(Breather) This show goes into more detail about dietary strategies to ditch unhealthy modern foods and dabble in the various popular ancestral style strategies.

Get Over Yourself Podcast

Brad: 00:08 Welcome to the get over yourself podcast. This is author and athlete, Brad Kearns, discovering ways to be healthy, fit, and happy in hectic, high-stress, modern life. So let’s slow down and take a deep breath. Take a cold plunge and expertly balanced that competitive intensity with an appreciation of the journey. That’s the theme of the show. Here we go.

Brad: 04:57 Mm, oh, I breathe the don’t you love the breather shows getting you focused, serving as a healthy, inspirational reminder of the good stuff to do or perhaps an awakening if you’re new to these ideas and hopefully willing to try something stepping outside of the normal realm of disastrous, unhealthy, modern lifestyle habits, particularly eating crap food in the diet. It’s shocking that this stuff is still available here in 2019 when we have plenty of research and validation for the idea that sugar is a killer. Uh, industrial seed oils are a killer. They cause instant disturbance in healthy cellular function at the DNA level. Uh, but here we are with massive multinational corporate, uh, entities pumping us full of sugar every single day. My most favorite example for the decline of modern society comes from the Starbucks coffee mobile ordering app, which is super cool to order something and not have to wait in line, have it be waiting for you on the counter, love that part of it.

Brad: 06:10 But what’s absolutely offensive and disgraceful to me is how their menu of suggested drinks to order. Many of them start with a default number of pumps of liquid cane sugar. So if you’re ordering a large size ice tea, like I think my passion fruit is the one I like or uh, black tea, pineapple infusion or the various names that they use. A, you go onto the app and the starting point is seven pumps of liquid cane sugar. So you have to physically use your thumb and press the minus key seven times to back it down to zero pumps of liquid cane sugar to get a proper ice tea that’s not loaded with sugar. So Starbucks people, if you’re listening or if you work there and you want to send an email to a, the person who is in charge of, oh gosh, how much sugar do you think those guys order off the boat from the sugar producing countries by the equator.

Brad: 07:11 Can you imagine a container ship? You know those container ships that stack up with the a stackable metal, uh, storage containers. How much sugar are they pumping into the throats of Americans and Chinese and Japanese and Australian and New Zealand, and wherever else they’re pumping their coffee of putting in the same category with a heavy heart. I must admit that I used to sell energy bars on my healthy nutritional products website because they’re at least a step up from a heavily processed snack with a whole bunch of chemicals and offensive ingredients like refined vegetable oils. So the age of the power bar, the Cliff bar, the big giants in the bar industry, uh, that emerged right when I was, uh, a racing athlete and had these convenient fuels for the first time to replace the licorice and hostess pies and things that we field ourselves on before the age of energy foods.

Brad: 08:07 But when you think about it, taking a few steps back and now deeply immersed into the ancestral living strategy where we’re realizing that even what we consider to be a routine consumption of carbohydrates where we have a bar or two a day, we might have a little treat here and there. We might start our day with a high carbohydrate breakfast. And what we’re doing is we’re just assailing our system with so much extra carbohydrate requiring that extra insulin production existing in a state of hyperinsulinemia that’s chronically excessive insulin production, which causes oxidative stress and inflammation in the body and sets you up for heart disease, lifelong insidious weight gain and Metabolic Syndrome type two obesity. All these things that are happening at record epidemic numbers. So we want to put the brakes on, pull out of this tailspin spiral and get our diet straight. So we’re gonna focus in on some more details, uh, that I, uh, first mentioned in the overview breather show overview of healthy lifestyle tip and we’ll get a little more deeply into diet, but trying to stay a high level here.

Brad: 09:14 And then I’ll add a few comments at the end about some of my particulars that might interest you, such as refining the primal or the ancestral approach to a ketogenic eating strategy where you engage in discipline, a reduction of carbohydrates down to the nutritional ketosis level, and prompt the manufacturing of ketones internally to generate a sort of health benefits. Or my recent experiment with a carnivore style diet where I’m emphasizing the nose to tail carnivore foods and making that the centerpiece of my diet. The most nutrient dense foods on the planet. And a lot of this stuff, granted, is fun and games for the extreme health enthusiast or the health professional who is immersed in this as a career field. Most people are too busy, don’t have enough time. So that’s why I want to back it up a few steps and just give some sensible advice sort of in the triage order of priority.

