Two Meals a Day

CHAPTER 1

Clean Up Your Act

The first step to transforming your body into a lean, energetic, fat-burning beast is to eliminate nutrient-deficient, high-insulin-stimulating foods from your diet. You must get insulin under control, or all bets are off when it comes to building metabolic flexibility and developing your ability to fast. Our bodies are simply not designed to process the massive amount of carbohydrates in today’s grain-based diet. Remember, humans evolved by consuming extremely minimal carbohydrates in the form of wild seasonal fruits, starchy tubers, and high-fiber vegetables. We evolved to burn mostly fat, exist in a state of ketosis routinely, and to live a low-stress lifestyle that doesn’t require tons of glucose to sustain. Our Homo sapiens default genetic setting as fat burners is illustrated by the fact that you only have around a teaspoon (five grams) of glucose circulating through your entire blood volume of around five quarts (4.7 liters). This ratio is tightly regulated at all times by your liver—the control tower for the processing and distribution of nutrients into the bloodstream.

When you indulge in oatmeal breakfasts, Starbucks Frappuccinos, PowerBars, and pasta dinners, you abuse your extremely delicate hormonal mechanisms and hitch a ride on the familiar blood sugar roller coaster that makes you tired, cranky, and fat. Even if you choose healthful carbohydrates and stay away from junk, you can still develop a hyperinsulinemia problem if you eat and snack too frequently, don’t move around or work out enough, or don’t get adequate sleep. Remember, even when you choose slower-burning whole grains, legumes (beans, soy products, lentils), and starchy tubers (sweet potatoes, squash, and so on), it all eventually gets converted into glucose. You still need to produce a significant amount of insulin to process these carbohydrate calories over time. Add in today’s liberal year-round consumption of fruit (especially the high-glycemic, low-antioxidant tropical fruits); the hidden sources of sugar in restaurant meals, condiments, sauces, and processed meals and snacks; and the insidious liquid carbohydrate calories in myriad sweetened beverages that are calorically dense but fail to satiate, and you have a huge disconnect from our genetic predisposition for health.

Metabolic syndrome is a cluster of interrelated disease conditions driven by poor diet and physical inactivity. Medical and nutrition experts agree that it is today’s number one global health epidemic (yes, even more than COVID-19, because metabolic disease dramatically increases one’s susceptibility to the virus and the severity of its symptoms and mortality risk) and that it’s driven predominantly by excess insulin production. The Cleveland Clinic states, “The exact cause of metabolic syndrome is not known… [but] many features… are associated with ‘insulin resistance.’” The five markers of metabolic syndrome are: high blood pressure, high blood glucose, excess belly fat, high triglycerides, and low HDL cholesterol. Amazingly, these are so closely tied to dietary choices that four of the five risk factors can be corrected (in most individuals) in only twenty-one days by ditching the unhealthful foods described in this chapter. The fifth, slimming your waistline, might take longer depending on your starting point. However, reducing your total insulin production will mobilize stored body fat and help you progress quickly to a healthier body mass index.

If you can lower your overall dietary insulin production, you will lower disease risk, lose excess body fat, boost immune functioning, feel better, think better, and live better. It’s difficult to dispute the idea that producing the ideal minimal amount of insulin (to accomplish the job of delivering calories and nutrients to your cells) could be the single most important lifestyle practice in support of longevity. It is known in science that across all species, the individuals who produce the least amount of insulin over a lifetime live the longest. Unfortunately, under FDCS (flawed and dated conventional stupidity, remember?), prediabetic and type 2 diabetic folks are treated with prescription medication (more insulin!) and flimsy directives to eat fewer calories and exercise more. Such efforts almost always fail in the long term because they don’t address the root cause: metabolic dysfunction and hormone dysregulation caused by hyperinsulinemia. Achieve metabolic flexibility, and you steer clear of this mess!

