Hey, welcome, everyone, to the latest episode of Keto Chat. I am your host, Carole Freeman, founder of the Keto … Ah, I can’t remember what the name of my program is right now. Fast Track to Keto Success. I’m a certified nutritionist in Washington State, here. Today, I’m bringing a really amazing success story with keto. Michael Wood is here. He has a really unique perspective on nutrition, too. Background is gonna be really interesting for you guys to hear about.

So, Michael, will you just share, who are you? We had this discussion, we were when we turned it on, but …

Well, I’m a retired health and wellness consultant with a large national consulting firm, and I used to work with big self-insured companies in the tech space and hospitals, oil and gas, financial institutions, and would help them figure out their wellness strategies and what they would provide to their employees across the board from weight loss to smoking cessation, consumerism, how to be your own doctor sometimes, the whole gamut.

And I retired three years ago, and kind of hung out my shingle to work with the early stage companies and, at the same time I was having an eye problem, and I had a detached retina that was caused by a surgery that didn’t work. And so, same time I was talking to my dentist and he said, “Michael, you know, your gums bleed too much.”And I said, “Well, but I brush and I floss. “He says “Well, what’s your A1C? What’s your blood pressure?” You know. “What do you eat?”

Which is amazing, that a dentist is … Most doctors don’t even ask that, let alone a …

Right.

A dentist, yeah.

It’s amazing. There’s a dental practice in North Seattle here, and this periodontist has converted all the dentists in this large practice-

Amazing.

To be low carb. He says, “Well, read this book.” I said, “What book?” And he goes, “Gary Taubes, Good Calories, Bad Calories,” which is, you know, this thick.

Yeah, yeah.

But since I have training in public health and epidemiology, it was kinda like, I just ate it up and read it cover to cover, and just went, “Wow. Have I been doing this all wrong all my career?” And telling people to do the wrong things? So, I studied more and more, watched a lot of YouTubes, and then when I had my eye problem, it was kinda like, “You know, you don’t wanna have high blood sugar when you are trying to heal your eye.” And I had been gradually, I was an athlete and everything, and I gradually had been gaining weight over the years. My blood pressure crept up to 140 over 90, my A1C was 6.3, my dad was a diabetic, my sister’s a diabetic, so, I had metabolic syndrome.

Okay.

And so, finally when I had this eye problem, I decided, “Okay. That’s it.” And I went cold turkey on July 10th, 2014, I went entirely low carb.

Okay.

And I couldn’t exercise because of my eye condition at the time, so the first three weeks that I was on it, I lost ten pounds. Which just floored me.

Because you were athletic before, so you thought you had to exercise to lose weight. Right?

Yeah. Right. Yeah. And exercise is always a good thing, but it’s not required, especially in the early goings and when you’re eating low-carb. So, I lost ten pounds. Blew me away. I had tried cutting my portions, and I even talked to a coaching company that was provided through my employer, and they said, “Well, just eat more fruits and vegetables, and cut your portion sizes and use your fist to measure how big things are,” and all that kinda stuff.And I tried it, and nothing happened. And I was 212 pounds.

Okay.

At the time. And so, in that first month or so, I went from 212 to 202, and I couldn’t believe it. Now it’s four years later. My A1C dropped from 6.3 to 5.7. My triglycerides dropped from about 300 to 179. Interestingly, my cholesterol, my total cholesterol, went from 279 to 250. And my reading on this is that half of people who go low-carb go up on their total cholesterol, and half the people go down, which means it’s probably irrelevant.

Yeah, yeah.

And then, my waist went down three inches, and more energy, had to buy new clothes and all that stuff. I’m down almost thirty pounds, after three and a half, nearly four years now, and it’s kinda like when people say, “Well, low-carb or Keto’s not sustainable,” I kinda go, “Well, it was for me.” And I’ve seen hundreds if not thousands of other examples out there of people who’ve been successful in low-carb way of life or lifestyle.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Were you following a low fat diet before, or roughly like that?

Yeah, kind of. I mean, I wasn’t, you know, rigid about it, but, yeah. I followed like everybody else, I followed the USDA guidelines, even Heart Association, and all this of you should eat low fat and drink skim milk.