Brad: 10:10 So when we talk about diet, the first thing, the most urgent thing that we need to do is ditch these nutrient deficient modern foods of refined grains, sugars, sweetened beverages and industrial seed oils. These are the high polyunsaturated seed oils, canola, sunflower, soybean, corn, the stuff that’s contained in most of the shit processed foods that we find a, but also in most restaurant meals, almost every fast food meal is using these ubiquitous agents of refined vegetable oils. You can go on youtube and search Brad Kearns, Cate Shanahan, vegetable oils, and you’ll see, uh, and very interesting and short video and very powerful insights about how this stuff is, has nasty effects on your brain function, uh, on your ability to, uh, burn body fat in a healthy manner and on cellular function as soon as you ingest them. So the immediate goal of completely eradicating consumption of vegetable oils from the diet is critically important.

Brad: 11:17 Hundreds of thousands of deaths every year are attributed to directly to the consumption of these nasty chemical agents that can integrate it into our cellular material because they seem like a regular, uh, fat molecules from the diet. But the body doesn’t know what to do with them. So it stores them, they accumulate to toxic levels, they’re very difficult to burn. So that would be, let’s say number one, cause that’s so easy and it causes no sacrifice. If I say, hey, don’t eat sugar ever get in your life, there’s going to be a little pushback there because it’s such a centerpiece of celebratory, modern life. But vegetable, I mean, excuse me, the technical term would be industrial seed oils. Get rid of those, toss those in the garbage can. Take care when you’re ordering a meal to ask your waiter or waitress to cook the meal and butter rather than vegetable oil or choose something else.

Brad: 12:05 Okay, so we’re getting rid of that. And then with the sugars and the refined grains, that is the ancestral pitch that, you know what? We never ate these foods in our history of hunter gatherers. They don’t have a lot of nutritional value, there’s no call to eat them. There is no justification for eating processed carbohydrates in the modern diet. Most people have plenty of body fat to burn that they never need to spike blood sugar in that way. Spike insulin and have this stuff stored as body fat. So that’s the number one culprit in the heart disease. A story as well as the excess body fat story is the consumption of refined carbohydrates. So we’re going to count grain foods as well as sugars and sweetened beverages. But if you can put the brakes on that, a ditch grains, at least for a three week experimental period to see how much better your body feels and realize that your sugar indulgences, which are so much a routine and customary part of modern life are really, really bad for you.

Brad: 13:04 Straight up, maybe you can, uh, make some better decisions. And if you do insist on indulging, have small portions and enjoy the heck out of them with full attention and awareness rather than making consumption of sugar foods and sweetened beverages, a habitual process. There’s a big difference from saying, Hey, tonight’s time to celebrate, we’re at a fabulous restaurant. They made a homemade, a banana cream pie. Here you go. Or Hey, guess what? I just returned from Seattle, a town known for many things including the Seahawks and the space needle, but also for their penchant, for homemade handmade ice cream shops that you see around town. One of them is called Frankie and Joe’s. It’s all plant based ice cream. They also have a Salt and Spoon and Molly Moons and central district. Those are four pretty awesome ice cream stores that you go in there and this stuff is handmade, it’s fresh, the flavors are unique and exotic and it tastes delicious.

Brad: 14:03 And so I in the last two years have eaten ice cream on two occasions, both on my visit to Seattle. It’s a wonderful part of celebrating and, uh, being a tourist in the town. Otherwise big difference between going home and hitting Ben and Jerry’s to stock up my freezer to always have these supplies on hand that don’t offer a lot of health benefits and spike blood sugar, spike insulin. But at least I’m choosing in a celebratory manner, some product that’s made with more care and more attention than the mass produced crap. Shockingly, I just recently discovered, uh, doing research for the book that some Ben and Jerry’s flavors, maybe all of them have industrial seed oils in the ingredient list. Can’t believe it. Cause those guys are passing themselves off as healthy, cool hippies from making these exotic ice cream flavors, but they’re putting crap in the ice cream.

