Advantage: This is a fully-individual, objective and reasonable-cost measurement.  The results cannot be argued with.  You either prove or disprove, for you, that this is true.  I do not claim that this is true for everyone, but for everyone I've had the pleasure of looking at this with it has been.  Nonetheless there are probably people for whom this does not apply; if you're one of them, after you test it yourself, then enjoy ignoring this advice because it almost-certainly does not apply to you personally.  But it does apply to nearly everyone in my experience, which means until you perform this test you must presume you're poisoning yourself daily.

Yes, I said poisoning yourself.  Slowly, but you are.

Every holiday season Garmin puts a number of their "smartwatches" on sale.  The key ones are found at this link; the bottom line is that anything that does overnight HRV is what you're looking for in the feature set.  The least-expensive as of this column is the Instinct 2 series.

There are others (e.g. the "Oura" ring) but note that one of the keys to this is not just overnight wear, but all-the-time wear.  This is a problem with many smartwatches and similar devices as they require frequent charging.  This is where Garmin excels; their devices will run a week or even two weeks between charges.  That matters because if the unit is not on your person it can't record anything and you need to wear it basically all the time for it to get an accurate baseline.

(BTW before you ask no, I don't work for Garmin and don't earn anything if you buy one -- I'm not a "referral affiliate."  I have been an avid user of their "smartwatch" and "exercise watch" (before the smartwatches showed up) products for roughly the last 15 years, and like their products a lot.)

After getting it you need to wear it essentially continually, especially overnight while sleeping, for about three weeks to establish a baseline.  During this time you should do what you usually do -- make no effort to change anything, because what you're looking for is the "as things are now" situation.

You can either download and use the "Connect" app on your phone (either IOS or Android) or connect the watch once a week or so to a computer and use Express, which is a small app that runs on your computer and will sync when its plugged in -- and of course your watch needs to charge too, so this is a good way to do both at once.  A web browser version of the Connect app is at https://connect.garmin.com and is essentially the same as the phone application, but in a larger format.

Once you have a baseline your graph will look like this (not the same values, but you'll have a "gray" area with green, orange and possible red markers) -- again, this will take about three weeks although the values will show up starting immediately.

If you click Overnight Averages you'll get both the rolling average (the dot) and the line, which will look like this:

Note that there is one night in that week that is out-of-range.

Now to test take a 24 hour period and make very sure you eat nothing that has a seed oil in it.  If you cook at home this isn't too tough, but it does mean not eating anything in a box or jar that has any mention of a plant-based oil (yes, including olive oil, palm oil and similar) on it.  Olive oil is likely actually ok but it is almost-always adulterated so for this purpose you must avoid it.  Essentially all salad dressings bought at the store are laced with this stuff as is essentially anything that comes in a box or other similar shelf-stable package.  If you eat eggs use either bacon grease, lard or butter (real butter, not reduced-fat or margarine) to cook them.  Meats and green vegetables, provided they are not cooked in or otherwise exposed to seed oils are perfectly ok as are hard cheeses (again, blocks of cheese, not processed stuff -- read the label!) and similar.  Spices are also unrestricted.

Leave everything else you do alone.

Note that one drink a day will hit your HRV overnight quite-reliably for a couple of points.  After 2 drinks in a given day it will get hammered, so for accurate results don't do that while performing this test.

Note the change, if any, in HRV over night.

If it goes up when you remove the seed oils you might want to keep doing that for a period of time until it levels off again.  This may take a bit, but once it does now you can "notch test" the hypothesis that they're harmful to you by eating something containing them and seeing if the HRV goes back down that night.

Notice that one night deviation?  That was from "buttered" crackers with a cheese dip (cheese I can eat in any amount without any impact at all and do regularly) but no other changes compared against my usual food intakes.  I know that's what caused it because this is a consistent hit whenever I eat seed oils and that day it was the only possible exposure to them at a pub -- which I did not expect because it was claimed the crackers were BUTTERED.  Obviously that was not butter; it just tasted like it.

Also note that this insult took two days to return back to "high normal" and in both of those days I consumed quite a bit of carbohydrates since it was, after all, Thanksgiving.  But -- all the food I consumed I cooked at home ex a gift scotch-infused "cake" that was imported and, on the label, were no seed oils (gee, fancy that; they don't use them in Europe in baked goods as a matter of routine!)

A week later I went back to the same place and ate the same baked wings -- but no dip and crackers.  The impact did not occur.  I thus know precisely what caused it.

If you get the same sort of result I do -- and yes, you should repeat it a couple of times because its always possible to accidentally confound a single test without realizing you did it, you have the gold standard of evidence for yourself because for any scientific experiment that standard is repeatability -- that is, every time you do something the outcome you first observed occurs -- not one time in three, not half the time, essentially or actually all the time.  It is only once you have established that you can make a claim for yourself but once you do then from that point forward if you continue to take in such substances voluntarily you are deliberately poisoning yourself and there is no escaping that fact.

If you get the results I get -- every time -- then you might go into a grocery store and pull off the shelf a can of infant formula.  Note what the third ingredient on the list (by law they must be listed in order of the amount present) typically is.

Incidentally if you've been eating this crap for a long time (and if you're most Americans, you have) it takes time for it to all leave your body because, being fat soluble, it winds up in all your tissues -- including especially your fat tissue.  Think of it like weed -- if you smoke some it will show up in your urine for a couple of weeks or more.  This is the same sort of thing, so if you get a positive result, that is, improvement, no matter how slight, if you're like most people and don't eat any of it the next day you will likely, for some period of time, continue to see improvement as it is eliminated from your body.

Until just a couple of years ago this sort of highly-sensitive and personal information was almost-impossible to obtain for the average Joe or Jane.  It wasn't impossible for researchers with effectively unlimited money to obtain these results but obviously nobody did the work or, if they did, they hid the results on purpose.

