Two years ago I decided to make a change in my health. I didn’t have any scary reasons to do so, those would come later. I just looked down at the scale the day after Xmas 2018 and said enough. I was fed up. I was the proverbial frog being boiled from a low starting temp. 1/

I didn’t have a goal in mind, I just wanted to be better than 260#. I joined an online men’s health group developed by @Thirdwayman. I think this sort of accountability step is crucial to making changes as large as I eventually did. Paleo diet and daily workouts with a tribe. 2/

Then scary things started coming. I went to a dermatologist because I had a persistent rash that looked like ringworm. Turned out be granuloma annulare, an autoimmune condition associated with diabetes. He suggested I read The Plant Paradox, a book that really opened my eyes. 3/

Although I disagree with many of the conclusions Dr. Gundry reaches, there are some first principles concepts that were very important to take away. #1 is that plants are not benign food items. Almost all of them contain some sort of chemical defense against being eaten. 4/

These poisons are often concentrated in defense of the reproductive cycle, and have probably evolved to help ward of insects. Certain seeds, fruits and roots contain more of these poisons. Eating these foods indiscriminately induces a chronic low-dose poisoning of your body. 5/

Some of the worst offenders are pulses (soy, peanut, beans, peas), nightshades (tomatoes, potatoes, peppers except black pepper), grass seeds (wheat, corn) and flower seeds (sunflower, safflower, canola). Unfortunately these are extremely common in the modern SAD diet. 6/

Many of these are made into oils that are the foundation of the modern packaged and fast food businesses. Even most sit down restaurants qualify as “fast food” in this regard. Anything fried from a restaurant is almost certainly made with one of these oils, and the sauces too. 7/

The single biggest thing you can do to improve your health is eliminate these oils from your diet. Easier said than done, just try looking at the ingredients list on your favorite packaged food items. Almost every salad dressing available is essentially flavored soybean oil. 8/

Replace these with animal fats and oils from fatty fruits. Use butter, tallow, lard, coconut, avocado, and olive oils instead. Olive oil is barely acceptable and should be your minimum standard. Even here, you should limit liquid oils and use ones that are solid at room temp. 9/

Despite the big ag programming, the majority of your fat intake should be saturated fat, not unsaturated, which are solid. The vast majority of mammalian biology is based on protein and lipids (fats), and the majority of the lipids are straight chain saturated fats. 10/

A small amount of unsat fat in your cell walls allows for greater pliability, but in all the ratio is actually pretty small. Even most sat fat sources, eg beef fat, contain some unsat fat, enough for most people. The more unsaturated a fat source, the less healthy it is. 11/

So now we know that plants can be your biggest enemy, especially seed oils. So should you never eat another plant and go strictly carnivore? Many people do actually, but I don’t believe it’s necessary except in some case of extreme allergy. 12/

Ok, done with that section so now time for an @adamscrabble style interlude, how cute are these dogs? Our two left and bottom, the neighbor’s on the right. Kudos to her for the patience to get a shot like this. 13/

On to the 2nd most important topic: carbs. There’s a wealth of information on this topic, and some of the best research can be found here on Twitter. It is important to note that for proto-man, sugars were a very seasonal food source, becoming abundant only in the fall. 14/

Carbs trigger insulin, which pushes glucose to cells quickly, giving a burst of “energy”. This has led many to believe that carbs are our bodies “preferred energy source”. This is incorrect. Similar to alcohol, your body is burning it as fast as possible to get rid of it. 15/

A lot of sugar intake becomes glucose, but as much or more is converted by the liver into triglycerides. Trigs are a fat, your body’s actual preferred energy source. Your liver works as hard as it can, but with a high sugar intake you get both high glucose and high trigs. 16/

Sugars pack a lot of energy, so often the body will be in a state of excess total energy. This is being labeled energy toxicity in many circles. Insulin acts to push the excess trigs into fat storage cells (adipocytes) while your cells burn the glucose. 17/

If you eat fat together w/ sugar, your body is really stuck. Your liver is working overtime to convert sugar into trigs, but there’s already abundant fat energy. The two together are a fat creation machine. Think about that the next time you put butter & jelly on a biscuit. 18/