Brad: 14:55 It’s disgraceful. It’s tragic. So make good choices if you’re going to celebrate, oh my goodness. Okay. So we’ve agreed to ditch the industrial seed oils, the refined sugars, grains, processed box package, frozen foods made with offensive ingredients, chemicals, preservatives, causing proinflammatory and free radical reactions in the body, accelerating the aging process, setting you up for metabolic disease, cancer, heart disease. Get rid of the junk and emphasize healthy, colorful, natural food of the planet. Your choice, right? Not gonna pigeonhole you. If you want to be a plant based person or you want to be a carnivore person, we’re still adhering to the same guidelines, which is the ancestral lineup of meat, fish fowl, eggs, vegetables, fruits, nuts and seeds and of course primal blueprint, famous for welcoming the healthy modern foods as allowances, things like high fat dairy products, high cacao percentage dark chocolate, no, it didn’t exist in Paleolithic times, but has health benefits, minimal health objections. Go ahead, enjoy it. But you’re emphasizing these colorful, healthy, natural foods and also having this component of flexibility in your diet where you are not dependent upon regular meals as your primary source of energy. So we call this metabolic flexibility.

New Speaker: 16:35 When you become fat adapted instead of carb dependent, your meal habits can become more sporadic and intuitive. And the more time you can bank fasting, the more health benefits you can accrue. Fasting optimizes fat metabolism, enhances cellular repair, delays the aging process and assortment of wonderful benefits accrue. But of course, if you’re not fat adapted and you try to embark on fasting efforts, you’re going to feel tired, cranky, and trigger the fight or flight response. That’s a poorly prepared, poorly adapted enthusiast of fasting is just going to get a stress hormone bath. So first you want to get good at burning fat, and that happens by getting the junk out of your diet, emphasizing the healthy natural foods, and then tiptoeing into the world of skipping meals or delaying your morning meal as we discuss in the Keto reset diet.

Brad: 17:31 You have this a eradication period where you get rid of the junk food, emphasize healthy foods, and then try fascinating in the morning waiting a delaying your first meal until you experienced true sensations of hunger. So that would be pretty much tackling the diet goal. And first some details. Uh, I have gone from, uh, routinely fasting in the morning until noon or later and then experimented with throwing in, for example, things like a super nutrition morning green smoothie, uh, macronutrient balanced smoothie, not a high sugar smoothie. So I’m talking about emphasizing the healthy fats found in coconut milk. Uh, putting in, uh, some protein powder to get the protein up of a Kado to get a little more fat in there, a bunch of fresh produce to get the, uh, healthy nutrition, the micronutrients from things like a frozen Kale and spinach. Uh, putting in a little bit handful of frozen fruit, not too heavy on the fruit.

Brad: 18:31 Uh, so that’s been one of my morning choices. Same with having a healthy breakfast like eggs and bacon or a delicious omelette. Uh, there are some other, uh, tips and tricks that we’re putting in our new book, Keto Cooking for Cool Dudes. These are quick breakfast meals, like a primal style oatmeal where you’re cooking up on the stove. Uh, a few egg yolks, some nut butter, some crushed up nuts and some coconut milk and creating an oatmeal style mixture. Maybe throwing some Cacao Nibs in there. Delicious filling, satisfying, but not that sugar spike that you get from a regular oatmeal. So there’s an assortment of ideas to start your day off with a healthy meal or with fasting, which is a great suggestion for most people, but not all so fast and can get really difficult if you have a metabolic damage or you’re not entirely a healthy specimen. Maybe you have some gut dysfunction, leaky gut syndrome, and the stress of depriving yourself of calories for 16 hours over a 24 hour period. For example, if you’re fasting till noon a, it could be too much. So in that case, you want to get these healthy meals in, experiment with a different strategy until you feel really metabolically healthy and then can kind of, uh, put the gas on, upregulate your, uh, fasting efforts, especially to stimulate the reduction of excess body fat, which happens a gracefully and efficiently when you’re, uh, not eating, uh, all kinds of, uh, patterned meals, right? You’re skipping here meal here, skipping a meal there and turbocharging fat burning every time you skip a meal or skip a snack. Uh, so the midday meal Mark Sisson has popularized the concept of the big ass salad. So pretty simple primal or Keto approach where you skip breakfast, maybe you have some coffee, some tea, something waking up your digestive system, getting yourself on that, a digestive circadian rhythm, even without consuming any calories or very many calories.