If you're one of the people for whom this damage does not accrue when you consume such things then happy for you.  But as I have noted, for virtually everyone, it is absolutely present and among those who have such devices and who have let me see them there it is.

This started with my observations with a still sensitive but less so metric (all day stress) where I'd bet others in the run club that I could identify which days they had consumed no alcohol in the evenings.  I won a lot of free beers this way.  All-day stress levels (which the Garmin watches also measure) is quite-useful but materially-less sensitive than overnight HRV and while you can read the seed oil impact in all day stress you have to pay a lot closer attention where with overnight HRV it literally screams at you.

Let me be clear: If you eat seed oils, at least in my observation, it is roughly equivalent on a metabolic basis to consuming THREE beers a day.  Nobody would consider a person who consumes THREE drinks a day, every day, to be "healthy"; any physician would tell you that this, if continued, is almost-certain to have very severe negative effects over time including alcoholism, liver failure AND ULTIMATELY DEATH.  Obviously if you drink on top of that then its even worse, and of course if you're drinking you're inclined to eat things, so there you go -- but after repeating this several times as an "isolation" (change one thing) test I can confirm that one item of food containing seed oils, all alone, does more damage than TWO beers.  This **** is in damn near everything, including virtually all commercially baked goods and anything that comes in a box.  It is basically impossible, for example, to consume any sort of salad dressing without eating this crap so stop kidding yourself about that salad being "healthy" -- the greens are probably fine but the dressing is not.

You can't even buy roasted nuts without them having this **** in them and it is extremely difficult to avoid them if eating out because they are not disclosed.  Even worse is putting them in foods that are served in places like schools where they're essentially force-fed to kids.

The worst "conspiracies", if you want to call them that, are those where multiple actors, all apparently unconnected, goad you into doing something and they all profit from it at your expense.  Seed oils are one of these: The food seller uses them and loves it because they're cheaper, the various "medical authorities" all told you to eat them in favor of animal fats (this was and remains an outright lie) and then when you did all the bad effects -- including obesity, diabetes and all sorts of inflammation-related diseases which seed oils cause as they are all inflammatory -- you have to come back and have treated.  Oh, and don't think you can get away from this by using olive oil -- it is extremely common for it to be adulterated with various seed oils and nobody ever goes to jail for that either.

We are headed for a train wreck across the health system of the United States.  The release of the "covid study" from Congress the other day, which claimed the shots "saved millions of lives" is a flat-out lie and not only that it is deliberately ignoring the enormous spike higher in cancers and cerebrovascular conditions -- heart attacks, strokes and clotting disorders -- that showed up exactly when the shots were rolled out and has not gone away.  In addition the last year has given us a two trillion dollar federal deficit which is all in CMS spending that is not offset with current tax receipts and that has been growing exponentially over the last three decades.  This cannot continue and if you are reliant on that spending you are going to be ****ed.

I have been beating this drum for close to two decades now and in fact was raising Hell about it back in the 1990s, as it was obvious what was going to happen.  Rather than address it then when it was reasonable we instead doubled down and kept doing stupid things, including both lying to others (by physicians, so-called "public health" experts and others) and ourselves in what we stuff into our mouths.  But now, rather than conjecture and association, which can provide strong evidence when its is across huge populations but cannot, as an association, be conclusive we have available at little cost the capacity to determine at an individual, personal level whether these issues apply to you individually in an actual test you can perform, nobody else has access to and which is irrefutable evidence that your specific metabolism is poisoned by consuming these things.

We should hang every so-called "health official" and "doctor" who advises you to consume this crap, all the way back to infant formula.  We should force black-box labels on every food and container of such material in every store and absolutely ban them from any place where they are not disclosed and thus avoidable (e.g. restaurants should have to label every item on their menus that contain same.)

But this journey, in fact, begins with you proving to yourself that these people have conned you into poisoning yourself on a slow but relentless basis since your infancy and then, once you have satisfied yourself that this is in fact the case for you then what you choose to do next -- whether it simply be avoiding all such consumption for your person or taking it on more-broadly is up to you.  I will not advocate violence but I will certainly understand if you decide that it is warranted, exactly as many have publicly expressed quite-recently.  All these people -- the FDA, NIH, physicians, insurance firms and pharmaceutical companies had to know; this crap has been going on as a concerted advocacy message and in fact when it comes to schools and such has been forced on our kids for decades, never mind the most-blatant example being that every hospital sends every new mother home with a box of formula full of this crap knowing full well that if she uses it her lactation will dry up from non-use and both she and her infant will be effectively compelled to continue to buy and consume it.

But from that point forward, even if all you do is stop eating that which screws you on a personal basis, you'll start to become more healthy literally by the day.

PS: Note that this has no impact on, nor is targeting high-glycemic consumption which is known to produce insulin resistance leading to obesity and Type II diabetes (nor does it account for statins which have an actual label warning that they cause diabetes -- which, of course, your doctor will push on you after you create systemic inflammation via consumption of seed oils and cholesterol is part of the body's repair mechanism so increasing inflammation will cause the liver to make more of it!)  This is targeting only seed oils -- but if you're not going to change anything else, and many people simply won't, for the love of all that is Holy change this.

And by the way, contemplate this -- ninety percent of comments on the recently-whacked health insurance CEO were not expressing horror or disgust (at his murder); they were somewhere between "well, bye Felicia!" and outright glee.  To those of you in the medical, pharmaceutical, "so-called healthy oil advocacy" groups and food producers -- once people figure this one out, and they can with absolute finality for any individual person -- exactly how many people are going to get really angry, especially when they walk down the grocery store aisle and note what the third ingredient is on essentially every can or bottle of infant formula?

Note the bald lie here:

“I don’t think anyone who is in the health care business or area would ever argue against lifestyle modification, diet and exercise and healthy foods as the cornerstone of improving people’s health and weight management,” Drucker told CNN. “The challenge we have is that there have been multiple trials that have tried to see: Can we markedly improve people’s health and get substantial weight loss with diet and exercise? And the answer’s been no; people lose a little bit of weight.”