Avoid red meat.

Avoid red meat, all that.

Just cut back on salt.

Yeah, all that kind of stuff.

Okay. Okay.

Then I read Gary Taubes, I read Nina Teicholz’s book, “The Big Fat Surprise.” Gary’s second book, “Why We Get Fat,” and his third book, The Case Against Sugar,” and David Ludwig’s on “Always Hungry” and dozens of lectures by the researchers in this field. It just was amazing to me that all of the USDA, Heart Association, Diabetes Association recommendations are not based on evidence, and weren’t based on evidence.

And you’re somebody who, that was your career, looking at that and making recommendations. What was that moment like when you realized, “Oh wait, these recommendations we’ve been making aren’t based in science?”

Well, it was kind of embarrassing and I kind of feel the same way as Tim Noakes. I feel like apologizing to my clients that gosh, I told you all these years of low-fat, whole grain goodness and all that stuff, and I was making the problem worse. So, I’m trying to right the wrong and now do some things to help spread the word that reducing carbohydrates and eating whole, unprocessed foods can make a huge difference in most people’s lives.

Was it an easy mental switch for you? Because I know a lot of people, especially people that have worked in the nutrition field in one way or another, when they’ve been touting this low-fat, whole grain thing for 30 or 40 years, even if they read Gary’s book or a mountain of research, that cognitive dissonance is really hard for them to wrap their brains around, it takes a lot to change somebody’s mind. So, was that a quick process for you or what was that like to-

Well, for me, fortunately it was a quick process.

Okay.

It was here’s 10 seminal studies or whatever, randomized trials and then all the epidemiological that Zoe Harcombe has uncovered about the inverse relationship between total cholesterol and life span. The higher your cholesterol the longer you live.

Yeah. Wait, say that again. Say that again.

The higher your cholesterol is, the longer you live.

That’s a big … Yeah, that’s another thing we’re working on unraveling right now. I think the low carb approach is going to be easier to swallow than the “don’t worry so much about your cholesterol.”

Well, the thing is that the reason low carb is also resisted is because it says it’s okay to eat saturated fats.

Right.

Because that produces satiation and you lose your appetite and you’re not hungry all the time, you’re not always hungry.

Yeah.

Like David Ludwig says. So, I think part of the difficulty that people have had is … So, if you go low carb that means you’re increasing your fat and your saturated fat intake. That’s a bad thing, that’s going to raise your cholesterol, that’s going to cause you to have a heart attack. None of which is true. The data just don’t bear that out. So, for me it was relatively easy, but I was trained as kind of a scientist and researcher and to follow the evidence. And when I saw the evidence was contrary to everything that I had read before, it was kind of like wow, that’s amazing. And I had my own n=1 experiment and found that it worked for me.

Yeah.

But I also empathize with people who learn about the low carb way of eating and then have trouble with it, because there’s all this dissonance, like you said. But wait, now I can eat cheese and I can drink full-fat cream in my coffee, and I can have a steak. You know? And I can put butter on my green beans, that’s all okay now? I don’t have to use margarine or any … It’s a hard switch when for 10, or 20, or 50 years you’ve been told the opposite.

Right.

That all that stuff is unhealthy. And then the other thing is the toxic food environment that we all live in where there’s sugar everywhere. You go to the office supply store and at the check out there’s sugar. You know?

Yeah.

And then 90% of all the groceries that we buy have added sugar in them. So, it’s hard and people are time pressed, and the temptation of convenience and quick and all that type of thing keeps a lot of people from cooking real food. And so it’s harder to get off of it for a lot of people, because of the way we do things. But interestingly, places like India, vegetarian, they have a high rate of diabetes than we do.

Yeah, yeah.

And it’s because they eat so much processed flour and sugar that it causes abdominal and liver fat accumulation, and they end up with diabetes.

