Wednesday, May 22, 2019

Retrospective #96: The Pregnant Bachelor’s Diet

Do you have a big, hard, high beer belly? Or have been told that you are “Pre-diabetic” or have “high cholesterol” or “elevated blood pressure”? And do you need to take a pill or a cocktail of pills for these conditions”? If yes, then this diet will work for you. By the way, when your doctor says you are “Pre-diabetic,” he is just following a misguided protocol that has become the “Standard of Practice” today. You are, essentially, already a Type 2.
What he should be telling you is that you are (i.e., have already become), to a lesser or greater (probably greater) degree, carbohydrate intolerant. That means that, through a progressive worsening over many years, you have developed Insulin Resistance. Your cells no longer quickly “take up” the circulating glucose from all the processed carbs that you have been eating on the ill-advised, medically-prescribed low-fat, thus high-carbohydrate, diet. As a consequence, you now have either impaired fasting glucose (IFG) or worse, impaired glucose tolerance (IGT).
Although your doctor is not likely to test for it, you also probably have high circulating insulin, which means you will have difficulty losing weight even on a “starvation” diet. Because of a high circulating level of insulin in your blood, you will be hungry all the time and likely will quickly gain back any weight you do manage to lose.
In addition, as you ate the diet you were told to eat, you probably will have also acquired elevated triglycerides, low HDL, “high (total and LDL) cholesterol,” and hypertension (high blood pressure). And omental adiposity or “truncal obesity” (the beer belly or “pregnant” look in middle-aged and older males) All these things are actually part of a common condition known as Metabolic Syndrome. I’ll bet your doctor has never told you that either.
In order to lose weight, you need to eliminate most of the carbs from your diet, especially the processed carbs. This will drop your insulin levels. When insulin levels drop enough, your body gets the message, through hormonal signaling, that your body fat is needed for energy, and it will burn its own fat reserves for fuel.
All carbs eventually digest into simple sugars (glucose, etc), and so, as long as glucose is available to burn, insulin will block those fat reserves from breaking down and being used. When insulin levels drop, you burn your fat. It’s a beautifully regulated system that maintains energy balance, so long as we allow it to work as designed.
But if we eat too many carbs to avoid those terrible saturated fats and dietary cholesterol, as we’ve all been told to do, then, for many of us who are pre-disposed and susceptible to this metabolic disregulation, the system breaks down. We get fat, “Pre-diabetic,” and develop high blood pressure and a disregulated lipid (cholesterol) profile.
Pre-diabetic is in quotes because the medical establishment is hopelessly behind in recognizing Type 2 diabetes. It is only in the last decade that it has recommended the routine use of the A1c test to obtain an estimated measure of your 24/7 blood sugar over about 3 months. And they set the standard for diagnosis at 6.5% for Type 2 diabetes, and 5.7% % for Pre-diabetes, but they set the goal for treatment to an A1c of 7.0%. Apparently, they don’t think they (or you) can do better than that – following their low-fat, high-carb eating plan.
Ralph DeFronzo, M.D., winner of the Banting Award and keynote speaker at the American Diabetes Association 2008 meeting in San Francisco, said, “In summary, individuals with IGT [impaired glucose tolerance] are maximally or near-maximally insulin resistant, they have lost 80% of their β-cell function. By both pathophysiological and clinical standpoints, these pre-diabetic individuals with IGT should be considered to have Type 2 diabetes.”
The Pregnant Bachelor Diet, for Pre-Diabetics or full-blown Type 2s, is simple:
·         Breakfast: 2 fried eggs, 2 strips of bacon and a cup of coffee with full cream and a non-nutritive sweetener.
·         Lunch: just protein and fat. NOT a salad. I like kippered herring, or sardines, or roast beef or ham slices.
·         Supper: a portion of protein and a serving of low-carb vegetables, tossed in butter or roasted in olive oil.
The point is: To get your doctor off your back, improve all your risk factors for heart disease, stroke, etc., and lose your Pregnant Bachelor’s Beer Belly, eat Very Low Carb. But don’t tell him how you did it. He’ll have a heart attack!

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