**** all the drug-pushing lying sacks of ****.  With a rusty chainsaw, just in case you are uncertain about exactly what I'd like to see happen to every single one of those people.

Was this a "little bit of weight"?

 

Oh by the way, did I keep it off?

May I point out that prior to ditching that weight I wore an XL shirt -- both T-shirt and sweatshirt.  Both the right-side picture and the one below it are size Medium; that is what I wear today.  In addition on the right side picture my pant size requirement was a 30 waist and I wear that same pant size today, which was after they fell off three times as I was previously wearing a 34 (tight) or 36 (comfortable.)  My underwear is now size medium; that was formerly XL as well.  The former picture is from 13 years ago and from the left to right side took eight months; while yes, I now enjoy exercising and before did not, I also wore a Garmin 305 that recorded all exercise during that time period and the exercise calorie expenditure was not why I ditched the excess body mass.  It was all, statistically (and particularly when one considers that exercising will increase hunger) from what I ate.  Math just is and the Garmin data is proof.

In short if you're not hungry you have no reason to eat and if you don't eat as much then yes, body mass goes down.

Your body has the capacity to automatically titrate its food consumption.  You poisoned it over a period of years and are doing so today which is why you did and today do get fat and what you poisoned it with are things that either didn't exist at all or weren't consumed in material quantity 100,000 years ago.

Specifically, seed oils and fast, processed carbohydrates.

If you refuse to accept this then shut the **** up, turn over all your money to the people who advertise their services to make your slow, miserable death a bit less-miserable and at the same time I bet you believe a man can become a woman by cutting off his dick.

How do I know that your body knows how to resolve this problem conclusively in each and every instance?  Because every single animal on the planet does precisely that.  They neither become wildly obese nor, except in the absence of available food, rail-thin and starve to death.  They eat enough calories to maintain their weight within a reasonable range on an autonomous basis without conscious thought and every single animal does this, without exception, until and unless they get into human-processed foodstuffs.  All of them do and always have.  Further, the amount of seed oil any animal can consume without human intervention is in fact a statistical zero because they only exist in any sort of concentrated form due to human processing and thus no animal, of any species, ever consumed any material amount of them naturally.

How do I know the problem is in large part a high-glycemic (e.g. processed and fast) carbohydrate intake wildly beyond what natural consumption of food can provide?  Because animal husbandry has proved it all the way back to biblical times; how do you "fatten" up a calf or hog?  You feed it high-glycemic carbohydrates to the exclusion of what it would usually eat.  Every single farmer back through recorded history knows this and in fact doing exactly that (e.g. "the fatted calf") is referenced in the Bible!

How do I know the problem is at least in large part the result of consuming seed oils?  Because I have repeatedly tested that on a "notch" basis, that is, "change one thing" and with the more-modern Garmins that can do HRV overnight any consumption of them, in any amount, damages my overnight HRV -- every time and the amount of damage is commensurate with the amount of consumption.

How much does it cost to stop eating all of that crap?  Zero.

How much medical expense, including doctor visits, medication, morbidity and worse do you avoid if you do that?  Quite possibly all of it.  For me it was literally all of it; my requirement over the last decade+ for same has been quite-literally zero.

Just read this and do it.

In a month or two it will not kill or materially harm you.

If your pants fall off then you have your answer as to whether it works, don't you?

If you want more data take your blood pressure at the local drugstore or WalMart that has one of those sitdown machines before you start and then a month later as well, and if you'd like to track individual days and test the seed oil and fast carb impact for yourself, personal to your own body then buy one of the Garmins that can do HRV (the Instinct 2 is the least-expensive as I write this, about $200) and perform a personal set of tests that are specific to your metabolic person and habits.  The alternative is that you can listen to those who have been lying to you, deliberately for the purpose of making money at the expense of your health and pocketbook, for the last several decades.

Now if you want to get really angry, after you prove to yourself that seed oils **** up your body, go into any grocery store and pull a can of infant formula off the shelf.  Read the label.  You will note that they're full of those very same oils -- they are typically the third listened ingredient.  The amount of seed oils that any infant of any mammal, not just humans, has ever ingested other than by such a formula is zero because such substances are not found in any material quantity available to be ingested in nature and thus there is zero of them in the natural milk of any mammalian mother.

PS: Google would deem this "medical misinformation" were I to put it on the other side of the blog, despite the fact that you can personally verify that I am quite athletically-capable today as there are public records of same in the form of race results and plenty of former appearances on various media and podcasts which quite-clearly document how much of a fat-ass I used to be around the time of the 08 crash. Or you could choose to show up in Knoxville on Turkey Day for the Regal 5k and see for yourself -- I'll be running it just for ****s and grins because I like to just as I did recently in Townsend, even though it appears the weather for Turkey Day morning may well suck (rainy); I'll almost-certainly, unless its really ****ty, go do it anyway.

Let's me make this clear: Health care as we know it in the US is going to collapse and that collapse is imminent.

Yes, I know, they've "saved" it before.  Obamacare anyone?  But they didn't fix it - they instead threw (printed) credit at the problem, which just made it worse.  If you learned nothing else from Covid this was the lesson you damn well should have learned: No profession in the US gives a wet **** about anything but money anymore -- even if the result is your death.  There is a pile of bodies, over 1 million of them, stacked up at the unholy altar of cash flow from the virus and therapeutic options that we had reason to believe worked, and we later knew did work, were deliberately ignored in favor of very expensive things that did not work.

Ventilators are the poster child for this because we knew in March of 2020 they didn't work.  We knew it because in China they tried them and nearly everyone they used them on died anyway.  Do I need to repost the outcome table from the study published very early on that should have instantly stopped their use?

But they were good for tens of thousands of dollars for each cadaver delivered from the hospital and billions for the companies that made them under the DPA as ordered by Trump.  A worthless "therapy" that simply added agony and expense to your loved one who got shoved in the hole anyway.