Yeah, yeah. Well, and I’ve been listening to an audio book, “The End to Overeating” I think is what it’s called. I’ll link it below but talking about societal norms have changed as well, so kind of contrasting in parts of Europe, like France where you eat at mealtimes and that’s all. Whereas, he was saying the example of now we’re … And this has even happened in my lifetime that I can recognize that now it’s normal that people go into meetings and bring snacks with them, you know? And bring a drink and a Starbucks whatever sugar coffee or something. And that’s the norm is that you’re always eating and there’s always food available. And you go to meetings and people bring food, high-carb foods into meetings, and so it’s normal now that we eat all the time. And that we should be eating all the time.

I’ve taught classes in the past where it’s an eight hour class and the students, they’re eating the entire time because they gotta keep their blood sugar up. And so that’s dramatically changed. I remember when I was growing up, maybe it was like Kindergarten had a snack in the afternoon, but otherwise you didn’t eat all day long, and now you think about how cup holders are in cars for examples because you can’t go long without drinking something.

Right, no, that’s very true. If you think about us evolutionarily, for three million years we were hunter-gatherers and it’s just logical to me that it was kind of feast or famine. If you made a kill you got to eat well for a day or two and then you probably didn’t each much for another day or two.

Yeah, yeah.

And there was none of this eat every three hours pattern of how we evolved. And so, our bodies were evolved over three million years to be in this feast and famine mode, not to be eating every three or four hours and snacking on high sugar or high processed carbohydrate stuff, which was not available until about 10,000 years ago. And then just in the last 50, 60 years with the new guidelines, we went from low fat to … Or from higher fat to low fat replaced with sugar. So, there’s sugar in everything now, and so sugar in bread, sugar in your spaghetti sauce and so on, and carbohydrates have just skyrocketed in our consumption, and it’s a straight line correlation between carbohydrate intake and diabetes increase and obesity increase. And so, it only stands to reason that if we reduce the proportion of carbohydrates and processed foods that everybody will be better off.

Do you fear … Now, some people I know fear that we’re going to swing the pendulum too far, that we’re going to go from low fat to extreme high fat and that’s not going to be any better. What do you think of that?

Well, kind of one of my missions in my professional life is to find that sweet spot. My training is in public health and so I always have my public health hat on-

Double-curve, right?

What’s going to work for the mass majority of people?

Okay.

And I think what we need to focus on is reduce or restrict your carbohydrate intake, eat unprocessed whole real foods, and don’t worry about fat. Now, you shouldn’t necessarily have to supplement with fat if you’re just eating whole natural foods. If you’re eating a variety of types of fish, chicken, meats, and vegetables, above ground leafy vegetables, that’s not very radical or swinging the pendulum, that’s just natural whole foods.

So, I try to help people that I talk to about this understand that it’s not about eating 80 percent coconut oil, and it’s not about necessarily … I mean, there are people that do it, becoming full carnivore and just eating meat. There are some people that do that with success, but for 80 or 90 percent of the population I think if we’re just reasonable, restrict carbohydrates, eat green leafy vegetables, protein, and the fats that come with them naturally, don’t be afraid of having a little bit of butter and full-fat cream in your coffee, that everybody can have success.

Yeah. Well, and what you’re describing is probably around a 60, 65 percent fat diet is what you’re describing, the whole foods fat ends up being. It’s not the 90 percent … The Ketogenic diet has its basis in treating children with epilepsy and sometimes there is a place for that 90 percent fat, but like you’re describing, most of the population doesn’t need that extreme therapeutic ketogenic approach, but just a low carb approach works for most people.

And I think most people either can’t or don’t want to count food. It’s like with calorie counting. Calorie counting is futile. I just saw a study the other day in Britain where the men under-counted their calories by nearly 1,000 calories a day, and women maybe 800 or something like that. And all you need to be off by is 21 calories a day-

Like Gary points out in his book.

In order to gain 20 pounds in a decade.

Okay.

Nobody can be that accurate to 21 calories. I think the same with carbohydrates. I don’t “count” my carbohydrates, I just choose from a list of foods that I know are lower in carbohydrates, and so when I choose nuts, I choose pecans and macadamias over cashews, because cashews are higher in carbs. And I try to stay away from … I don’t eat grain by and large and I stay away from root vegetables and potatoes and things like that. So, I just naturally, I don’t have to count carbs, and I think probably 90 percent of people don’t want to count what they eat. They just want to eat and enjoy their food. And as long as you kind of stick to this list of here are the good foods and here are the ones that you should avoid, it all works out.