A curious thing I discovered recently is that fructose is the most damaging of all the sugars. Metabolically it has 7 times the impact on your liver as sucrose (table sugar). Of course, fructose has become as ubiquitous as seed oils in our modern diet. /19

The reason for this harkens back to proto-man and seasonal availability. Fruit sugars are only widely available in the fall, right before the great famine of coming winter. Fructose in quantity tells your body it’s time to store up for lean times and missed meals. HT @wellboy 20/

Think of a typical modern fast food meal. A sandwich with high-carb bread, mayonnaise made with soybean oil, ketchup made with high-fructose corn syrup, and potatoes deep fried in corn or peanut oil, washed down with more high-fructose corn syrup cola. Recipe for obesity. 21/

So what should you be eating? Well, a good rule of thumb is to stick to the outer walls of the grocery store and avoid everything on the aisles to the degree possible. Anything with more than 4 ingredients on the label should be highly suspect. 22/

Our bodies are designed for protein, and this should be the highest priority. Eat all the meat, seafood, eggs and cheese you want, no limits. Plant proteins should be eaten sparingly, and limited to hard-shell nuts like pecans, walnuts, macadamias, and almonds. 23/

You should eat only the most benign green vegetables and complex carbs you can find, in very limited portions. No grains or pulses. And cook the hell out of them. Cooking can break down the plant toxins, but it can take a lot of time. A pressure cooker is ideal. 24/

Cruciferous vegs (broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower) are your go to, spinach, asparagus, carrots & yams occasionally as treats. Kale is terrible & should be avoided. Don’t worry about salt, have as much as you want within reason, it’s insulin that causes hypertension not salt. 25/

Another interlude, that gold/silver ratio is looking to make a fresh low. Got silver?

Back to my storyline: after going on a paleo diet and daily exercise with the group, I lost 8.5 pounds in the first week. All I felt was Hallelujah! As I would come to learn, this is mostly water weight, and actual fat loss was quite a bit less. Still, it felt wonderful. 26/

Actually, I have to call bullshit on myself. I felt bad. Water had been held in my body due to chronic inflammation, and was acting as a pressure cast on a lot of aches and pains. Also, you piss away a lot of salt with the water nd end up very dehydrated, aka the "keto flu". 27/

All of this gets better with time and adjustment, and lots of water and electrolytes. More on them later. After switching to a better diet and doing some exercise, I was losing about 2 pounds a week for the next 8 weeks. Down from 260 to about 235. 28/

Not long after I stumbled upon @Mangan150, and his book Dumping Iron. I highly recommend it, especially for men. As a chemical engineer the concepts made a lot of sense. In a nutshell, iron is very chemically reactive metal, one of the most potent in the human body. 29/

This makes it very useful for transporting oxygen to cells, but it has to be tightly controlled. Free radical iron is an oxidation wrecking ball. Your body stores the excess iron in the body, more than what's needed immediately in hemoglobin, in a protein call ferritin. 30/

Think of this as more of a cage than a sealed ziploc. There's a tiger in the cage, anything that gets too close is liable to get some claws. A blood test for ferritin can quickly tell you how much excess iron you have. This is the important point: too much is VERY HARMFUL! 31/

Many chronic diseases are associated with high iron, including cancer, hypertension, cardiovascular disease, Parkinson's, etc. Unfortunately, these hit men more than women. High ferritin levels also tend to affect men more than women, because it's a mass balance problem. 32/

The body holds on to iron with a tight fist in case it's needed to replace blood loss. Women have that blood loss on a regular schedule, while men do not, so men tend to accumulate. My ferritin is was very elevated. Fortunately this is easy to treat, just give blood. 33/

The ferritin test costs $29 and takes 10 minutes for the blood draw, you can order it yourself along with a host of other tests. I use http://requestatest.com  to schedule mine. 34/

Scary Reason #2. My ferritin was 343, with an optimal level between 80-120. Wut? Associated with CVD, diabeetus and high BP..wut? Wasn’t I supposed to make sure I got enough iron? Nobody ever said too much was a thing. I decided I needed to look into health stuff some more. 35/