We have an epidemic of morbidity in the United States.  All of it is recent.  It is too recent, and too rapid, to be genetic.  It is therefore, with certainty, environmental.  Yet over the last 50+ years we have wildly cleaned up the air, land and water -- and anyone who tells you otherwise either is too young to know or lying.  I'm 61 and lived through the cleanup -- from when the fish were unfit to eat, you couldn't swim safely in said water and the air was foul and full of chemical fumes.  All that is gone.

So that, clearly, isn't the problem.

What is?

We're not sure but we do know what correlates, and there are three, two that are very solid and one a bit less-so: Vaccine administration with adjuvants, specifically aluminum compounds, have exploded in terms of the "recommended schedule" and the per-capita consumption of seed oils and high-fructose corn syrup.  Those three are correlated with the rise of chronic and serious conditions from childhood forward.

Which is responsible?  We do not know.  Quite possibly all three -- or even something else too.  You can't "untake" a shot although there is zero justification (and incidentally this is now confirmed in a few court rulings, so pushback is entirely possible) for any alleged "vaccine" that does not provide sterile immunity -- that is, which does not prevent you from giving the disease to someone else.  Nearly zero of the current shots do this; MMR is one of the notable exceptions that does.  DTaP does not (the original formulation of DTP did -- that was the one they botched and led to immunity from lawsuit), injected polio does not, HPV does not and neither do Covid or flu shots.  Further, Hep-B is a blood-borne disease so giving it to infants is outrageous -- it confers zero benefit in a baby who obviously is neither a sex worker or an IV drug abuser.

What you can do, however, is get the HFCS out of your diet and at the same time get rid of the damned seed oils.

I cannot calibrate the HFCS problem accurately with personal data but on the seed oils I can.  You see, it is virtually impossible to avoid them when eating away from home.  At home its easy since you cooked it and you know what's in it.

An example: I had a box of Granola Bars.  They're part of my "emergency stash" and I took them on a trip because well, you never know.  Calories in a small package, shelf-stable.  So the other day I ate one while driving -- for me, a very low-stress activity (never comes out of the "rest" range except during the few minutes required for me to fill the tank or stop and take a piss.)

My body stress level spiked immediately, within 15 minutes of consuming it, and remained highly elevated for more than two hours without coming back to baseline!  What does it have in it?  Sunflower and/or canola oil.

Then, same day, I went into a Texas Roadhouse and ate "Road Kill" (chopped steak with onions, mushrooms and cheese on top) with the chili and steamed veggies as sides.  That's a full meal and yet I choose it specifically because there are no oils necessary to cook it at all; the fats in the beef are all in the beef itself in both the meat and chili.  That caloric intake, roughly six times the granola bar, barely moved my stress level and within a couple of hours it was back to baseline.

I've also noted that what I thought was a peanut allergy based on a notch test (with a jar of peanut butter) turned out to not be true -- on challenge with dry roasted peanuts (nothing other than them and salt) there was no impact.  There was also no impact with a spoon of "natural" (peanuts and salt) peanut butter as a re-test.  It wasn't the peanuts, in short: Its the damned seed oils in the commercial products.

How do I know all this?  I have a Garmin smartwatch that measures stress levels all day, and in addition gives me overnight HRV which is ridiculously sensitive to the point that I can document the consumption of a mere single beer during a given day.

These results are absolutely, 100% of the time, repeatable.

We must force these "ingredients" to be labeled prominently on packaging for foods, on the front, as dangerous and we further must force them out of all institutional and commercial food production entirely.  That specifically means schools, hospitals and restaurants where they are used because they're cheaper and it is basically impossible for you to know if they're in there or not.  You can't even order an omelet without exposure to them as the restaurant is almost-certain to use them rather than actual butter because these oils are much less expensive.

If you want to consume them in goods bought in a store have at it -- provided they're labeled prominently (they are on the ingredient list panel, so you can read it first.)  But we should mandate that such labeling (e.g. "contains seed oils") be on the face of the package and we must bar them from all "forced" consumption such as in restaurants, including fast food, and commercial production kitchens in both workplaces and especially schools of all types including colleges.

The continued ramp of cost in the medical system is not slowing down and the medical system -- including your doctor personally -- does not give a crap if you live or die; they only care about money.  Get that through your damned head right now and if you don't believe it look back over the last four years and then go ahead and tell me I'm wrong.

You know full well I'm not.

If you think my experience -- and I've repeated it enough times by now to be absolutely, 100% confident in the results when I ingest these things -- doesn't apply to you you're almost-certainly wrong.  Of course you can prove that I'm wrong in your individual case if you have or get one of the Garmins with HRV, wear it for a couple of weeks to get a baseline, then make changes one at a time and see what happens.

But in virtually every case among people I know personally who have some metabolic-related complaint, when I explain this to them, simply do not want to know or argue "well, it might not be accurate for me."

You never find what you refuse to look for and if you don't cut this crap out then who's responsibility is it when you continue to suffer declining health, you're presented a reasonably-inexpensive tool that will nail down the negative impacts of what you put in your pie hole on a specific and repeatable basis, and you refuse?  In addition you believe you can demand that everyone else pay for your deliberate refusal to even identify the source of the problem because then you couldn't deny it anymore?

Well guess what -- this crap is why the nation is literally going bankrupt and you WILL be the one who's screwed when the checks you're demanding be written so you can eat that CRAP cannot be cashed.

That day is coming very soon and it would be wise to excise all of this from your food consumption right now or prove that for you there is no negative impact on your health.

I keep getting asked for this -- how is it that thirteen years ago I did this with no drugs and went from a deteriorating glucose tolerance and obesity to completely-normal glucose control, no high blood pressure problems, no unwanted excess body mass and no need for medications of any sort -- and thirteen years later, its the same other than (obviously) being 13 years older.