Yeah. What’s it been like, your family seeing you go through this? Have you converted some people along the way, friends and family?

Yeah. My immediate family, my daughter is largely low carb and so is my wife. My son lives in New York, I’m not quite sure what he’s doing.

Okay.

He’s thin, like I was when I was his age. I’ve got other relatives who are even diabetic, and they’re unable to change, and it’s one of my kind of questions is how do we deal with this issue of carbohydrate addiction?

Yeah, yeah.

Because most people … I was lucky, I’m probably in the one to five percent who can go cold turkey. Most people, they love bread, and they love potatoes. I have a really good friend who told me, he says, “I lost 100 pounds on a low carb diet 10 or 15 years ago, but I can’t not eat rice. I have to eat rice.” So, how do you break through that addiction? I had another friend who is a mountain climber and weightlifter, and he was eating two cups of quinoa a day. He thought he was virtuous.

Right? Because that’s protein rich.

It’s protein and it’s an ancient grain and all this. Well, when he stopped eating two cups of quinoa a day he dropped 15 pounds.

Oh wow.

But the whole idea of addiction, I think we’ve not done a very thorough job yet of addressing. It’s kind of like once we … Like with tobacco, once we recognized that tobacco was an addiction then we were able to develop strategies and tactics that helped people more effectively quit. I’m hoping we can do the same thing with low carb, is that most people are addicted. I was addicted to different things. I love bread, things like that, but now I just find pleasure in other foods.

Yeah, I was going to ask later about what your perspective on cheats and treats. Are there certain things that you really miss that are hard to resist, or has it been pretty easy? And then, do you ever allow yourself …

Yeah, I will have a small piece of cake, and a little ice cream at a birthday party, or like if I go to the movies and somebody else buys some popcorn I will have a few hand-fulls of popcorn, that type of thing. But, it’s what I do day in and day out that’s more important, it’s kind of over a 30 day or 60 day period, I’ve estimated I probably eat somewhere between 30 and 50 grams of carbs a day, at the most. I mean, there are some days when I’m under 20, when I know all I’ve eaten is meat and vegetables and eggs and cheese, I know I’m under 20.

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

So, I’m not rigid about it, and if I go out to dinner for a nice celebratory dinner and they bring some sourdough bread, I’ll slather a bunch of butter on and have a small piece of sourdough bread. I don’t treat it like poison.

Okay.

But I just can’t do that every meal, which most people do. Most people, if you look at a typical American breakfast it’s oatmeal or cereal, toast, even if it’s whole wheat which is just as bad as white, and orange juice. And it’s like blood sugar skyrocket, and so it’s more about what you do all day every day for a month or two at a time as opposed to, well you had a piece of cake, or you had a brownie, or you had a potato.

Yeah. Well, and people like you, and there’s a percentage of the population that can do that. I’ve found the longer that people stick with a low carb or keto approach, they end up with being able to dabble in that once in a while and not spiral out of control, whereas there’s still a lot of the people, like you were talking about, people with carbohydrate addiction, a lot of them that I work with, that’s a very slippery slope for them. They have a hard time ever controlling that. But, I have also found that people that historically that there was always that slippery slope where they could never have a little bit, if they stuck with keto long term enough, I’ve seen that they can start to experiment a little bit with noticing what works for them and what doesn’t. And they end up having kind of that gap, instead of like a compulsion, they actually can make choices. But it varies from person to person as you probably recognize that.

I have kind of gotten to the point where if I eat something with a lot of carbohydrate in it, sometimes I’ll kind of go, “That really wasn’t worth it.”

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, it doesn’t taste that good.

That’s a part of the learning, right? Like, I don’t like feeling like that anymore.

And you know, I haven’t had heartburn in three and a half years, and at one point I used to think about which pizza topping is giving me heartburn.

Okay. Okay. It wasn’t the topping.