Calorie Confusion, Constraints, and Compensations

Dr. Jason Fung, a Canadian nephrologist and weight loss expert who wrote The Obesity Code, The Diabetes Code, and several books about fasting, states, “The calories in, calories out theory of obesity is one of the great failures in the history of medicine.” Dr. Fung explains that a calorie-restrictive diet alone will not reduce body fat over the long term because genetically programmed survival mechanisms against starvation will start kicking in to lower your metabolic rate and drift you back toward your annoying body-composition “set point.” This is the idea that whatever you do to eat fewer calories, burn more calories, or even eat more calories and burn fewer of them, your genetically influenced homeostatic drives conspire to eventually return you to a specific set point. The familial genetic attributes Mom and Dad gave you have a strong influence on your set point; Dr. Fung cites research concluding that obesity risk is 70 percent genetic.

Counterintuitive as it may seem, the calories you burn during strenuous, depleting workouts make little or no contribution to your fat-reduction goals. Countless studies reveal that exercise calories burned are offset by a corresponding increase in appetite as well as a reduction in routine caloric expenditure during the day. This shocking and counterintuitive idea is scientifically validated by what is known as the compensation theory. Compensations happen both consciously—rewarding yourself for that 6:00 a.m. spin class with an evening on the couch with Ben & Jerry—and subconsciously: we tend to be a bit more lazy and sluggish, eat bigger portions, and snack more frequently in the aftermath of impressive workouts.

Amazingly, humans seem to have assorted homeostatic compensatory mechanisms that effectively place a ceiling on our daily total energy expenditure (TEE). If you burn a bunch of calories at a workout, your body finds assorted ways to burn fewer calories at rest over the course of the day. This is known as the constrained model of energy expenditure and counters the common misconception that a devoted workout routine will speed up your metabolism at rest. These concepts have risen to prominence after a landmark 2012 study of the Hadza tribe, modern-day hunter-gatherers living in Tanzania. The study, led by American anthropologist Herman Pontzer, PhD, revealed that despite their extremely active lifestyles, which include walking between four and seven miles each day, the Hadza were found to burn around the same number of calories daily as an average urban office worker! I’ve actually done some caloric intake and expenditure calculations that show that a Saturday featuring a hundred-mile bike ride in the morning, followed by hours on the couch watching TV and slamming chips, guacamole, and recovery smoothies, is in energy balance with a Sunday of taking the dog for a walk, doing some yard work, and eating normal meal portions.

The revelation here is that the way we have fought the battle of the bulge for decades has been an ill-conceived, dismal failure. It has led to the completely flawed and psychologically harmful misconception that excess body fat is indicative of laziness and lack of discipline: eating too much and exercising too little. Dr. Fung calls this “the calorie deception.” He explains that hormones influence hunger and satiety beneath your conscious awareness so that overeating, excess body fat, and diet-related disease conditions are almost entirely a result of hormone dysfunction caused by hyperinsulinemia.

I’ve long believed that body composition is 80 percent dependent on diet and only 20 percent on exercise and other lifestyle factors. Dr. Fung goes so far as to say that controlling insulin is 95 percent of the solution here! Or, as my friend Eddy says, “Abs are made in the kitchen.” Beyond your genetic influences, years and decades of hyperinsulinemia and the resultant hormone dysfunction will cause your set point to drift ever higher. This is where we get the widely cited statistic that American adults gain an average of a pound a year from ages twenty-five through fifty-five—by adding 1.5 pounds of fat and losing .5 pounds of muscle. This results in huge increases in disease risk and a 40 percent obesity rate for American adults today.

Even if you have lucky genetics and don’t carry a lot of visible excess body fat, it’s possible you are still what Dr. Phil Maffetone calls “overfat”—possessing extra fat that impairs health and fitness, especially visceral fat. Visceral fat is a distinct type of fat that accumulates around the abdominal organs as well as the heart. Visceral fat is far more destructive to health than the subcutaneous fat that typically accumulates in the hips, thighs, and rear end. This is because visceral fat releases inflammatory chemicals known as cytokines into the bloodstream, hindering fat burning, and suppressing key antiaging hormones such as testosterone and human growth hormone. The inflammatory, hormone-altering properties of visceral fat beget the accumulation of more visceral fat. In his book The Overfat Pandemic, Dr. Maffetone estimates that 76 percent of the world’s population can be classified as overfat. As one of the world’s leading experts on endurance training and a coach to many world champions in distance running and the Ironman triathlon, he also asserts that you cannot exercise your way out of an overfat condition.