This began because of Obamacare.  That was the last chance to address the medical monopolies without some sort of, for me personally, a catastrophic outcome.  Specifically I knew if I didn't get it under control the odds were extremely high that when the system collapsed, and it would as a result of Obamacare being done rather than addressing the monopolists and insane "health care" distortions I'd be ****ed.  At best I'd be infirm and wishing I was dead, and there were good odds I'd actually be dead.

As it turned out the latter would have occurred with near-certainty had I not made those changes when I got Covid.  Had I been insulin compromised and fat the odds of me being dead rather than having a rough time of it are likely near 100%.  So there you go; the payoff of "not dead" came but that wasn't the only payoff -- my health and physical fitness is wildly better than it was even at 40 years of age and arguably better than in my late teens.  Certainly when it comes to exercise tolerance (e.g. capacity to run a 5k and the time in doing so) it is better now than it was then even though I'm more than 40 years older.

What I changed was what goes in my pie hole, or more-specifically, what doesn't go in my pie hole.  When I made the change the rules were this:

• Animal flesh including the fat (no trimming it) of any sort, including any sort of fowl (e.g. chicken, turkey, duck and Cornish hen), beef, pork and fish.  Yes, proto-animals (e.g. eggs) are animals.
  
  
• Full-fat cheeses.
  
  
• All cooking oils were 100% animal oils; butter counts as its from a cow and thus is an animal fat.  No exceptions.
  
  
• No white carbohydrates of any sort, ever, period.  No breads, pasta, rice, potatoes (including sweet potatoes) and similar.
  
  
• The only vegetables were green and if oils were used to cook them they had to be animal fats.  The one exception was olive oil as part of a salad dressing (e.g. oil and vinegar) but never for cooking.
  
  
• No added sugars, period.
  
  
• Spices, provided pure spices (no carbohydrate fillers, check the labels!) used liberally, including salt.  No salt restriction of any sort.
  
  
• Any consumption of alcohol counts toward total carbohydrate, no more than 50g/day total for all sources.

My pants fell off repeatedly.

The first month or so sucked.  Carbohydrates are crazily addictive and withdrawal is just that.  Yeah, not fun.  Tough it out and don't be a pussy.  It will break but it may take a month or two.  Do not keep any of the prohibited foods in the house; you can't eat what's not there.  If it has a seed oil or carbohydrate in it other than green vegetables into the trash it goes.  To have something to munch buy some fresh broccoli, a block of cheese you can cut some slices off or similar.

But what has changed now and what do I eat today?

Here's a typical day:

I usually wake up between 0600 and 0700; no alarm required.  I do set it on Tuesdays and Fridays so as to make sure I have sufficient time for espresso before SNJ, but otherwise generally do not as I don't need to.  I am not hungry when I wake up.  At all.

I get myself an espresso, sometimes a glass of water with an electrolyte tablet (which has a gram or so of carb by the label in it) check my email and if I have an interview to do then that gets done.  If its a nice day and I feel like it, I will go for a run after that.  This is usually 3x/week or more-or-less every other day, usually 3 miles, but its highly weather-dependent.  In the winter I do have a dreadmill but I hate the damn things and have it only because it beats no cardio workout at all for a couple of weeks at a time.

Typically around 10 or 11 AM I'm a bit hungry.  Not ravenously, but somewhat.  I'll make a cheese omelet; usually two eggs, if I have an open package of bacon I'll cook a couple of strips of that and use the grease as the oil for the eggs.  Frequently I'll either saute some chopped onions in the pan for flavor, or if I have some chili (no beans) in the fridge I'll put a bit of that in the pan while its heating for its oil and meat content.  That is usually consumed with another espresso and a glass of water -- sometimes carbonated, zero-cal/zero-sweetener (usually flavored generic such as from Kroger.)

Dinner, my only other "real meal", is usually around 3 or 4.  More animal.  Depending on what it is (hamburgers, steak, pork chops, bacon-wrapped meatloaf, ribs, chili, fish of some sort, etc.) the time I start it varies widely.  In a few cases (e.g. if I'm smoking a whole pork shoulder or brisket) it went into the machine before I went to bed.  I'm not a nazi about BBQ sauces except that I refuse to buy any with seed oils in them.  There are several without; yes, they have some sugar in them (e.g. molasses) but choosing wisely keeps the seed oils out and I am relatively sparse in my portions.

I do not meal plan beyond the next two days, typically how long it takes for something frozen to thaw in the refer.  The exception is very large things like a whole pork shoulder or turkey for thanksgiving, where you have to figure out thaw times 3-5 days in advance.  There is typically something on the refer shelf for the next day or two but that's it.

If I desire a snack later on it follows the same rules.  If I'm home brussels sprouts with a slice of cut-up bacon for the cooking fat (and bacon itself) are one of my favorites to do in the cast-iron skillet; cut up and cook the bacon, cut the sprouts in half the put them in the skillet, add a quarter to half-cup of water and put a lid on it, steaming them in the boiling water, then when that's evaporated off add seasoning (e.g. Lawrey Seasoned Salt) and eat.  Pork rinds are one of the few indulgences that might have seed oils in them -- its hard to know and I do pay attention to my Garmin HRV that night if sampling a new brand because it will show up.  That overnight HRV is extremely sensitive and if you misbehave you will not get away with it.  It will absolutely call out the first beer, the second and beyond that you may as well get ****faced in terms of the metabolic impact - its that bad.  Straight liquor is a bit less evil in that the carbs aren't there but if you do mixed drinks forget it -- same thing.  Booze in any form is conducive to eating things you shouldn't either in type or quantity -- always -- and the damage metabolically is multiplied if you do, so if you are actively trying to ditch excess weight just don't at all.

Can (and do) I sometimes break these rules today?  Yes.  I now have a normal glucose response where I did not before.  But if I go back to what I used to eat the damage will return, so I can't do it other than very occasionally and if yours is damaged now you can't do it at all for quite some time, likely many months to even a few years.