It wasn’t the topping, it was the dough. Or like, if I would have my regular oatmeal breakfast, and let’s say it’s a Saturday or Sunday and I go sick and watch T.V. or read the paper and fall asleep again, often times is I’d wake up with a sour stomach.

Okay.

I couldn’t figure out what was going on. Now I know.

Now you don’t even need the nap afterwards, either.

No, and if i eat … My typically breakfast is some eggs, either fried or in an omelet, and some sort of breakfast meat, I never have an upset stomach. And I usually don’t eat lunch because of that. So, I’ve actually kind of taken to some intermittent fasting just naturally, not as a conscious strategy, but if I have a big breakfast I don’t feel like eating until maybe 3:00 or 4:00, and then often times what I’ll do is I’ll just eat a few pecans that I’ve roasted in ghee and salt, and have a few pecans and that tides me over till supper.

Yeah. Yeah.

Or, I’ll have supper and then I’ll skip breakfast and have breakfast at lunch.

Yeah, okay.

And I think that’s one of the ways that I broke through when I kind of hit a plateau of my weight, and was able to drop another seven, eight pounds by doing intermittent fasting.

Okay. Longer gaps of the insulin exposure, right?

Right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So, I think the whole idea of individualization is really important. I think that, and not everybody out there can do what I did or how I did it or how I’m doing it. Everybody has different degrees of addiction to different foods. Everybody has different schedules and family obligations, and budgets, and all that type of thing, so I think it needs to be personalized so the keto and low carb coaches that are out there, I think are beginning to understand that more and more, is that it’s not a one size fits all. But still the principles are the same, restrict your carbohydrates, don’t be afraid of fat. Eat adequate protein, and you’re not going to be as hungry and you’re going to lose weight, and you’re going to hopefully reverse your diabetes.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Let’s see. Oh man, I had more ideas, questions, but then I’m like listening so intently to what you’re saying.

I mentioned diabetes. There’s a couple of new companies, HEAL clinics and Virta Health I think are very exciting new companies that are reversing diabetes and helping people lose weight at the same time.

These are medically run clinics, right?

Right.

So, it’s not just some fringe person that’s doing this, this is-

Right. These are M.D. supervised weight loss and diabetes reversal, and if a person follows the regular American Diabetes Association diet and medications and all that stuff, nobody ever reverses their diabetes.

Right. Right.

They just maintain their blood sugar between six and seven or so, but they still end up with amputations and heart attacks and kidney failure.

Yeah.

Whereas this new approach is restricting carbohydrates and supporting people. People are getting off their insulin, they’re getting off their additional medications, these hugely expensive medications that you see on T.V. commercials all the time.

Yeah, yeah.

And they’re going to near zero medications, including off blood pressure mediation. It’s all medically supervised. Virta just published their results and I think they got a 60 percent success rate in their first year. HEAL Clinics has a track record-

60 percent of reversing diabetes, right?

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah, yeah. And the other 40 percent didn’t reverse diabetes because they couldn’t or wouldn’t or weren’t able to follow the recommended eating style.

It would be interesting then to look at the success rate of everyone who followed protocol. I imagine it’s like 95 percent.

It’s over 95 percent, because Eric Westman and his clinic at Duke has shown that over the last 10 years that if you stick with a diet, you’re 95 percent of the time going to be successful.

Yeah, 95 percent. If you follow the diet, 95 percent of people are reversing diabetes. There’s no medication. There was a joke at the conferences, if there was a pill that could do this-

It would be worth trillions.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. And so, ultimately what I understand Eric’s clinic has shown is that if you take 1,000 people go and enroll in his clinic, after two or three years about half of them are still on the diet and still off their medications or greatly reduced medications. So, if we had a pill-

Even that rate, right?

If we had a pill that 50 percent effective it would be a miracle.

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

But there’s all the money in the pharmaceuticals and big food and all that, that push keeping things as they are.

Well, let’s go down that path. With your training and experience in the past, what do you see happening over the next 40 or 50 years?

