The Return to Keto: Part 2

In this post I’ll detail my experience of slowly realigning my eating patterns over the last 8-10 years and the key influences on that process. This has by no means been a seamless transition. There have been many ups and downs, fits and starts, and different experiences along the way. As a result, the narrative is not exactly chronological, but does move in a linear fashion as my understanding of these things has improved, followed slowly and choppily by my body and my habits (will/action). I’m hesitant to put it this way because it makes the change sound overly mental/rational; my experience however has been that it is only once the body follows with habituation that the rational/thinking dimension permanently dials in. I think there is something about self-directed neuroplasticity going on here, but I'm not that kind of doctor.

But this is how it works with every area of virtue or human practice that’s valuable and worth pursuing. We want to pursue our own happiness - we’re wired for it. The problem is that we settle for things that make us happy in the short term. The quick fix. The buzz. Doing what feels good. But as everyone knows, those things don’t add up to flourishing or “the good life” in the long term. And how we eat, as something that’s fundamental to human experience, has everything to do with the ends and goods of what it means to be human. What are we pursuing?

So all this fits the Yoke, and is an essential part of what I teach my kids in The Young Loverin's Illustrated Primer. The problem is, I have not always modeled this well (see Part 1). So the journey of eating that we’re all on is just that - a journey to a foreign land that hopefully looks more like health, wellness, and freedom than sickness and enslavement to our passions (egged on by the food and marketing industries). Before going further, it’s probably important to say that I’m not THAT kind of doctor either (MD or nutritionist), and so I am not giving you, personally, medical or nutritional advice. However, there is a larger cultural backdrop that we all share, and maybe you’ll find my personal experience and general comments helpful on your journey.

Maybe around 2008 or 2009, my wife was in a book club that read The Omnivore’s Dilemma, by food journalist Michael Pollan. I’ll confess, I didn’t read this whole book (it’s massive), but I did read the first part, titled “Industrial Corn'' which is all about the way this grass has taken over the food systems of the West, the final product being the fast food meal. I was fascinated. From the multitude of corn products to the high-fructose corn syrup in soda (and just about every other processed food), it was like a veil being lifted from my eyes to see what was happening with food. Michelle and I began our transition away from drinking soda (at least, HFCS sodas), and at least questioning our reliance on/engagement with fast food.

Shortly after that, I came across the documentary Food, Inc., which featured Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser (author of the much earlier, 2001, Fast Food Nation). This film did even more to expose the dark side of industrial farming, not so much industrial corn as industrial meat/poultry and its dangers. I showed this film to my college classes at every opportunity, because it depicted so clearly the dynamics in play between fast food, cheap food, industrial food, the political establishment and all of the ethical entailments involved. It also ends on a hopeful note, with Joel Salatin of Polyface Farms (a genius, and personal hero of mine) describing how a clean, sustainable farming/food enterprise could work in the 21st century. Even though it was expensive, it seemed like eating clean food was possible, and maybe even worth the cost.

Sometime around 2013, Michelle was on a trip somewhere and I can distinctly remember staying up late, sitting on the couch, and gorging myself. Not on food - but on Greg Glassman’s original CrossFit articles from 2002-2005, especially “What is Fitness?” Now, Glassman has since become persona non grata in CrossFit circles, and probably everywhere else - but this does not invalidate his ideas, or a fitness methodology that has completely revolutionized the way the culture thinks about exercise, fitness, and nutrition. I would even venture to say that Glassman’s prescription on nutrition (through the influence of CrossFit) has done more to catalyze a healthy eating revolution in America than any other single factor. Here is the first two sentences of the CrossFit definition of world-class fitness:

“Eat meat and vegetables, nuts and seeds, some fruit, little starch, and no sugar. Keep input to levels that will support exercise, but not body fat.”

Notice that this prescription is the inverse of the USDA Food Pyramid that we all grew up on, and relative opposite of the myplate.gov that has since taken its place. Today, the CrossFit eating philosophy gets constructively applied through Barry Sears’ Zone Diet, which is notoriously difficult to follow, and took me years to grasp. Even when I understood it (I think) and did it with medium success, I didn’t enjoy it. The result (for me at least). was a high rate of non-compliance and then backsliding into carbohydrate addiction.

What I took from this was that the CrossFit prescription was right in terms of the quality/kind of food to eat, but overly stringent when it came to quantity; you really only have time to eat this way if you’re a professional athlete, and/or have someone to prepare your food for you (I’m talking to you, Mat Fraser).

