Before I start I'd like to say that I'm not the kind of guy who's into selfies. However recently I was scrolling through old pictures and I found one. I stopped and smiled for a while. It reminded me exactly of the moment when and why I took that selfie and most importantly, who I was at that very moment. The selfie that you see in the left above is from 2016 and it captures "little me" from my university times, as I'd just decided to take a selfie hopig that the next one will be slightly better. It's been 4 years since and I knew right there that probably now's the time to take the next selfie. The result can be seen right aside. When I look at those selfies I see two different people who differ in at least two important aspects. Those are health and experience. What's important in this story is the thing that the selfies have in common in spite the striking differences. After almost four years of trials and errors now I know that on both pictures there is just an ordinary man, who hasn't lost the desire to ask questions and seek answers. How's that possible ? All that time he's been, still is and I hope will be the same optimist😊.
A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity, an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.
Winston Churchill
In order to paint a better picture, I will go even further to my past. Unlike my peers, as a child, I always had problems with being overweight, even though I still did some sport. Besides being overweight, I was a more or less healthy boy. My only health problems were perhaps "only" annual respiratory diseases. A fundamental change came in 2012, when I was diagnosed with the so-called IBD (inflammatory bowel disease). I was said that it was a chronic autoimmune disease. Non-specific intestinal inflammation that will be with me for the rest of my life. In this disease, as in any other chronic disease, doctors prescribe drugs to relieve symptoms. They do this when they describe the cause of the disease as idiopathic (unknown). In such cases our medical system is rather manager of the symptoms, because it can not pinpoint precisely what caused the disease (state). I remember to this day, how I asked the doctor if it would help to change my diet in eny way. The answer was quiet brief: "In your case, it has nothing to do with the diet, but of course it won't hurt if you eat healthy." Then I was given prescription medicine with the remark: "if it won't be enough we'll prescribe something stronger." I was 18 at the time and about to gradute high school. I couldn't believe that I'd be dependent on a regular supply of some drugs for the rest of my life. I knew I was sick, but at the same time I had no idea why. After all, even my doctor didn't know either. Fortunately the feeling of dispair and injustice quickly turned into curious search of any ways to help my situation. Our medical system had already provided everything it could and I realized then that if it wasn't enough for me, from that point I was on my own. I was an optimist. I simply believed that after series of many trials and errors, eventually I'd find the answer. It was clear to me that this search would not be a sprint but rather a marathon. This is usually the case when solving a seemingly unsolvable problem.
The magic pill
During my first Google searches, I came across discussion forums where people with the same diagnosis tried to solve their problem with various supplements. They reported smaller or larger victories with the addition of "miracle" aloe vera, a special type of fiber, or some enzyme or vitamin in the form of a pill. I also fell into this endless cycle of testing various supplements. It took about three years of experimenting with different supplements, until I realized that perhaps I was looking for the answer in the wrong place. It occurred to me that since even doctors do not have the answer in the form of some medicine, it would be difficult to find it in the form of some miraculous nutritional supplement. So I took a step back. I remembered the doctor's words that it wouldn't hurt to start eating healthy. Fortunately, I somehow dropped the part about the "fact" that the diet has nothing to do with my diagnosis.
The cleaning
Instead of adding "miracle" nutritional supplements, I began to focus on eliminating foods that I considered unhealthy. So I started with the most obvious. Sugar - a white crystalline substance that is often referred to as a highly addictive drug. Getting rid of sugar was really difficult, but the moment I started to limit it, I really felt my health started to improve and that I was going in the right direction. Next candidates were fast food and other processed food. I proceeded from the assumption that the quality of these foods and their composition will probably not be the most optimal. Still, fast food can't be compared to fresh homemade food. I admit that getting rid of fast food was also not an easy task, and it also took me quite a long time. As with restricting sugar consumption, I felt that things were moving in the right direction yet again. I dropped some pounds, but I still felt that my health was not where it could be. At that time, I perceived food only in terms of calories and weight loss or gaining weight only in terms of caloric intake versus expenditure. It was a popular concept on which all weight loss strategies (diets) were based. However, my problem was first and foremost health and not so much extra pounds, although today I know that these things are related.