Well, I think as we recognize that we are over consuming simple carbohydrates, I think … If you think about the low fat movement, the low fat movement got started around 1970, ’71 with McGovern Commission. Here we are nearly 50 years later and everybody thinks low fat’s the way to go. Still.

Right, right. Exactly. Yeah.

So, I have hope that we can flip that and people will say low carb is the way to go, and then there’s evidence that’s documenting the impacts being positive. So, take smoking in the ’50s or ’60s, everybody smoked. It was everywhere, and nobody could understand why you would want to restrict it or anything like that. And here were are now, you know, who would have ever predicted that the Irish and the English would ban smoking from their bars and their pubs? Or the French from their restaurants? You just never believed that that could ever have happened.

So, I think and I’m hopeful, it’s going to take a while and hopefully it won’t take as long as it did for to tobacco to kind of be understood. Because we have the internet, free communication around the world. The ideas can be spread. The research can be done and disseminated, and hopefully it won’t take 10 years for the research papers to disseminate it, and will be put into practice like in the past, pre-internet days.

I can see that happening much more quickly, like you said too, because of the internet and things like that. And we’ve already got research that supports it. I remember when I was in school … So, we’re filming this in 2018, back in 2004 is when the A-Z diet study came out. I was in school, it was probably about, I would say 2009 or 2010, I’m in my micronutrients class with my professor and whatever project I’m doing. I pull up that study and find that A-Z study. So, it compared Adkins diet, what was it Ornish? And then Zone, it was basically like a low carb, a moderate carb, and a very low fat diet. It compared all those. And I think … Was there four or three?

Anyways, so across the board the Adkins diet had the greatest health improvements of all markers they looked at plus then at follow up, people could, even when they stopped the diet they were on in the study, the people that had followed Adkins diet kept the weight off the longest and retained the most health benefits from it. So, I remember showing my professor at that time, “Have you seen this study?” She says, “Yeah, it’s such a head-scratcher. We just don’t even understand why that came out like that.” So, the research has been there, but it’s been swept under the rug as an anomaly, like we don’t know why that happened. I think we do have research and I think that’s going to happen a lot sooner.

My fear though, is because the food manufacturers are already starting to jump on the bandwagon, my fear is that this all can be … We can lose the goodness of it if all of a sudden we just switch to highly processed, high fat, low carb, artificially sweetened foods that are full of pseudo food chemicals and things like that. Because people will overeat those, and if you’re over consuming calories and fats you’re still probably not going to get most of the health benefits that people are getting when they’re eating real whole foods, right? So, that’s my fear is that people are going to jump on the processed food bandwagon of keto or low carb, and not get many health benefits, and just say, “Well, that was another diet that didn’t work. So, that’s my fear.

I relate to that, and I see some of these keto friendly products coming out. Bars and drinks and shakes and exogenous ketone additives and all this thing, and that’s one of the things that I’ve kind of been trying to sort out. My wife said, “I thought you thought doing the bulletproof coffee was a good thing.” And I said, “Well, it’s not a bad thing necessarily, but it’s just mainly adding calories, empty calories at that.” Again, coming back to my public health hat, is restrict carbohydrates, eat whole unprocessed foods. So, I don’t buy the bars and the shakes. I don’t even make keto desserts. My dessert every night is one or two squares of 70-85 percent dark chocolate, and that’s enough to satisfy me with my coffee with heavy whipping cream.

So, I think we’ve got to get back to just eating real food and being a little bit more judicious or plan-full with our time. Some people like recipes, some people don’t. I’m not particularly into the recipe thing and trying to make the perfect keto bread, I just kind of eat the vegetables and the meat and the fish and the cheese and the eggs, and that’s fine for me. But for you, you might really get into keto brownies or whatever it is, but the whole idea of big food getting into this, it is concerning, and they’re going to do what sells not necessarily what’s healthful.

Right. Right. I do like the current trend that we’re seeing where the drink, the beverage companies are jumping on the bandwagon of unsweetened, flavored sparkling waters. We’ve got a lot of choices of that. I think that is a very safe route to go down. But as we start to get other foods and things like that, then …

One encouraging thing I learned at this low carb Breckinridge Conference last week, there’s a little hospital in West Virginia with like 50 beds or something. They’re the first hospital in the country to outlaw sodas and junk food in their vending machines.

