About Me
I have been following a low carb high fat way of eating better known as LCHF or Keto for more than three years now. Prior to that, it was simply low carb. Prior to that, it was the fast metabolism diet consisting of highly controlled portions and combinations of specific foods. Prior to that, my diet was very low calorie/low fat. Those all did the job, for a time, sort of…
I attended my first-ever low carb conferences earlier this year. I thought I knew everything, as I was already following the main principles of the diet lifestyle for the past two years. I am truly humbled. I have come away with an inspiration and new motivation inside me that is bursting to get out and move forward with my life. I will explain much of this later, but first, a little bit of history…
You see, I didn’t have the misfortune of growing up in a family that knew little about good food choices, or was an overweight, inactive child. I was raised in a large family by a fairly nutritionally savvy mother in the 1950s and 60s in southern California who not only taught me to cook, but helped me to understand why we ate the foods we did, including saurkraut and liver - thankfully not together! We would however, get treated to popcorn with real butter on a Saturday or Sunday night. But that was the exception, as we had an extremely tight food budget for a family of six which did not allow spending money for foods that were unnecessary extravagances, including desserts, candy, soda pop, etc. There were also occasions when avocados were on sale (I think they were 19 cents each) and my mom would make me an avocado sandwich for my school lunch – yum! Nevertheless, I felt left out because many of the other kids had the popular bagged snack foods such as Laura Scudder’s potato chips, Frito-Lay Fritos, cookies, and candy in their bagged lunches. It was seriously the forbidden fruit I wanted to eat, but simply didn’t have the money to buy that stuff. Little did I know at the time that this would prove to be nutritionally beneficial for me in the long run.
After school, sometimes we got really, really lucky when we would walk past a lone, abandoned farm house, with a driveway laden along the sides with mulberry and pomegranate bushes, and old walnut trees. In the late spring (school didn’t get out for the summer until mid-June), we would gorge ourselves on these delicious foods! Unfortunately, our stained purple socks would give us away. My mom, who couldn’t figure out why in the world our socks would be purple, realized we were eating mulberries, and got angry (rightly so) wondering first, why we didn’t keep our shoes on, and secondly why would we risk ruining our dinner. Who knows why we took them off, but I think it was because we loved to go without shoes – it just felt better. You see, it was not the norm to eat six times a day which is widely accepted as “healthy” now: breakfast, snack, lunch, snack, dinner, bedtime snack. We understood that if we wanted to get full, we had to eat during mealtimes only. Not a problem. Hungry or not, we never questioned that rule, except with the abandoned farmhouse bounty – that was simply too tempting for hungry kids after school.
One day after school I went to my third grade friend’s house. When my mom came to pick me she came into the house to meet my friend’s mother who happened to be preparing dinner for their family which consisted of a native dish from her country: Mexican food from scratch. The house was filled with the aroma of beef, tortillas and homemade refritos on the stove, with piles of cut-up tomatoes, lettuce, cheese and avocados. Intrigued with the idea of expanding our food palate, my mom asked what she making, and my friend’s mother spent the next hour or so teaching my mom the intricacies of this multi-layered process for homemade tacos and enchiladas.
By the time I was in college in the 1970s I was able to make many savory dishes, and in fact, when I met the man who was to become my husband, I made that very same Mexican dish for him: homemade enchiladas. He said it was at this point that he knew he was going to marry me because not only could I cook, but he had never tasted any of the dishes I prepared for him – especially the Mexican food dishes my mom learned that day at my friend’s house. His decision likely included other variables, but apparently the food was a big one;-)
I went on to have three healthy pregnancies and babies in the 1980s, who were thankfully and fortunately all breast fed. After my last child was born I had more than 60 pounds to lose. I lost weight after my two previous pregnancies with severe calorie restriction and lots of exercise, which was the dominate thinking of the time, and actually still is. Fortunately, I was an aerobics instructor before and after the first two, so it gave me the means and motivation to starve myself and limit my caloric intake so I could get into my leotard and not embarrass myself. But after my last child was born, from my perspective I had a serious weight problem as I had never gained that much weight before in my life! A new diet had just come out called Fit for Life by Harvey & Marilyn Diamond. Basically, you simply ate only fruit for breakfast, as much as you wanted, and food combined for lunch and dinner. For example, lunch or dinner could include any protein with a vegetable, or any starch with a vegetable, never combining a starch with a protein. The only fat used was butter. It was that simple, and it worked for me losing all 60 pounds, and for a quite a few years after that.