How do you know you've reversed the damage?  When you misbehave for a couple of days your metabolism will shift back and 3-5lbs will immediately reappear (along with feeling like crap.)  But -- within 48 hours of stopping that it will shift back immediately, you will******out the excess water (which is what it was) and you will be back to your former mass.  If you lose ground and it takes a week or two to recover from it you are still metabolically compromised and thus the misbehavior was stupid rather than an indulgence that almost-certainly did you no real harm.

When you resolve metabolic dysfunction you are automatically "fasting" 18 hours of the day without attempting to.  My usual practice, entirely by when I'm hungry, is to eat something around 10 or 11 and again around 4.  That's 18 hours of the day "fasting" yet I made no attempt to do that; its just a function of eating when hungry, and not when you aren't.

It will take months to years to regain reasonable metabolic health. You didn't destroy it in a week and you won't fix it in a week either but the differences will be noticeable immediately and the improvement starts immediately as well.

It is absolutely true that to ditch body mass you must consume and absorb fewer calories than you expend.  There is no such thing as magic food or magic anything else and no, its not that your metabolism is "special."  You are free to lie to yourself but it is still a lie no matter how many times you repeat it.  One Cafe Latte at Starbucks is nearly 200 calories, 19 grams of carbs, statistically all of them sugar and if you drink just one per day you have consumed 13% of a non-exercising person's caloric requirement down your pie hole and at the same time suppressed the consumption of body fat for at least two hours assuming you eat nothing else during that time because carbohydrate is always consumed first.

You cannot outrun your mouth, fork or not.  A mile of walking or running consumes about 100 calories.  It requires two miles of walking or running to balance that Cafe Latte all by itself.  If you add a scone, honey bun or donut to that -- forget it.  It is trivially easy to stuff a half-marathon's worth of food in your mouth in the form of carbohydrates within minutes.

If you are metabolically dysfunctional you will be hungry in the morning.  If you feed yourself with carbohydrate in the morning as soon as that is consumed -- about two hours later -- the excess insulin in your blood will make you ravenously hungry again and you will eat whatever is available favoring more carbohydrate because you have excess insulin in your blood.  This cycle will repeat all day long.  You get fat because you've ****ed up your leptin signaling system which in turn has damaged insulin sensitivity in the cells and thus destroyed the ordinary regulatory function that insulin has in your body.  Seed oils, by virtue of their resistance to being broken down by ordinary bacterial (biological) process, which is why they're used in the first place to make something shelf-stable, make it worse.

Drugs cannot reverse or control this.

The only way to stop it is to stop consuming that which is ****ing up your system.

The seed oils will take months to even a couple of years to get out of your system because they, as a fat, become incorporated in the cellular structure.  All cells are replaced over time in your body and that's what has to happen to completely rid yourself of these.  In the tiny amounts you can and will obtain from eating actual green vegetables they are not harmful but in size they are, and there is no safe amount you can consume from modern use as cooking, taste-promoting and stabilizing oils in restaurants and packaged food products.  The only way to stop the damage is to stop eating them and allow your body to clear them over time.

If you use drugs to try to overcome these problems you continue to accumulate the damage while suppressing the symptoms via the drugs.  This is not only guaranteed to fail it is guaranteed to eventually seriously harm or even kill you and it is not the drugs that kills you it is what you're putting in your mouth that does so because rather than cutting that out you are using the drugs to attempt to hide the negative effect.  The damage still happens and you build tolerance to the drug because you are still accumulating the damage, thus you need more and more of the drug!  The now-common political trope of "$35 insulin" is one of of the most-obscene and abusive examples of this and everyone involved in it should be executed as they literally are damning you to a million dollars of medical expense and a miserable death rather than explain that you can either greatly decrease said spend or even avoid it entirely, plus ALL of the misery and other medical spending, by simply not eating pizza, seed oils and similar.

Further, and this you must clearly understand: YOUR DOCTOR, EVERY PHARMACEUTICAL AND OTHER MEDICALLY RELATED COMPANY AND ORGANIZATION -- ALL OF THEM -- WANT YOU TO SCREW YOURSELF AND IN FACT ADVOCATE THAT YOU DO SO.  Every one of them has a huge financial incentive to get you in a situation where you MUST spend huge amounts of money not only for the temporary relief of symptoms but by deliberately allowing the damage to continue you are GUARANTEED to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars OR MORE with them over the next decades.  THEY HAVE A LITERAL MILLION REASONS TO LIE AND THEY DO -- ALL OF THEM -- because absent those lies none of that money gets spent.  These people are greedy *******s who are perfectly happy to see you ruin your own health and die a miserable death so their paychecks keep coming and they encourage you to do so rather than make the ZERO COST changes that will immediately stop and in many cases reverse accumulation of that damage.

This, and only this, is why the US went from spending 4-5% of its economic output on medical care to 21%, a quadrupling as a percentage of the whole, over the last fifty or so years.  It is why the Federal Government has posted up $35 trillion in debt and the entire federal deficit, more than $2 trillion thus far with one month left to go, is in fact found in CMS -- Medicare and Medicaid.  This is intentional, it is malicious, the people doing it are both in the medical fields and government and it is done for one and only one reason -- profit without regard for the misery and financial destruction you will and do suffer as a result.

This is exactly what someone who is using opiates runs into and the exact same incentives that a drug pusher has to let and even encourage you to get hooked.  Opiates get you high but at the same time they suppress respiration.  Your body has a tolerance response to both but the dulling of the high is much more-profound than the suppression of respiration.  Eventually if you keep using it you die as a result of literally failing to breathe -- so junkies, when this starts to happen (its extremely uncomfortable - think about how uncomfortable it is if you try to not breathe for a couple of minutes!) use methamphetamine to counter that suppression.  This is not a solution in other than the very short term because the tolerance continues to build and eventually you give yourself a heart attack or you can't get the meth one day, your addiction compels you to use the opiate anyway and you die.  This is exactly what happened to Floyd, incidentally and the toxicology report proved it thus if you assert otherwise I bet you're equally lying to yourself about what you eat.