That’s awesome. Yeah.

And so, that was really encouraging.

Yeah.

And amazing at the same time that hospitals still serve and provide junk food as a part of their meals. You have Cokes and orange juice Jell-O and all these things, and the vending machines are full of very sugary sweet things. It’s contributing to the bad health and obesity and diabetes of both the patients and their visitors, and the staff.

Yeah, yeah.

So, that was an encouraging sign. Hopefully there will be some other hospitals that follow suit.

All right. And I, on the same page as you … Whereas keto dessert is something I occasionally will make, not something I like to have every day. First of all, I don’t like they’re making me feel, because it still feels like empty calories. And then I don’t like the feeling of … Most the time I’m not hungry anymore, I’m not obsessed with food, I don’t even think about food. I like that freedom. And eating those things makes me … It calls out to me, like hey, there’s some leftover whatever in the fridge, you should go have some of that. And I don’t like that, food being in control of me. So, I only make those things occasionally. I’m like you, keep the food really simple, it’s really delicious. I eat, I’m satisfied, and then I can go on with the rest of my life and not be constantly thinking about food.

Which is a big change for me. Because I came from before of like gourmet … I wouldn’t say I’m a chef because I’m not working in restaurants, but home cook and teaching cooking classes and spending all day planning and preparing meals, and now it’s just so much … It’s so much more freedom. I just enjoy it so much more.

I do too. And I didn’t realize until I’d been eating low carb for quite some time how much I subconsciously viewed food as a reward as opposed to fuel. I kind of learned just from a fellow scuba diver on a boat I was with, this Russian guy. He’d just go get a plate full of stuff and eat it, and he says, “Food is just fuel.”

Yeah, yeah.

And I don’t go that far but that’s kind of the attitude I’ve taken, is I’ll enjoy it, it’s wonderful, there’s nothing better than a nice juice hamburger with some cheddar cheese on it, and a salad and some broccoli with some butter, it’s great, and it’s delicious and I love it, but I’m not thinking during the day, “Oh, I did that, so now I get a snack.” Or I really feel like a big sandwich or something like that for lunch. It just doesn’t even enter my mind anymore.

Or you’ve been so good on your diet for a few days you deserve a treat or something, right?

Right. Right. Yeah, that whole psychology has changed because I’ve lost my appetite, if you will. I’m usually only hungry twice a day. Not everybody can do that, but again, back to individualization, but if you eat a big breakfast, big monster breakfast, most people don’t need to eat lunch. Right? I mean, it’s only four hours away, and I’m still feeling full.

Yeah. It’s such a difference of … I was certainly there. If I went two hours without food before, I was just not doing well. I was always having to plan about where I was going to stop to eat, and bring food with me and all that kind of stuff. It’s just crazy.

That’s because you were eating high carb, right?

Yes. Yeah. Oh yeah.

Yeah eat some carbs … One thing, I used to eat oatmeal at 6:00, 7:00 in the morning, by 9:00 I’m starving.

Yeah, yeah.

And because I had this sugar bounce, and as healthy as oatmeal has been portrayed to be, it’s got a big glycemic load and then you crash, and then you’re hungry and you want to eat more carbs.

Yeah, yeah.

So, it’s a vicious circle.

Well, I’m wondering what work do you think needs to be done. Any different, whether it’s personal people watching, they healthcare community, whether it’s … I don’t know. What work do you see that needs to be done so that we can improve as many people’s lives as we can.

Well, I think one thing is that everybody can feel as though they have permission to do an n=1 experiment on themselves. Try it. Try it for a week or two, see what happens. If you’re really strict keto, the first two weeks you can have some side effects. Some people call it a keto headache. I never happened to have one. Some people have a little trouble with their regularity and all that, but once you get beyond that two weeks, people find that they feel better, they have more mental clarity, and in the first two weeks they often times lose a few pounds. First month, they’re usually losing more than that. So, just be okay … What’s dangerous about eating any vegetables, meat, fish, chicken. What’s dangerous about that?

