New Year: New You

2018 marks the third year Sherry and I have been low carb/high fat. We lost weight and got healthy through Whole30 and the Paleo Diet. We now eat clean food, made from scratch using whole ingredients, and our bodies have responded by losing weight and our blood chemistry getting back to normal. The improvements in how we feel and look, and in the number of opportunities we can now take advantage of are incredible. It’s all due to adopting a low carb/high fat diet that the human body is built for.

Look at old pictures from the ’40’s and earlier. The vast majority of people you will see in those photos are of slender build. It has nothing to do with starvation, famine, or lack of food. People had access to food, and ate regularly. It has nothing to do with life being harder, or people working more physically demanding jobs. It has to do with the food they ate.

When you look at cookbooks from the ’40’s or earlier, the ingredients are things like lard, butter, fat, meat, eggs, and vegetables. If wheat is used, it’s not enriched. Main dishes used wheat products sparingly, if ever. Our ancestors ate whole foods that were natural and what we would today consider organic. And their bodies were healthy.

Life expectancy was lower not because of the food they ate, but because things like the flu would (and did) kill millions of people at a time. Illnesses that we consider trivial today took lives by the thousands. Simple things like sterile surgical instruments weren’t common until 1916. People, on average, lived shorter lives because of medical advancements, not because of diet.

Look around you. Look at how many people around you are obese or overweight. It’s staggering when you open your eyes and really pay attention. What is causing this? It’s our diet of low fat and high carbs. All that bread and all those foods with sugar in them are killing us slowly. Type 2 Diabetes? It used to be called Adult Onset Diabetes until children started getting it. We now know it’s based on too much sugar in our diets that throws our system off.

It’s a new year. Make the decision to make a new you. Changing your diet isn’t easy, but it is simple, and you will be surprised with how many foods you love and enjoy can be made easily with a few changes to make them healthy, and how many of your favorite foods are already healthy and good for you (bacon, anyone?). Look up Whole30 and The Paleo Diet. Look up Ancestral Eating and Ketosis. Whatever your path, make this journey yours, and dedicate yourself to it.