So if eating less and exercising more doesn’t work, what does? The research is clear: the best way to improve your body composition is to minimize your overall dietary insulin production for the rest of your life—through fasting and, as Dr. Maffetone suggests, “replacing junk food with real food.” When you ditch processed foods and reduce meal frequency, you lower insulin and activate your long-dormant fat-burning genes. You will be able to maintain stable mood, appetite, and cognitive focus all day long and quickly and efficiently reduce excess body fat. Your daily caloric requirements for peak physical and cognitive functioning actually decrease. It’s like upgrading to a car that gets better gas mileage. You will be able to absolutely thrive on a maximum of two meals a day and further explore the life-changing, life-extending benefits of routine fasting (i.e., going at least twelve hours without eating, between your last meal of the evening and your first meal the following day) and occasional prolonged fasting for focused fat reduction, disease prevention, and detoxification. With a sustained commitment to fasting and minimizing insulin production, you can gradually lower that stubborn metabolic set point and essentially rewind your biological clock so that you’ll look and feel better than you have in years.

Disease Risks from Hyperinsulinemia

Chronic (a.k.a. systemic) inflammation is believed to be the root cause of virtually all disease and dysfunction in the body, including cancer, heart disease, and cognitive decline. Chronic inflammation indicates that the body is struggling to defend itself against a chronic stressor, such as reactive foods (e.g., gluten, peanuts, and lactose), excess exercise with insufficient recovery time, chronically elevated glucose and insulin levels, and even seasonal allergies. Because our bodies are not designed to be on the defensive 24-7, chronic inflammation eventually leads to immune suppression, digestive disturbances, hormone dysfunction, assorted minor conditions ending with “itis” (arthritis, colitis, gastritis, sinusitis), and major modern killers such as cancer, heart disease, and diseases of cognitive decline. By contrast, acute inflammation is typically desirable in the short term. Acute inflammation helps your muscles run, jump, lift, and sprint. It facilitates the containment and healing of a routine bruise, twisted ankle, or bee sting.

People with lucky genes who don’t store much fat may still have metabolic dysfunction, excess visceral fat, and elevated disease risk attributable to inflammatory lifestyle practices—especially the ingestion of toxic seed oils. You may have heard of the disturbingly common occurrence of super-fit individuals dropping dead from surprise heart attacks—a result of their bodies being chronically inflamed from carb dependency and excess exercise. Over years and decades, chronic inflammation causes scarring in the heart muscle and damage to its electrical circuity. Blood tests for fasting glucose, fasting insulin, HbA1c (estimated average glucose over a long time period), triglycerides (the level of fat in the blood—elevations are driven by excess insulin), triglyceride-to-HDL ratio, and C-reactive protein (a key marker of systemic inflammation) can reveal hidden disease patterns in healthy-looking individuals who eat poorly and exercise to extremes.

Excess caloric intake and chronically high insulin levels also send genetic signals to your cells to divide at an accelerated rate. This is common during distinct growth phases of life, when accelerated cell division is desired—pregnancy, infancy, and adolescence (e.g., as a teenager tries to pack on muscle for high school sports). Otherwise, accelerated cell division, marked by the overstimulation of growth factors such as insulin-like growth factor (IGF-1) and mammalian target of rapamycin (mTOR), leads to accelerated aging. Cells throughout the body divide a finite number of times and then they die. This can be seen in the gradual deterioration of cellular functioning in muscles, organs, the immune system, and the metabolic system as the body ages. For example, the gradual weakening of the immune response—known as immunosenescence—is the reason elderly people are more vulnerable to infection than young people.

