Ready to make a change?  Feeling guilty about the choices you’re trying to make because it goes against everything you have heard or done the past 40 years?  Here’s 4 permissions to dramatically change your health…that May make Your Doctor Hate You.  Now go rock it.

Permission to Eat Fat

On my intake forms, I have a line of questions that ask the person if they feel better eating certain foods.  An overwhelming majority of people mark they feel better when eating higher fat foods.  But because doctors, media, and all things medical industry have villainized fat and cholesterol for 40 years, people shy away from it out of dogmatic guilt that they are harming themselves, not helping.  The reality is that we all know what has happened to diabetes, obesity, heart disease, auto-immune conditions, and dementia the last 40 years as we have removed fat.  We’re not any healthier.

If there’s something you should feel bad about eating, it should be sugar.  Sure it tastes good, gives you an instant energy boost but have you ever looked back an hour later and said, ‘I wish I just ate more cake, cookies, breakfast cereal, and whole wheat bread. I just feel so good.”  You’re chronically fatigued because you keep feeding the insulin-energy-store-overload reaction based on your high glycemic choices.

WORDS THAT MEAN SUGAR: Tango Yankee Nicole Recine RN, MSN

Agave Nectar
Barley Malt Syrup
Beet Sugar
Brown Rice Syrup
Brown Sugar
Cane Crystals
Cane juice crystals
Cane Sugar
Coconut Sugar, or Coconut Palm Sugar
Corn Sugar
Corn sweetener
Corn syrup, or corn syrup solids
Dehydrated Cane Juice
Dextrin
Dextrose
Evaporated Cane Juice
Fructose
Fruit juice concentrate
Fruit Juice Sweetened
Glucose
High-fructose corn syrup
Honey
Invert sugar
Lactose
Maltodextrin
Malt syrup
Maltose
Maple syrup
Molasses
Palm Sugar
Raw sugar
Rice Syrup
Saccharose
Sorghum or
sorghum syrup
Sucrose
Syrup
Treacle
Turbinado Sugar
Xylose

You could also add ‘Low Fat’ on the label.  Since fat is flavor, when you take out the fat, you also take out the flavor.  Sugar then gets added to make it palatable.

The sugar industry paid scientists in the 1960s to play down the link between sugar and heart disease and promote saturated fat as the culprit instead.

The internal sugar industry documents, recently discovered by a researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, and published in JAMA Internal Medicine, suggest that five decades of research into the role of nutrition and heart disease, including many of today’s dietary recommendations, may have been largely shaped by the sugar industry.

The documents show that a trade group called the Sugar Research Foundation, known today as the Sugar Association, paid three Harvard scientists the equivalent of about $50,000 in today’s dollars to publish a 1967 review of research on sugar, fat and heart disease. The studies used in the review were handpicked by the sugar group, and the article, which was published in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, minimized the link between sugar and heart health and cast aspersions on the role of saturated fat.

The Harvard scientists and the sugar executives with whom they collaborated are no longer alive. One of the scientists who was paid by the sugar industry was D. Mark Hegsted, who went on to become the head of nutrition at the United States Department of Agriculture, where in 1977 he helped draft the forerunner to the federal government’s dietary guidelines. Another was Dr. Fredrick J. Stare, the chairman of Harvard’s nutrition department.

When did the attack on fat really get heated?  The late 70’s.  Coincidence?

Where people get in trouble with eating a high fat diet is that they are usually pairing those high fat foods with high carb, starchy, non-fibrous foods.  Bacon and pancakes.  Cheeseburger and bun.  Steak and Texas toast.  Fish and chips.  Guacamole and tortillas.  You have permission to eat high fat foods but you have to be diligent with not pairing them with high carb, starchy, non-fibrous foods.

Permission to Skip Breakfast

Now you that you have permission to eat bacon and eggs, ditching your government recommended, dessert disguised cereal, muffin, and milk shake, let’s look at ditching your traditional breakfast consumption time all together.

Breakfast as the most important meal of the day?  It’s possible but I would argue it’s when you break your fast that is the bigger determining factor for your success that day.  You have permission to not eat before heading to work, dropping kids off at school, or hitting the gym.  Who has time for it anyway?

In fact, run on empty as long as you can.  Your body has better built in intelligence in an underfed state than an overfed state.  The biggest reason is that most traditional breakfast foods are just dessert in disguise.  So your daily routine of downing high energy foods (low fat ones probably) to rev you up to then go sit at a desk all day is counter productive.  You consumed a lot of energy to do absolutely nothing and by mid morning your energy is tanked.

Let me guess, you’re worried about starting the day tired and dragging even more because you haven’t had any calories.  Mitochondria are the power plants of our cells, where all the energy is produced (as ATP).  Here’s the dirty little secret about glucose (sugar).  When you look at the amount of garbage leftover in the mitochondria, it is actually less efficient to make ATP from glucose than it is to make ATP from ketone bodies.

So what the flip are ketones?  Ketones are substances that are made when the body breaks down fat for energy.  If you Google ketones, you will find everything from the fountain of youth to severe warnings that you’re going to die if detected in your urine.  The ironic thing is all the warnings come from diabetic sites that want you to eat low-fat all the time, one of the main reasons the diabetes developed in the first place.

[bctt tweet=”Your body has better built in intelligence in an underfed state than an overfed state.” username=”DrKurtDC”]

You already use this form of energy at night while you sleep.  Think of ketones as slow burning fuel.  It’s energy to optimize all your functions while you sleep but without the spike that keeps waking you up.  Since you’re going to sit at a desk most of the day, why not keep using these forms of energy?  And since you’re using fat as fuel and not sugar, guess what happens to your fuel-rich, midsection, spare tire?  You lose pressure in it, which is a good thing with this type of tire.