I went on to raise my own family in the 1980s and 90s with my roots and these same basic principles which included protein (meat, poultry, fish, eggs, dairy), veggies, fruit, whole grains, starches, vegetable oils & margarine (touted as healthy fats for baking and frying – not tallow, lard, butter or tropical oils – fats that were once used by my mom, chefs and bakers prior to 1980).
By the time my children were in school, their day now included snacking at school encouraged by the current thinking, because after all, it was thought that kids couldn’t get through the day without at least two snacks, including an after school snack once they got home. Parents were convinced that it wasn’t healthy to allow blood sugar levels to drop, so eating virtually non-stop was considered healthy. By the time my children were all in high school, there would often be another snack during homework, which meant that their insulin levels were continuously on overload due to the consumption of foods high in carbohydrates and frequency. Translation: they had a constant infusion of foods that metabolized as sugar, never allowing insulin levels to normalize. Thankfully, they were very active and athletic during those years, which aided in their eating frequency assisting the metabolism of all the food they ingested. But, knowing what I know now, I realize my kids were on a constant carbohydrate/sugar fueled roller coaster.
It was during my kids’ high school and college years (mid 90s – early 2000s) that I returned to teaching full time, and went on to complete my doctoral degree in education. Being a teacher, continuous education was part of my M.O., but to tackle another degree while working full time was a challenge. Trying to eat healthy, combining the Fit for Life protocol while eliminating most sweet processed foods, and limiting tempting carbs like pasta and bread (my weaknesses) was also a challenge, but one that I thought I was being successful at for most of this time period.
However, I had no idea the role cortisol played with hormones in terms of metabolism, but it’s pretty real. Cortisol is a hormone produced by the adrenal glands. It’s the fight or flight hormone. When feeling threatened, intimidated, scared (think being chased by a saber tooth tiger), and especially being sleep deprived, cortisol comes to the rescue shooting adrenalin through your body urging you to take action. The down side is it compromises the body’s ability to maintain weight, let alone lose weight because when the body feels threatened or deprived cortisol is an ancestral hormone (think caveman) that is going to conserve your body’s resources (stored fat) to survive. At age 50 with menopause on its way, this was my situation during the latter part of my teaching career. Add returning to grad school with a younger generation (can anyone say ‘feeling threatened’?) to work on a doctoral degree, no matter what I did to adjust the scale, it was a win/lose/lose battle. I was experiencing all of the emotions mentioned (threatened, intimidated, scared, sleep deprived) in spades. I was about 158 pounds, and my ideal weight for my height is about 130 - 140 (in my aerobic teaching days it was 121-125).
A couple of years into grad school my oldest daughter was to be married in May 2005. Digging my heals in, I signed up for one of those extreme low fat/low carb programs (which included powdered protein drinks and soups we were required to buy) determined to lose 20 pounds, and I had four months to do it. I’ll never forget it. It was January and I had until May to meet my goal. By April I was in an Advanced Research Principles course, and I had begun to experience hot flashes. Can anyone spell M-I-S-E-R-A-B-L-E? But when you know that this is your oldest daughter’s and family’s first wedding, I was going to make this work, and somehow I did. I waited until early May to begin looking for my mother of the bride dress because by that time I had reached my goal of 138 pounds, was a size 6-8, and I found the perfect dress for my daughter’s wedding - no tailoring required! On this extreme diet, while working, going to school, menopause arriving, and probably metabolically broken, I lost those 20 pounds! It took me exactly 5 months to begin gaining it all back, and more. Surprised?