Glycation is another disturbing consequence of a high-carb, high-insulin-producing diet. The body’s longest-lasting cells are the most vulnerable, including those of the brain, cardiovascular system, eyes, kidneys, and skin. Diabetics who can’t properly regulate blood glucose commonly suffer from vision and kidney problems. It’s commonplace for the elderly to have wrinkled skin, dementia, and heart disease.

Brain cells are the most sensitive to oxidation, inflammation, and glycation, and today’s disturbing increase in rates of cognitive disease is being increasingly tied to nutrient-deficient, high-insulin-producing diets. The senile plaques and neurofibrallary tangles of Alzheimer’s disease are believed to be driven by glycation. Neuropathologist Dr. Suzanne De La Monte, of Brown University, explains that dementia is fundamentally a metabolic disease characterized by impaired glucose metabolism in the brain, “with molecular and biochemical features that correspond with diabetes.” The connection is so strong that Dr. De La Monte’s team has coined the widely appropriated term “type 3 diabetes” to describe conditions of cognitive decline.

TRAINING FOR THE CORONALYMPICS

The Big Three Toxic Modern Foods

The Big Three toxic modern foods are sugars, grains, and refined industrial seed oils. Until you rid your diet of the Big Three, you will remain stuck in carbohydrate dependency and unable to efficiently access and burn stored body fat.

The Big Three have long formed the foundation of the modern diet, to the great detriment of human health. A grain-based, high-carbohydrate diet prompts wildly excessive insulin production (in contrast to the genetically optimal ancestral diet), lifelong insidious weight gain, and an assortment of disease patterns driven by metabolic syndrome. You’re probably aware of the idea that refined grains lack nutrition and spike blood sugar quickly. The metabolic response to a slice of white bread or a forkful of plain pasta is not much different from the response to a tablespoon of sugar. In white flour products, the original wheat kernel has been stripped of two of its natural components: the bran (containing fiber, vitamins, and minerals) and the germ (containing fatty acids and antioxidants). The remaining segment of the plant, the endosperm, delivers a dose of “naked” carbohydrate calories that spike blood sugar quickly.

Unfortunately, whole grains such as whole wheat bread, brown rice, rolled oats, and the like (with the bran, germ, and endosperm preserved) have been recommended as the centerpiece of a healthful diet. This is a highly problematic premise that has made the Standard American Diet (SAD) a dismal failure of phenomenal scale and severity. Indeed, whole grains, with the three segments intact, deliver incrementally more nutritional benefits and a lower initial glucose spike than refined grains, but the nutritional value of grains pales in comparison to that of truly nutrient-dense foods such as fish, eggs, liver, fermented foods such as sauerkraut and yogurt, and colorful produce. Know this: both whole and refined grains are a cheap source of calories that are easy to harvest, process, and transform into the highest-profit items in the grocery store, such as cookies, crackers, chips, baked goods, snacks, treats, and frozen meals. The rationale for a grain-based diet is based on decades of flawed science and manipulative marketing, driving a profit machine for food manufacturers and creating a disease paradigm. The epidemic of diet-driven metabolic syndrome is also a reliable profit center for the medical and pharmaceuticals industries.

The other huge objection to eating whole grains is that they contain natural plant toxins, a.k.a. antinutrients or antigens, which can trigger systemic inflammation, autoimmune reactions, and leaky gut syndrome. Gluten is the most prominent offender, and many sufferers have figured out how immediately destructive this agent in modern-day wheat products can be. It’s becoming increasingly apparent that at some level we are all sensitive to gluten and other antinutrients found in grains, because we have not evolved to eat these unnatural modern foods and they are extremely difficult to digest. Yes, the first cultivation of grains, around ten thousand years ago—the catalyst for the advent of civilization—counts as “modern” on the evolutionary timeline.

