Ultimate Body Makeover pt. 1

Generally, the best advice for health-minded individuals is to engage in a lifestyle that supports their health goals over the long run. But sometimes there is a desire for the ever-loved quick fix. Everyone would like a simple and easy fix for whatever health concern they might have, but 99% of the time there is no such thing. Health issues take time to manifest and time to resolve. The 1% that is quick is usually due to an acute infection or toxic exposure and the right medications usually provide quick results. The other 99% are the health issues that have resulted from poor lifestyle choices impacting the body over lengthy periods of time. Examples might include obesity, poor muscle tone, balance issues, chronic inflammation, metabolic syndrome, and a laundry list of others.

These types of conditions are the result of years and years of abuse and neglect of our body and its needs. These types of conditions have a lot of inertia. They are like a huge cargo ship. They don’t move really fast, but they are also really hard to slow down or change their course. These suckers require hard work for a long time, and seeing results is difficult. Honestly, most people fail when they are told to change their ways to reverse one of these chronic diseases. The ‘ways’ we have to change are the result of our best efforts to cope with the stresses in our lives and our desires to experience a bit of happiness. When a doctor says to give up our current lifestyle and adopt something entirely new in order to tackle some health problem, he/she might as well tell us to jump off a bridge. We have tried being healthy a hundred times and we do really well for about a week, then life intervenes and we get blown out of the water. So the advice to simply change is fairly worthless.

Change is inherently a trial-and-error learning process. Like walking a tightrope, change is best approached one tiny step at a time. That being said, sometimes we are feeling up and motivated and really want to do something good for ourselves. Realistically life is going to throw us a curve ball and in our attempt to adapt and compensate, our good plans will have to be set aside for a moment. This reality got me thinking. What we need is a change process that will really impact our health quickly and that is designed to be used for just a short time and then repeated when we feel up and ready for action again. Looking at internal hormonal cycles for guidance, I think that a 2-week protocol is about the right length of time to take some steps in the right direction. If you are still feeling strong and motivated at the end of 2 weeks then simply reengage for another 2 weeks. But if you have used up your tank of motivational gas then take a rest until you are ready to engage again.

Over the years I have embraced many, many different healthy lifestyle diets and activity protocols. I have learned a ton of stuff about all these approaches and even more about how the body works. One thing that stands out is that the body loves variety. Everything runs on cycles, sleep, hormones, digestion, growth, everything. So when you try doing the same thing all the time to change, the body fights it. It adapts and undercuts your efforts. So in designing an effective two-week protocol, I am actually going to shift what we do in many different ways. Diet and exercise are the two biggest components.

Diet: Most people want to lose weight, but weight does not want to be lost. Weight is our survival rations for lean times. For this reason, the body won’t let go of weight unless it has no choice but to dip into its reserves to meet its energy needs. That means not eating enough to meet our energy needs. In the short run, this works to lose weight. In the long run, the body has ways to reduce its needs to compensate. Ideally, we could just switch on our cells to make them use more energy, but the ways to do this are really unpleasant and most people won’t do them (like swimming in a frozen lake every day.) Nevertheless, we do want to support improving our cellular energy-burning mechanisms; the mitochondria. There are certain supplements to help with this which I will suggest as part of the protocol.

Exercise functions much like diet for the human body. Most people want (and need) better muscle tone. And just like diet, the body likes variety. We want to be able to use our body in lots of ways, so we need to activate our muscles through a wide variety of movements. We might get confused by looking at the training for Olympic athletes or professional bodybuilders. They are using their muscles for specific goal-oriented purposes so their training methods are not what we want to emulate. We need strength plus flexibility plus coordination plus balance plus stamina. We want an even mix of all of these, and each requires a different kind of training. If we have a particular hobby sport then we might want a little emphasis on certain exercises that will support our goals.

Let’s look at the fourteen-day eating protocol first. Since the goal is to lose a few pounds over the fourteen days, we want to consume at least 1200 calories less than we need to kick the body into dipping into its reserves, our fat, to make up the difference. These days women need about 2000 calories a day, so we would shoot for eating around 800 calories per day. For men, we will go for around 1000 calories a day. Initially, we want to stimulate the body to burn fat. The body won’t do this in the main tissues unless our insulin levels go way down. That means we have to avoid carbs as carbs trigger insulin release. Carb burning also causes the body to retain a lot of water, which we can let go of when we avoid the carbs for a bit.

Another key point I mentioned in a recent newsletter is we want to eliminate fat from our diet for fourteen days. If we are carrying excess weight then we are probably lipotoxic. That means we have fat accumulated inside our regular cells, not just our fat cells. This messes up our metabolism and damages our mitochondria. For those of you feeling faint at the loss of butter and bacon, I feel your pain. For me, butter was its own food group. Particularly damaging appears to be linoleic acid, one of the polyunsaturated oils found in all vegetable oils. So no mayo either, and no fried foods or even cooking with oil. Personally, I take a DHA capsule and a krill oil capsule every day to support the supply of the essential omega-3 oils my body needs. I say zero fat, but that is probably impossible as every natural food has some amount of fat in it. Our goal is to consume less than 20 grams of total fat per day. Our overall goal initially is to eliminate both carbs and fat and just eat protein and fiber (low-carb veggies.)

For protein, we want to consume around 80-100 grams per day. This needs to be a very low-fat protein like egg white, shrimp, low-fat fish, lean ham, chicken breast, no-fat yogurt, low-fat cottage cheese, or protein powders. Most of these are one-quarter protein by weight fresh. Proteins from like plant foods usually have either a lot of fat (as in soy proteins, nuts, and seeds) or way too many carbs (like legumes) at this stage of the process, except for vegetable-sourced protein powders. We are going to be eating protein for the first seven days and then we will be abstaining from most protein for five days and then go back to eating protein again for the last two days.

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Warning: This protocol is only for folks that are carrying at least 22% body fat. You can not get enough calories from eating just protein and fiber if you are lean. If you try your body will break down your muscle tissue for calories and possibly develop protein toxicity. You must have fat onboard for your body to burn to supply those extra needed calories.
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The overall pattern for this ultimate body makeover is:

7 days of lean protein and low-carb vegetables

3 days of just low-carb veggies (fast mimicking – no protein)

2 days of rice/sweet potato/fruit diet – still no protein

2 days of rice/sweet potato/fruit diet w/ protein again

Over the fourteen days, we will be engaging in four different diet strategies, each of which has different physiologic effects for healing our body. We will be addressing liver health, brain health, kidney health, blood vessel health, and pancreas health as well as rebuilding the gut microbiome and healing leaky gut. We will be cleaning out old damaged cells in the body and kicking up the production of new stem cells to replace them. The general outline is as written, but there is so much more to make this the ultimate makeover. Part 2 next time.

Take care,

David

Ellen 

Well, we just got our lab work back after two months on the no fat sweet potato and rice plant based diet. We did a set of labs just before we started so we would have a good comparison. We were in hopes that this would improve our insulin levels and cardiac risk factors. Despite the glowing reports other people gave online and in the two books on the diet I read, our labs both came back with everything worse. All those carbs are trying to kill us! So the next day we went to Texas Roadhouse to change paths and start reversing the damage we have done over the last two months.