I know it was so funny, because I’ve had parents that I work with and they’re like, “Oh, can my kids eat this way?” And I said, “Well, meat, and vegetables and a little butter. What about that would be dangerous for your kids to eat?” And they’re like, “Oh, okay. Yeah, that makes sense.”

Yeah. Right. So, do your own experiments. For those of you who are so inclined, there’s some now randomized controlled trials that have been published and you can find them on TheDietDoctor.com or I think even in Wikipedia, lists all the different randomized trials that show that low carb is superior to any other diets or ways of eating, for weight loss.

70 studies.

Right. I know, that’s controlled trials. And then when it comes to policy, if we can all support our schools, our hospitals, our public institutions to change and look at the evidence, and use the actual medical evidence that shows that if we reduce our carbohydrate intake and increase our use of whole foods, that we’ll all get better.

What would the schools will be like with healthy, low carb foods in the schools? Oh man.

Yeah, well for those of you who haven’t seen it, I encourage you to watch “Fed Up” which is a movie about school and nutrition and obesity in schools, and kids. It’s really sad in a way because these poor kids are exercising their butts off and still gaining weight. And you look at what they’re eating at lunch, it’s … This one girl who’s a swimmer, she just kind of shrugs and says, “I’ll have a hamburger and French fries,” and that’s just contributing to … It’s a vicious circle.

Yeah.

Because between the hamburger bun and the sugar in the ketchup, and the French fries with the vegetable oil, she’s just going backwards. If she just ate the meat and the cheese and had a salad, maybe even two patties, have at it, she’d probably start losing weight. And they just point out the interview over a variety of scientists in this, but that’s a nice … If you want to understand what the schools are doing, because they have sponsors and fast food companies that are in there, three and four and even five days a week. So, that’s I think another thing that you can do. And then read and watch videos. Read Nina Teicholz’s book. If you can read that-

A Big Fat Surprise.

A Big Fat Surprise. And if you can come out of that and think that eating a low fat diet’s healthier, I can’t imagine.

Yeah, yeah.

Or Gary Toubes new book, A Case Against Sugar, which he argues that if you ran the trial and put sugar on trial for being the cause of the diabetes and obesity epidemic, he thinks that it would be a conviction. It’s hard to prove, but there’s a preponderance of evidence, so read, watch some videos. You just go on YouTube and type in low carb or keto diet or whatever. Diet Doctor is a great website, too. So, I think just everybody if they could just kind of be open-minded about it, and try some things and support low carb wherever they can, I think that can help push things along.

Nice. Great. Well, anything else that you wanted to talk about, or wanted to share?

No, I think we’ve kind of covered the water front. My philosophy is make it work for you. Individualize, just broad guidelines of eat fewer carbs, eat real food, don’t be afraid of eating some fat, and stay away from vegetable oils.

Yeah, yeah. That’s a whole other health topic that has nothing to do with low carb or anything, but that’s a kind of an area that hopefully we can move to next as we get people healthier and healthier, right?

Yeah. There’s some evidence that vegetable oil increases in our diet in the last 50 years that have gone along with the carb increase maybe made it worse.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Great. Okay, so I have one closing question for you. The meteor’s coming to the planet today, we’re all going to get completely wiped out, what’s going to be your final meal?

Oh man. Probably a T-bone steak and a nice salad with blue cheese dressing, and probably some green beans with butter.

Okay. I love it, sounds delicious. Nice. All right. You have the rest the day to go enjoy the rest of the sight of the meteor coming.

Yeah.

Well, Michael, thank you so much for being here and sharing your story, and I think you really have an important perspective because of the work you’ve done in the past, and your own experience. That’s what I see universally is that when the doubters are out there and they just try it for themselves, that is what convinces everybody that, “I feel so great and so healthy.” Okay, let’s keep going with this. So, thank you so much for sharing your story with everybody.

Thanks for having me.

Yeah, so if you guys like this, give us a thumbs up. Subscribe to see more. We’ve got more great interviews coming at you. Thanks for watching, everyone. That’s all for now.