(Mar. 9, 2024) — Many appreciate my openness to integrating new information into my personal health approach and what I teach. I am a perpetual learner and seek to constantly evolve my approach, so it is aligned with biological truth, even if I have to admit I was mistaken.
Along those lines, I only learned most of the information in this article earlier this year, and it has had a dramatic impact on how I view burning food for energy. This approach is dramatically different than I previously understood and recommended, which was focused on high-fat and low-carb consumption.
You might recall for the last few years I have warned that chronic low-carb eating is not a good idea, and that you need to cycle in and out of low carb. This was a great move in the right direction, but what I have recently learned is that it was not enough and that most people would benefit from far higher amounts of carbs.
When I first started keto, I was below 50 grams of carbs a day for about a year and then for the next five years increased to about 100 grams per day. For the past few months, I have increased that to 425 grams of carbs per day, mostly in the form of ripe fruit.
I have noticed dramatic beneficial changes in my blood work that I won’t go into now but will dive deep into in future articles. I will reveal that increasing my carbs by 400% resulted in a highly counterintuitive, 10% decrease in my fasting blood sugar, and that I also lost 10 pounds despite increasing the number of calories I was consuming — precisely the opposite of what most “experts” would predict.
This doesn’t mean you should stop what you are currently doing and switch, but if you have been struggling with keto and are unable to lose weight, it is likely that a high-fat diet is slowing down your metabolic rate, increasing your cortisol levels and contributing to an inability to achieve your ideal body weight.
My strong recommendation would be to not dismiss this concept as well-intentioned but seriously misguided nonsense, but to take the time needed to understand the solid science behind it.
The reason I switched to the higher carb, low-fat diet was due to learning the late Ray Peat’s work through his student Georgi Dinkov. Peat was a biologist and thyroid expert; Dinkov is a biohack expert. Since the beginning of the year I have been watching Georgi’s videos on YouTube for about two to three hours a day.
He has a thick Bulgarian accent and talks fast so you need to listen at 1X, although I typically watch his videos at least two to five times as it seems every time I relisten to them I learn something new or understand what he has to say in a new way.
Here is a chronologically sorted link to most of his past interviews.1 And wouldn’t you know it, he has not been censored by the globalists, so hundreds of hours are available for free on YouTube and it won’t cost you anything but your time to review.
However, please know that everyone is different and has a unique biochemistry, so your dietary program would have to be customized and fine-tuned for you. Many of the principles are universal and can be widely adopted, though, so If properly done I am convinced that most will notice profound improvement in their metabolic rate, mitochondrial function and energy levels, along with a reduction in inflammation.
Well, that is just not true. While cortisol certainly contributes to glucose balance, its primary purpose is to raise your blood sugar when it is too low and you don’t have enough glycogen reserves in your liver.
How Does Cortisol Work?
But just how does cortisol increase your blood sugar? It does it by breaking down your muscles, bones and brain. It sacrifices your lean muscle mass to release amino acids that your liver converts to glucose in a process called gluconeogenesis.
So, ultimately, cortisol also is going to increase inflammation and impair your immune function. And it increases food cravings. So, you do not want your cortisol to be elevated. For a long time, I was a proponent of a low-carb diet, but now I realize that chronic low-carb is not a good idea.
As a fuel, glucose is vastly superior to fat, and this was something I simply got wrong. The same thing goes for fasting. Both low-carb and fasting are great interventions in the short-term for those who are overweight and metabolically inflexible.
However, once you’ve regained your metabolic flexibility, it is important to revise your strategy and add healthy carbs back in, or these strategies will backfire and lead to decreased metabolic health, compromised mitochondrial function and impaired metabolism.
Cortisol happens to be the primary aging hormone. If it is chronically elevated, you simply will die prematurely as it is highly catabolic, meaning it will break down your body tissues. To stay healthy as you age you need to be anabolic and build healthy tissues like muscle and mitochondria.
Elevated cortisol will seriously impair those efforts. So, it is clear that you need to be doing everything you can to keep your cortisol levels and chronic inflammation low.
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The Paradox of Simple Versus Complex Carbs
Since I recorded the video above, it has become clear to me why there is a problem with the seemingly paradoxical conclusion that simple carbs are better than complex carbs for most people. I did not understand this when I recorded the video.
I have since determined that this is a result of most people eating large amounts of metabolic poisons like linoleic acid (LA) their entire life, in addition to regular estrogen exposure in the form of plastics which are xenoestrogens. As a result of these exposures, they have dramatically altered the composition of their microbiomes.
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