce: I really appreciate your straightforward approach. Many of your postings are thoughtprovoking and that’s what encorages scientific progress.
But sometimes you “overshoot” somewhat imho. I don’t know if Charles? diet is lacking nutrients that will cause problems along the way. Maybe, maybe not. You say he loses muscle if he don’t work out because he is undernourished. How do you know? Charles says he doesn’t lose muscle.
I think you sometime “cherry pick” comments from someone to make your point. I even remember you mentioning Charles as positive zero carb-example on some blog/forum and now you are attacking him on another.
At least you are not biased because you have no “loyality” to any idea or person.
Charles has said he “loses weight” if he doesn’t exercise. Since he is lean, it’s obvious that the weight being lost isn’t fat, but rather muscle. (I would hope he is not losing organ and bone tissue, but that’s a possibility.) He’s very thin at BMI 22 (like 147# and 5’8″), and he will “lose weight” if he doesn’t exercise. It isn’t cherry-picking. If you browse some of Charles’s comments, you will have all kinds of evidence of his personality and the benefits of his diet. Note that most of his comments are about weight, and he rarely mentions any health benefits that have been obtained – other than dropping down to a lower weight.
He admits that he feels cold a lot, and that he gets leg cramps sometimes after running. He used to get them more often, but eliminating salt and drinking water less often reduced the frequency. But I think he’s still deficient in potassium, magnesium, and other things. If he was not running, he would probably be a lot healthier. I believe running is one of the worst forms of exercise, even if it is done “properly.”
All primitive tribes eating carnivorous diets ate the brain, tongue, and marrow, not just muscle meats. Many of them ate other organs like liver, kidneys, heart, thymus, pancreas, spleen, etc. Pancreas and thymus are extremely fatty, so I am sure primitives would have eaten those, if they could. Charles ignores the fact that Stefansson and Anderson were found to prefer boiled meat in their Bellevue study. They also ate brain, liver, meat broths, and raw bone marrow. Charles is ignoring this simply to make his diet a little more appealing to modern people, with modern sense of taste. He plays to his audience’s biases, but the truth is that neither Stefansson nor the Eskimos ate muscle meat exclusively.
http://www.jbc.org/cgi/reprint/87/3/651.pdf
http://www.lowcarbportal.com/archives/categories/nutrition_protein/index.php
True on the running. I tried taking it up again recently to test out the endurance benefits of a fat-driven metabolism. I was a machine, no doubt, able to go on very long runs with minimal training (up to 15 miles over very difficult terrain with up to 2,000 vertical feet), but had asthma and health problems start to surface. i think the inflammation it causes due to injury has a lot to do with this – hip pain, calf pain, pulled and strained muscles, etc.
I do think Charles is a good candidate for adrenal exhaustion combining these two, but only time will tell. I need to continue this experiment much longer than 30 days to really solve some of the bigger questions. Not sure if I’m up for it though!