The chronic and usually mild symptoms that we experience from consuming grains and assorted other plants that cause reactions in sensitive individuals is so widespread that we have come to believe that gas, bloating, constipation, transient abdominal pain, and occasional diarrhea are a normal part of life instead of an adverse response to the plant toxins that you have slammed down your throat every day since infancy. Millions of ancestral health enthusiasts have reported amazing healing stories after they ditched grain-based foods and emphasized evolution-tested hunter-gatherer foods. Enthusiasts of the increasingly popular carnivore diet (see here) are taking it a step further and restricting their intake of virtually all plant foods. The healing stories include sudden and dramatic improvements in nagging inflammatory and autoimmune conditions such as arthritis, allergies, asthma, leaky gut syndrome, assorted skin conditions, and all manner of digestive and elimination dysfunction.

It’s also time to take a close look at refined, high polyunsaturated industrial seed oils, a.k.a. vegetable oils, especially because they may be a less familiar villain than sugars and grains. As Dr. Shanahan explains in The Fatburn Fix, refined seed oils don’t spike insulin, as processed carbohydrates do, but they disrupt metabolic functioning in ways that promote insulin resistance. Seed oils are extracted from the raw materials of corn, cottonseed, safflower, soybean, sunflower, and rapeseed (from which canola oil is derived) at high temperatures with the use of harsh chemicals. This results in oxidative damage to the product, damage that is greatly exacerbated when the oil is heated for cooking or used in making assorted baked, processed, packaged, or frozen food products.

By contrast, the naturally high volume of oil in an olive, avocado, or coconut means that it can be easily extracted without the need for aggressive and harmful processes using high heat and chemical solvents. For example, you may see the designation “first cold pressed” on bottles of extra-virgin olive oil. This indicates that the olive was crushed and pressed only once, without being heated or otherwise processed. This delivers a temperature-stable oil for cooking or consuming directly—on a salad, for example. Dr. Shanahan cites research estimating that 40 percent of all the calories you consume in a restaurant meal come from the seed oils it was cooked in. Holistic health expert and bestselling author Dr. Andrew Weil declares that 20 percent of calories in the SAD come from soybean oil alone. If you visit a typical grocery store, you will see that 60 to 70 percent of all processed, packaged, and frozen foods contain one or more of these insidious health destroyers.

When you ingest refined seed oils, they are not burned for fuel the way other fats generally are because of their unnatural chemical makeup. Instead, their similarity to natural fat molecules confuses the body into integrating these agents into healthy fat cells. Unfortunately, they are very difficult to burn for energy and can greatly hamper your overall ability to burn stored body fat over time. If you have problem areas of fat accumulation that don’t seem to go away even when you are losing fat in general, the cellular dysfunction caused by seed oils is likely one of the causes. Seed oils also break down into toxins that generate oxidative damage and systemic inflammation. The adverse health consequences of consuming seed oils are so immediate and extreme that Dr. Shanahan states, “They are free radicals in a bottle; literally no different than eating radiation.”

When toxic oils short-circuit your fat metabolism, you become even more dependent on dietary carbohydrates for energy. Extreme biohacker and elite adventure sports athlete Ben Greenfield, author of Boundless and host of the Ben Greenfield Fitness podcast, observes that seed oils might be considered the gateway to insulin resistance and diabetes because of how they short-circuit fat metabolism. He notes that while refined carbohydrates get the majority of blame in this area, they are arguably less problematic because you can burn them off during exercise, unlike toxic and dysfunctional fat cells. Sugar and refined carbs can be highly destructive in excess but industrial seed oils are inherently destructive at any amount consumed.

I include artificial sweeteners as “sugar”—and they should be totally eliminated from the diet as well. In addition to concerns about ingesting chemical agents linked to cancer and emerging concerns about how sweeteners can harm gut bacteria, some research suggests the highly disturbing potential of sweeteners to spike insulin. In The Obesity Code, Dr. Fung attests that aspartame spikes insulin by 20 percent—more than plain white sugar! Consequently, sweeteners can deliver a disastrous double-whammy effect of both spiking insulin and confusing the brain’s appetite center to crave real sugar. These mechanisms are part of the cephalic response