Moving forward into the years around 2015-16, experimenting with a Paleo diet was also medium-successful. The whole idea with Paleo (stay with me) is that agriculture is a relatively new development in the long evolutionary history of human beings. Before the advent of agriculture, humans were hunter-gatherers, and so the “best” diet biologically speaking is one that mirrors that of our prehistoric ancestors. Regardless of whether you buy into the Paleo story, one thing that is clear is that our pre-modern (pre-19th Century, let’s say) progenitors did not have diets rich in refined sugar, carbohydrate, and corn-based sweeteners/food additives. This makes the Paleo diet stand out from other prescriptions as one that specifically restricts the foods that are the most addictive to our bodies and brains: candy, soda, sweet breads, chips, pizza, ice cream, and of course, cereal. Sugar, salt, and fat are very rare in nature, and when we as humans find them, we tend to consume them in copious amounts. There’s a reason the Bible talks about the Promised Land as “a land flowing with milk and honey,” and a reason why there are even proverbs about not eating too much sugar (Pr. 25:16).

So there were lots of ups and downs when it came to moving toward Paleo and/or clean, organic, local, or sustainably raised food. Every few weeks or months I would be back to cereal, pizza, ice cream, and rice/pasta, and stay there for a long stretch. It’s not even than any of these foods were bad in themselves, it was the addiction to the mouth feel and satiety feeling that comes from over-indulging them (and the resultant insulin resistance and weight gain that went along with it).

It was probably 2016-17 when I came across a Tim Ferris podcast with Dr. Dom D’Agostino, who practices and prescribes a ketogenic diet. I began to learn about blood ketones and how they work to produce energy for the brain and other vital organs when the body is in a fasted state. D’Agostino is famous for deadlifting 500 pounds for 10 reps after a 7 day fast...so I knew this could be possible. This almost superhuman diet prescription also dovetailed with the work Dr. Robert Lustig, a pediatric endocrinologist who works with obese children in Berkeley, CA. Lustig is featured in the documentary “Sugar Coated,” which is primarily about the sugar industry and its marketing to children. By putting children with Type 2 diabetes onto a high-fat, low carbohydrate (HFLC) diet, Lustig was able to reverse/eliminate diabetes in his patients. Flash forward to today: the evidence is clear that you can do this for yourself (with the guidance of your physician, of course).

For me, this harked all the way back to Food Inc. and Michael Pollan, exposing what I had experienced in my 40 years of life: the marketing of sugar to children, an addiction that forms through childhood and carries through adolescence and on into adulthood. Ferris, Agostino, and Lustig were helping the picture of nutrition and metabolic disease, come into focus for me. The picture that was emerging, like a Magic Eye puzzle of the 1990s, was that sugar and refined carbohydrate (flour, bread, corn, etc.) were the primary cause of metabolic disease, including my heart disease and pre-diabetic state my doctor mentioned at the time of my heart attack. Researchers in this field are even pointing to cancer as a metabolic disease, based not just in our genetics or exposure to toxic chemicals in our environment (the usual suspects), but to sugar as the key factor in our environment leading to these diseases.

The last piece of the puzzle: my mom died of non-small-cell lung cancer in September of 2020. Although my dad smoked until I was about 10 (so 1986), she was not a smoker, and was not exposed to toxic chemicals throughout her life any more than the average person. She did, however, consume copious amounts of carbohydrate, including a lot of sugar, candy, bread, and snack food. Ironically, when she stopped her cancer treatment (chemo) in the Spring of 2019, I had her listen to the second Tim Ferris podcast with Dom D’Agostino, talking about cancer as a metabolic disease and how to treat it with fasting and a ketogenic diet. The basic concept is that sugar feeds cancer growth, and that by cutting off sugar to the body, you starve cancer and dramatically reduce its rate of growth. But she stopped listening about 40 minutes in, and wasn’t interested in that kind of life change so close to the end of her life.

For the rest of us who, hopefully, still have many years before us I wonder: do we want those years to years of obesity, discomfort, or even metabolic disease (diabetes, heart disease, cancer) that shortens the time we have to spend with loved ones, with children and grandchildren? Certainly some people will not want to give up on the way they eat in order to gain a few years of life, or what is in their estimation only a marginally better quality of life. And I’m not saying that this way of eating will guarantee a longer life - but what we do know is that eating the opposite way (the Standard American Diet) almost certainly will shorten your life.

When I had my heart attack at 30 years of age, my one prayer was that I would live/survive long enough to walk my daughter down the aisle. She was 6 months old at the time, and is 14 now. So we’re maybe half way there, haha. But in those intervening years, it turns out my wife and I had more kids, and I want to see them grown too, and married, and with children of their own. Point is, life is good, and we want to keep on living it, and living it in the best possible way that leads to the greatest flourishing for everyone.

Thanks for hanging in for this long post. In Part 3 I’ll talk about the last 2-3 years and how our patterns and lifestyle have really locked into a way of eating we feel is good and enjoyable and leads to this kind of flourishing. I’ll also talk about some questions that arise around ketogenic/low carb diets, including athletic performance, enjoyment of life around family/holidays/being social, and how we think about eating with our kids. See you then!