Brad: 20:29 And then you have a big centerpiece meal at lunchtime. You can watch mark making his big ass salad on youtube and of course any other healthy choice. And then the centerpiece meal of the day for many people is a delicious dinner where you’re emphasizing this healthy, sustainable animal product, whether it’s grass fed steak or wild caught fish cooking up some produce slathering those broccoli stocks and butter, enjoying a colorful, nutritious meal if you’re inclined to extra carbohydrates. For example, if you’re an athlete or you’re trying that strategy, you can have that delicious sweet potato, uh, some extra fruit perhaps as a dessert item and you can mix and match whatever you want. Uh, I’ve also talked about getting into that ketogenic realm where you’re devotedly restricting carbohydrates down into 50 grams per day or less with the idea that you’re going to stimulate a state of nutritional ketosis, ketone production in the liver.

Brad: 21:29 And there’s wonderful health benefits to accrue, to transition away from a glucose dominant brain function and muscle function into making these energy rich ketones, which burn cleanly and efficiently in the body, much more cleanly than glucose. So you get better oxygen delivery and blood circulation in the brain and you pretty much become free from the need to snack or boost up blood sugar through food intake because you’re making these ketones internally. So very popular, uh, dietary practice these days, uh, read all about it and the Keto reset diet and especially for, uh, dropping excess body fat. I think anything you do that’s restrictive and focused is going to promote success in that area. And I will claim to that from trying this carnivores style diet on a whim or with fascination, uh, in the early months of 2019. So I heard Dr. Paul Saladino on the Ben Greenfield podcast was captivated by the story and the idea that, uh, these plant foods maybe don’t provide as much critical benefit as we think, and in fact can be bad for people who are sensitive to, uh, the lectins and the anti nutrients contained in plants.

Brad: 22:42 So I said, you know what, this is interesting. I’ll try it. I’m not one of those people that’s highly sensitive to the plant agents. I don’t report any negative effects, but it was really interesting to just focus in and emphasize, uh, animal products, well chosen animal products. So broad based, not just eating a steak every day, but having the sardines and the salmon eggs and the Sushi and a delicious cuts of meat, including organ meats, which I hadn’t consumed enough of in my life to date and have so much nutritional value. So I kind of became this miniature carnivore guy, or sometimes I jokingly called it the C and C diet because I was still continuing to consume my high cacao percentage, dark chocolate. My gourmet dark chocolate was going hand in hand with these carnivore ish meals. But, uh, as you’ll hear from a the breather show called Fatty Popcorn, boy, I had some excess body fat to drop for the first time in many years.

Brad: 23:34 So that was a fun goal to share with the audience how the strategies that I did it. And one of them was just a narrowing down my dietary habits and also establishing a rule out of nowhere, a just for fun, just for the challenge of not consuming any calories until 12 noon because I’d been flexible on that, uh, for the time predating, uh, the, the before photo where I was up to my highest body weight ever and deciding, hey, you know what, I’m going to turn the corner here and put in some guidelines and restrictions and see how that goes. So I covered, uh, basically the transition from, uh, the grain-based standard American diet over into a primal or an ancestral eating pattern. And then talked a little bit about, uh, dabbling in Keto or carnivore. So there you go with a eating strategy.

New Speaker: 24:22 Uh, one other plug I’ll put in for a interesting insight I learned from Dr Cate Shanahan recently was that snacking is a discouraged practice if you are trying to drop excess body fat because anything you eat, even a high fat Keto approved snack will stimulate insulin production. Yes, even consuming fat, uh, especially, uh, we know that consuming protein and of course carbohydrate. So once you stimulate insulin by ingesting a food, you shut off internal fat burning. Make sense? Obvious, right? If you’re burning body fat, you’re burning body fat. As soon as you eat something, you’re burning the calories in that and uh, overriding the goal of turbocharge fat burning. And of course, if you’re good at fat burning and you’re engaging in fasting frequently, uh, you can tap in at any time to the energy you need to function at peak cognitive and physical level throughout the day. So this, uh, absent minded snacking or even strategic snacking could be second guessed if you’re trying for that goal of reducing excess body fat. Hmm. Interesting. Huh.