By the time I was about to retire from teaching in 2013, I had regained those 20 pounds plus another 30! So now I was almost 190 pounds! Rather than do the starvation route (low fat/low carb), I returned to a method I used decades earlier before I had children: Atkins. It worked until I plateaued, losing almost 20 pounds settling to around 172. A year later I used yet another diet method, this time Haley Pomroy’s Fast Metabolism Diet, which involved eating certain foods in specific combinations on certain days of the week – and it eliminated wheat, corn, sugar, dairy and soy. It too worked for a time, and I lost 20 more pounds, exactly, getting to 152.
But by my second daughter’s wedding in August 2014, my weight had crept up to 160. I had to find another dress because I could no longer fit into my first mother of the bride dress, which was too bad for me because the color my daughter wanted was almost the same as the previous dress. Damn! And by my son’s wedding in December 2014 my weight climbed another five pounds, but at least another dress color was needed. By now I began to rationalize that that’s just the way it was going to be due to my age and compromised hormones taking their ‘natural’ course.
Another two years passed and by October 2016 my weight topped out (again) at almost 190 pounds. Ugh! Not being one to give up, and having the time to read to my heart’s content, it was around this time that I began to investigate how our body’s metabolically function with respect to weight gain and weight loss. After all, there had to be an answer out there to the burning question of how do we gain weight (beyond the standard message of move more, eat less). Is it really just calories in, calories out? Not.
That’s when I discovered Dr. Andreas Eenfeldt from Sweden and his Diet Doctor website. After more than a decade as a practicing physician he began dietdoctor.com creating research links, food guides, eating protocols, instructional videos, interviews with experts in the field, movie links, recipes and food lists to help people - all explaining the science of low carbohydrate/high fat way of eating. My world opened up! Pages and pages and pages of information with zero advertisements or food items for sale (snacks, protein powders, energy bars, etc., etc.) cluttering the pages. More importantly, I finally began to understand the role insulin plays in my body when I eat certain foods, and the power of utilizing ketones for energy.
Within months of following the recipes and intermittent fasting support on the DietDoctor website, I lost 30 pounds. Dr. Eenfeldt and the other experts on his website are now celebrities for me and many others in terms of the merits of their message and this eating lifestyle. Since then I have met many of the experts from his website who present at various low-carb conferences. Of note, they are all required to declare any conflicts of interest - something that is not routinely revealed from those with big pharma or big industry backing. Speaking of which, I have subsequently learned of the power of big pharma and the processed food industry in terms of how they don’t make profits unless the calories in/calorie out narrative remains the same, and we remain fat, sick and nearly dead. This ultimately led me to Professor Timothy Noakes’ (Lore of Running fame) Nutrition Network where I completed training as a Nutrition Network Advisor in 2019. If you would like to contact me for a consultation I can be reached at trchampion@comcast.net.
After adopting these changes to my daily life, my current health is amazing! My weight continues to come down slowly (especially with intermittent fasting protocols), but more importantly, I’ve experienced some significant non-scale victories (NSV) since incorporating more of an ancestral/paleo (aka keto/carnivore) foods lifestyle to the low carb idea. For example, all my lipid ratios are all in the ‘ideal’ category; visceral fat 4%; and I have significantly lowered my inflammation score (CRP); including smoother skin, sleep improvements, mental clarity and an overall sense of well-being. And thanks to the encouragement of Ivor Cummins and Dr. Jeffrey Gerber, I’ve also had a CAC (coronary artery calcium) scan and scored 0, meaning I do not have any calcification in my arteries which suggests a very low likelihood I will develop a heart attack in the near future.
Welcome to my world of discovery and awakening! Come along with me and discover how you too can change your health paradigm and ameliorate weight issues, diabetes, inflammation, chronic illness/cancer, aging issues, and mental/emotional issues, and restore yourself to the ancestral health humans were meant to enjoy!