Note: I am not a physician.  I cannot back any of this up against a random controlled trial or even lab testing since I am unwilling to provide "formal" test results into a system that can and will be used to **** me down the road.  Thus, absent emergent need, I permit no such thing to occur, and there have been no emergent needs in my adult life.

As a result I do not know my serum Vitamin D level, for example.  I do know, however, a number of metabolic things about my person that I can test on my own with available and inexpensive items I can purchase over the counter or online, such as blood glucose, A1c, blood pressure and several elements of kidney function (urine test strips are available OTC and provide quite a bit of information.)

Until and unless I can have actual hard, enforceable privacy, with felony criminal and heavy punitive financial damages for any breach, no matter why or how, along with iron-clad and lifetime statutory guarantees that such cannot be abused now or at any time during my remaining life, my position on this will not change.  I am especially concerned, incidentally, with genetic-related information as that is a literal minefield for all of humanity; the potential on a forward basis to use that data in a discriminatory manner is unbounded and that we cannot typically do it today in most circumstances matters not because you can't change your genetic make up no matter what you do and thus once that data is in someone's hands it can be used to **** you up the ass for the rest of your life.  If you are one of the fools who used something like "23 and me" and you, or your offspring, get boned 20 years from now you deserve it -- I've repeatedly warned against this.  By the way that company is in financial trouble if their stock price of roughly 70 cents means anything which in turn means all their data is going to end up in someone else's hands and you have no control over any of it if you previously let them have it.  I warned people of this, and now it is going to happen so bend over and grab your ankles; someone, in the future, is almost-certain to screw you with that data if you gave them a sample.

YOU, AND ONLY YOU, are responsible for your own health.  I sell nothing.  I stand to gain nothing by sharing this information.  It is by definition an N = 1 test on one person (me) with one observer of the results (me) and said observations are limited in time to no further along than the present.  I could easily be wrong, but it is my ass, my choice and this is the set of choices I've made.  If you do any or all of this and get ****ed its on you; this is fair warning that it is not a recommendation or a "prescription."  I've read a lot of medical papers and taken the time to understand them and interpret them, then test against instrumentation I bought with my own money and against my uniquely-DNA-encoded body, which is different than every other human body, to some degree, on the planet.

Faux Snooz is of course at it again with "surprisingly simple ways to keep yourself healthy" which omit the most important -- what you put in the pie hole and your immune system's status.  I do agree that activity is a very good thing and being sedentary is bad.  And yes, digestion is important.  But note that of course they talk about "recommended vaccinations" which of course means flu and covid and if anything those are the opposite when it comes to immunity because they are a crutch.  If you get measles there won't be any question as to whether you have a serious problem or not -- right?

And of course the "crank up the stupid" has to come in through "organic this and that."  These **********s never passed organic chem, I see -- so what are they -- diversity doctors?  Probably.  Why?  Some of the nastiest chemicals on the planet are organic which makes sense if you think about it for five seconds; being organic they can interfere with you as an organism quite easily.  And of course they entirely omit the Granddaddy of immunity that in fact is likely the most-important of all, Vitamin D, which is impossible to get from the sun if you're indoors, it is impossible to get enough of it in winter for most people in the US and if you're black the problem is worse because you absorb less of it through your skin due to your pigmentation.

So pardon me if I have a jaundiced eye toward you when you ignore the biggest issue entirely and then play the "organic food" game.  This is nothing more than a cheap shot at those without a huge amount of money (that "organic" steak is twice as expensive as the not, and if you eschew it for the breaded chicken tenders or the pot pie in the freezer because of cost, well.... yeah.  Eat the damned steak before any of that other garbage.)

With that as a preamble here it is.

Due to the fact that roughly north of Atlanta, more or less, it is not possible to obtain adequate Vitamin D from exposure to the sun for about six months out of the year for a person of generally-white skin (the more melanin you have the further south that line goes!), Vitamin D is fat-soluble and thus in the winter all you have is that stored in the body, specifically the liver, and that during Covid we discovered that even in Central and South America most people are deficient (which was a surprise to me but it does make sense given how often people simply don't go outside these days) along with the extraordinary correlation between Vitamin D levels and fatal coronavirus infections (essentially zero persons who were not deficient died of it before any shots were available) I have taken the following daily since August of 2021:

• 5,000 IU of Vitamin D
• 100mcg of Vitamin K2

It is now nearly 2-1/2 years later and I have suffered exactly zero symptomatic respiratory infections.

The goal is to make sure that I am not severely deficient.  This should do so.  I am 60 and while I spend a lot of time outdoors in summer as we get older it is well-documented that your skin's capacity to make Vitamin D goes down, never mind that nobody likes getting fried and thus we tend to cover up, use sunblock or both.  Statistically-speaking this level is extremely unlikely to cause problems with having too much -- and the K2 is a buffer against that, although the base risk is very small.  Excessive Vitamin D levels are dangerous, including the possibility of precipitating calcium drop-out in the arteries which might be permanent, but there is quite a wide band before that area is reached.  I will note for reference that at one point during the pandemic Fauci stated that he took twice this amount daily.  I am uncomfortable with a higher amount and again, there is risk of possible permanent and serious damage if you go too far -- then again nearly anything is poisonous in sufficient quantity.  Were I younger and active outdoors on a regular basis I would use this only from roughly October to April -- but the key here is both age and regular outdoor exposure, as that study work during Covid in Central and South America showed.

There is, by the way, an argument for adding magnesium.  If you eat seafood, dairy and green vegetables you probably won't have a seriously-low level and too much is not good -- but if not you might want to add it. Just be aware that as with Vitamin D it is possible to overdose.