Permission to Ditch the Cardio

Unless you’re training for a distance race of some sort, I encourage you and give you repeated permission to ditch the cardio.  More often than not someone is doing cardio to burn calories.  By cardio, I’m referring to the person that has time to read a book, throw in ear buds, or channel surf while keeping a steady pace on a machine that only challenges them to stop after a lengthy built-in program.  As a result, that hopeful cardio enthusiast is sitting in front of me frustrated that they are eating a low fat breakfast (permission to skip it) and doing 45 minutes on a treadmill…every day, with no variation, confused why they don’t lose fat when they ‘burn all those calories.’

This is the cycle of exercise to burn calories not enhance health expression.  Most of these stored calories will come from the stored sugar in the liver and muscles, which hold onto about a day’s worth of energy.  You are proud of the calories your cardio machine said you burned and decide to refuel.  But instead of going for a high fat food (because you have been told it’s bad), you go for the low fat food, which is code for high sugar food.  All that energy you just burned out of your liver and muscles, gets redeposited back for future use and the stored energy around your butt, gut, and thighs never get touched.

That abdominal fat is not only aesthetically unwanted, it’s highly inflammatory.  It has the potential to create a hormone imbalance sh*t storm as aromatase enzyme has the potential to steal any testosterone and convert it to estrogen. As estrogen levels rise, your liver sends out the Sex Hormone Binding Globulin (SHBG) troops to escort it and make sure it doesn’t do any damage.  The problem is that SHBG is more attracted to thyroid and testosterone hormones, creating an imbalance and deficiency of those hormones that will help you recover and shape your body more efficiently.

I may start a new diagnosis called ‘Chronic Cardio Syndrome.’  Symptoms include: flabby belly, low libido, insulin resistance, forgetfulness, frequent urination, generalized pain, and morning fatigue.

How do you break ‘Chronic Cardio Syndrome?’  Stop exercising and start training. Train like your life depends on it.  If calories are fuel, what happens to your fuel tank when you repeatedly floor it versus coasting?  You burn more fuel.  Your training should be no different.  Go harder, faster, and stronger to burn more.

Think about it.  If you need to escape a real life threat, you’re not going to pace yourself away in hopes that you outlast the wild beast.  You’re going to sprint, climb, jump, push, and pull your way to safety.  The more you put your time in on that treadmill, elliptical, or step machine at a pace that you can maintain for 45 minutes, the more you are putting yourself in a state of stress.

Stress isn’t a bad thing.  The effects of stress happen to buy you enough time to escape that stress.  The problem with chronic cardio syndrome is that you are adding fuel to the twin turbo rocket flames you create every day of social pressure, family dynamics, work deadlines, and bills that are running late.  Ditch the drawn out cardio and get the same amount of work done in less time.  This means go faster, rest shorter, and push/pull/drag harder.

Try a TABATA, get to know Fran, Elizabeth, and Karen, and build some muscle.  You can be done with your workouts in less than 10 minutes and have vastly better outcomes in mental clarity, body composition, stress adaptation, and biomarkers.

Permission to Fire Your Doctor

Chances are if you tell your doctor you have ditched cardio, regularly skip breakfast, and eat a higher fat diet, they may fire you anyway.  The statement that always baffles me is that people sit in front of me telling me ‘their doctor doesn’t listen and only wants to prescribe drugs, but is a great doctor because he/she is nice.’  I’m glad your doctor is nice but your health is the single biggest predictor of quality of life.  If what they are recommending doesn’t have the outcome of improving your health expression, nice doesn’t matter.  You can be nice and totally incompetent.

Why does someone stay with their nice doctor that doesn’t do anything to help their health?  That doctor accepts insurance. The last question you should ask in regards to your choice to hire a doctor is if they accept insurance.  There’s a lot of doctors that accept insurance that can’t do squat to improve your health.  Even if that doctor does steer you towards better health practices, insurance doesn’t cover what makes you well.  Your attitude, sleep patterns, hydration levels, life purpose, food choices, and gym membership aren’t covered by your insurance.

There are 3 main unfeatures to not put your faith in your insurance coverage to make you live a better life.  The biggest one is that your insurance gladly covers the products and services that lead to the 3rd leading cause of death in the US.

You get the unfeature of stepping into a system, with mandated access by the federal government, of being the 3rd leading cause of death in our country, just from mistakes.  You get additional unfeatures of increasing your chance of death when you factor in the non-error deaths that occur from properly prescribed, properly diagnosed problems, increasing the death toll by an additional 128,000 people each year.

But wait, there’s more.

You may not die but your properly prescribed, insurance covered health care also sends 1.9 Million people to the hospital.  If it doesn’t send you to the hospital but you are there for another reason, 840,000 hospitalized peeps are given medications with serious side effects.  But no one cares because it’s all covered.  And when there is a mistake, the hospital can bill your insurance company to fix those mistakes. There’s no incentive at all to get your healthy.

The mentality is, “You can kill me but if I don’t have to pay for it, we won’t have a problem.”

Traditional healthcare has only one goal in mind, control the symptom.  You get a chemical to alter a symptom.  If your symptom can be altered with a certain chemical, regardless of your health outcomes, that treatment was successful.  Their best case outcome is to make you numb to the problem.  The end game objective for your doctor when taking care of chronic illness has to ALWAYS be better health expression.

Need someone with improved health expression as the outcome?  You know how to find me.