New Speaker: 25:27 Now if you are wondering about your carb intake level and your overall macronutrient patterns, one exercise you can do as a short term educational journey is to write down everything you eat for a couple of days straight, measuring as good as you can with a grams, uh, teaspoons, tablespoons, a a cup measurement and maybe even a digital scale if you have it, you know, getting a good, accurate indication of what you’re eating. And then you can input the data into, uh, the new app called Senza or the, uh, long established websites like FitDay dot com and my fitness pal.com. So you can painstakingly go through this process and seeing just what the macronutrient content is of your omelette, of your snack, of your dinner meal, your salad, and get a basic understanding of how many carbs you’re consuming in a day, uh, routinely. And how that might compare to making an effort to go into ketosis and getting those carbs under 50 grams. So if you have no clue what the macronutrient contribution is of the various foods that you eat, uh, you can do a little exercise. And if you don’t want to get that strict and uh, uh, methodical about it, you can just kind of look up some common macronutrient comparisons of, so let’s say a dinner of salmon and Broccoli or a big omelette with vegetables and a cheese and avocado and eggs.

Brad: 26:55 So you just kind of obtain a basic understanding of your calorie consumption patterns, especially if you’re trying to drop excess body fat. But it’s certainly not mandatory if you’re just choosing healthy, nutritious foods. You’re good to go for a long, healthy, happy life. But you gotta take action. And I feel like, uh, as I discussed with my fatty popcorn boy’s story, we are all existing on slippery slopes here, such that if we allow a little bit of indulgence and a little bit of flexibility with our intake of grains and sugars, especially high carbohydrate foods, what happens is they start to become a more habitual and less celebratory. And we also must be mindful of the compelling research that suggests that wheat, the modern wheat product, particularly the glad and protein contained in the modern genetically modified or genetically optimized wheat product, uh, has addictive properties.

Brad: 27:55 This is the premise of the great bestselling book wheat belly by Dr. William Davis identifying that, uh, the consumption of wheat in the daily Diet, the gluten, uh, stimulates appetite to the tune of consuming an additional 300 calories per day. So when you have that bread habit hanging around, you’re going to want to eat what you’re not going to feel satisfied and say shaded like you would in a carnivore style eating pattern where you’re eating these incredibly satiating foods and feeling full for long periods of time after, let’s say a single daily meal meal. Like a lot of carnivores are practicing. So who bread, wheat products, and of course the highly addictive properties of sugar. Some experts are putting those up there in the same, uh, addictive power of a strong drugs. And we know that the consumption of sugar, uh, stimulate, stimulates the, uh, the same opioid receptors in the brain as the hard drugs do.

Brad: 28:56 So who, you know, trying to cut back our wean off of sugar might not be as effective as waking up one day and saying, you know what? I’m going to eradicate this stuff from my diet at least for a month. Clean my body out, get what it feels like to be clean, burning and transitioning over to fat rather than being dependent or addicted to, uh, the grains and sugars that have been the centerpiece of the diet for a long time. So you can do it, it’s going to take some, uh, awareness and some dedication, but of course you can always reach for the nutrient dense, highly satisfying foods that are in the ancestral world and that should help you with your dietary transition. So that’s a good breather show to get a little detailed on the diet strategies. Thank you for listening. And we’re working our way through an entire lifestyle, uh, optimization program with these breather shows all inspired by, uh, trying to help a friend get healthy and put some tips together.

Brad: 30:00 Thank you for listening to the show. We would love your feedback at getoveryourselfpodcast@gmail.com and we would also love if you could leave a rating and a review on iTunes or wherever you listen to podcasts. I know it’s a hassle. You have to go to desktop iTunes, click on the tab that says ratings and reviews, and then click to rate the show anywhere from five to five stars. And it really helps spread the word so more people can find the show and get over themselves because they need to. Thanks for doing it.