• Vitamin C, liposomal

I keep a stash of Vitamin C around and at the first hint of any sort of respiratory trouble I gobble it in moderate size.  That is, if I feel a bit "off" at night before going to bed (e.g. a bit of a tickle in the throat, etc.) I will gobble up 3-4 grams of the liposomal form of it in capsules.  I am not concerned about overdosing since it is basically impossible to do in a way that will harm you, although getting the squirts, which will happen if you take too much of it, isn't very pleasant.  When I had covid I used a huge amount of it and never found that alleged "bowel tolerance", so the claims of your tolerance going way up when you're sick are, at least for me, very true.  I also will take 2-3 grams of it at once one time a week simply because I do not eat much citrus and while I do routinely eat green vegetables (and they are an excellent source) they're intermittent enough that I want to make sure I have enough of it.  Humans cannot synthesize ascorbate (Vitamin C) due to an error in our DNA that arose a very, very long time ago similarly to the error in feline DNA that prohibits them from synthesizing Taurine (thus they are obligate carnivores.)  You have to be pretty deficient to get scurvy but there is no downside to having more than you need short of bowel tolerance, so this is a vitamin that I gobble with abandon at any, no matter how small, sign of trouble.

I do not like the "powder" form although I have a big jug of it.  For routine use I am very much not a fan because Vitamin C is ascorbic acid and acid exposure is rough on the enamel of the teeth.  I have crappy genetics in this regard and don't need any trouble there but if I needed extremely large doses in order to fight something off I'd deal with it for a few days.  So far that jug has remained unopened (and I'm not concerned about it "expiring" either.)  For the same reason I would not use chewable tablets; there's no concern about tablets or capsules you swallow as your stomach acid will trivially etch paint so once down the pipe its not a concern.

• Quercetin and Zinc

Quercetin is a flavonoid found in, among other things, grapes.  It has very decent anti-inflammatory properties alone and for a lot of people (myself included) it works as well as OTC allergy meds such as Claritin.  When combined with Zinc it has antiviral properties.  Being a flavonoid in any reasonable amount it has a statistically tiny risk profile and thus I use it without concern, although again -- not without reason.  I used to have severe seasonal allergies before I went low-carb in eating; they are now minor annoyances, but Quercetin is equally if not more effective than Claritin and unlike every OTC antihistamine I've ever tried I do not build a tolerance to it so I choose it instead in the spring, summer and fall months if I'm having allergy issues.  If I have reason to believe I've been exposed to a viral thing or feel any sort of incipient trouble I hit both it and the zinc for a couple of days.  Note that there is some evidence of potential drug interference with this (not significant risk, but non-zero) so if you're on prescriptions check that first.

• Claritin

I rarely use this today but do keep some around.  There was a small retrospective study during covid out of Spain in severely compromised people (nursing home residents) that showed that immediate use of it had a very statistically significant (100%!) positive impact on preventing the infection from progressing -- with no adverse effects from the treatment.  They bundled the antihistamine with Z-pak but of course that is a prescription drug.  This is logical as it is an antihistamine and has a drying effect on the upper respiratory and sinus area, that is, it changes the environment in the nose, sinuses and upper throat.  That appears to be enough to give the body a better shot at attacking the invading virus before it can break through and cause more-serious trouble.  Prior to discovering quercetin I used to use it on a very regular basis during allergy season as part of a rotation (to evade tolerance build) so I have many years of experience taking it and know it doesn't do anything bad to me.  As such it is now part of my protocol for any incipient upper respiratory infection that I feel coming on, although in the last 2-1/2 years I've only used it once for that purpose -- and didn't get actually sick.  Was it a nothing or did it help?  I don't know but the generic at WalMart or elsewhere is extremely cheap and very safe so having a bottle of it around is an easy thing to have on-hand.  Today I would hit any incipient upper respiratory infection with it immediately given the Spanish data and its known safety profile, never mind that its trivially cheap to keep a bottle in your drawer.

• NAC

Were I to get a serious respiratory infection anyway I would hit it with NAC and I keep some on hand.  I do not use it all the time because there is some question as to its safety in long term continual use.  However, it is known as an anti-inflammatory, immune modulator and helps with respiratory symptoms.  Therefore were I to get something nasty I'd use it and have it on-hand for that reason, but would stop when the reason to use it is alleviated.  Be aware that if you are using prescriptions you need to check for interactions -- some drugs have known interactions where there is reason to be concerned.  I have not had reason to use this since got covid -- but I do keep it in the cabinet.

That's it.  None of these are expensive, none of them pose material risk (other than possibly NAC if you are using certain prescription drugs), the Vitamin D and K2 are likely to promote a better immune profile across-the board which may extend materially beyond respiratory viruses.

In addition it is now nearly 2-1/2 years beyond when I got Covid and in the time since I have not had any respiratory virus of any symptomatic note at all.  I have hit a few things that felt "off" or where my Garmin has pegged a low overnight HRV without any obvious provocation (e.g. a few beers at the bar) with the above protocol and none turned into actual illness.  Statistically, for me, this is quite significant as my "usual" in my years on this rock have seen me get some sort of minor respiratory infection once or twice and more years than not a mild to moderate flu (and once in a while, a real ass-kicker such as the first week of 2020) on top of it.  To go nearly 2-1/2 years with zero such illnesses is quite remarkable in my experience, yet there you have it and, given that experience, I have every intention of continuing to do so.

YMMV.

PS: What difference could we have made with this set of recommendations, ex perhaps the NAC, on Covid in the United States?  The cost of having this on-hand is less than one "quick test" package and the cost of Vit-D and K2 supplementation is literally pennies a day.  Between that and the Spanish nursing home data it is reasonable to expect that an enormous percentage, and perhaps statistically all of the people who got whacked by this virus would not have died, and few would have wound up in the hospital -- perhaps 1 in 100 who actually did.  Of course nobody would have made any money and there would have been no fear of anything if that was recommended and had worked -- would there?  Something to think about.