Fasting & Keto
While studying different styles of diets, I came across one that was fundamentally different from the others. The book called Renegade diet by Jason Ferrugia was about a diet, the principle of which was intermittent fasting. While other diets monitored pure caloric intake and expenditure, this approach also took into account the time interval (so-called feeding window) when a person eats food. This concept immediately caught my eye and fundamentally changed my view on eating. In his study, I found that not all calories are equal, that is, that different foods have different physiological responses in the body, and that a condition where a person does not consume any calories (fasting) is as important as their intake. In essence, fasting led me to study the physiology of human metabolism. I began to wonder how the body actually gets energy from food (in terms of its composition of macronutrients), and I was also interested in what happens when we fast. I have found that, in principle, the human body can obtain energy from two sources. One is sugar (glucose), from which energy is obtained through the process of glycolysis. The other source of energy is fats (triglycerides), which are reduced to glycerol and free fatty acids by the process of lipolysis, and subsequently converted into energy by other metabolic processes. These processes are very delicately regulated by the human body through various hormones. Our body tries to maintain a state of homeostasis at all times - in the case of the physiology of human metabolism, it is the maintenance of a stable blood glucose level and energy supply. Trying to understand these processes and the hormones associated with them has led me to ketosis. The state in which the body uses as a source of energy the so-called ketones and free fatty acids (both obtained from fats and their stores). The ketogenic diet was originally used in the 1920s as a treatment for epileptic patients [1]. At that time, doctors achieved excellent clinical results with this style of diet as well as fasting. About two or three years ago, this style of eating became popular again in the world of fitness. Judging from my selfie from 2016, it probably won't surprise anyone that the concept of burning fat as the main source of energy immediately caught my eye. I certainly had more fat at disposal than was needed. As the predominant part of the standard diet is carbohydrates, the metabolism tends to be very inflexible (the ability to use fat efficiently is attenuated due to the constant production of insulin due to carbohydrate intake). The process of said lipolysis is slower and more complex and the body naturally prefers glucose as a source of energy [2]. So it took some time for my body to "learn" again to use the fat. Getting used to fasting definitely helped, because in a relatively short time (about 2 months) I started to get rid of excess bodyweight at a relatively high pace. My shape was getting started to look more and more like what is captured on the introductory second selfie. And it wasn't just about looks. Hand in hand with it, my health also improved. I finally began to feel that the symptoms of my illness started to be under control. Despite the results, I still felt that I am not at the finish line. I was still reliant on medications that my doctor prescribed regularly.
Antinutrients & Carnivore
It was around 2018 when I stumbled upon Joe Rogan's podcast with a very interesting guest. Dr. Shawn Baker is a 50-year-old who favors an animal based diet exclusively, which keeps him in great physical shape. Shawn relies on the fact that, from an evolutionary point of view, we, as a species of homo, actually evolved from primates by moving to primarily animal based diet [3]. In addition, the results that Shawn demonstrates every day, as well as the results of people who have tried it with this style of eating, have been and are truly breathtaking. I was particularly interested in the stories of people who found the answer to various chronic diseases in this way of eating. That's why I decided to try the "carnivore diet" too. In principle, as with a ketogenic diet, it is a diet based on fat metabolism. The so-called carnivore diet, as the name suggests, is based exclusively on meat, eggs and meat and milk products. It is basically a subset of the ketogenic diet. The main difference is that carnivore omits a relatively wide range of vegetables and fruits. So what about fiber and vitamins? It's been almost two years since I started experimenting with this style of eating, and judging by the second selfie, I don't think I miss fiber or any vitamins. On the contrary. For example, certain vegetables have in addition to vitamins also plenty of so-called antinutrients that prevent the absorption of various macro and micronutrients [4]. This makes sense, as even those plants want to survive and antinutrients are their form of defense against predators (eg oxalates in spinach prevent the absorption of calcium and in sensitive people they can intensify the formation of kidney stones). Vegetables also differ in the bioavailability of micronutrients (vitamins and minerals) compared to animal based food. For example, the availability of vitamin A in the form of retinol (found mainly in the liver and egg yolk) is much higher than the bioavailability of vitamin A in the form of carotenoids (plant form) [5]. The topic of fiber deserves its own article, as it is really interesting how something that has no nutritional value can become a key part of a "healthy" diet.
Blog
I realized that it is a great pity if we look at our body only as a thermodynamic machine. There is much more to it. It's called biology. It varies from person to person, but my experiment and the testimonies of many others who have tried a similar experiment have confirmed me in one thing. Despite all the differences, we do share a common evolutionary heritage. The species Homo began to exist here about 2 million years ago. Almost all that time, our ancestors ate as hunters. Agriculture was invented about 10,000 years ago [6] and we have been witnessing the rise of industry in this area for about the last 200 years. In recent decades, we have seen an alarming increase in the incidence of various chronic diseases. So maybe it's not such a surprise that as soon as I started to focus my nutrition more around meat, my body and health started to improve. Whether we like it or not, meat has been, and still is, a key part of human nutrition and health. Not a miraculous dietary supplement, detox cleansing, or the latest trendy diet. My story (and many others) only underline this fact, and that's actually why I decided to start writing a blog. I wrote this article in the winter of 2020 and I hesitated to publish it for a long time. I guess I was waiting for the right moment, or I just lacked courage - I really don't know. I will try to write regularly about what my endless lifestyle experimentation has taught me and still teaches me. Maybe later down the road it will help someone, like it helped me. If you have come this far, I sincerely thank you for the time you have given me, and if you have any questions left, I firmly believe that in the future you will find your answers here. After all, I am an optimist😊.
References
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19049574/
[2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10365987/
[3] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21452485/
[4] https://benthamopen.com/FULLTEXT/TOBIOTJ-13-68#r4
[5] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/301702721_Bioavailability_of_Nutrients
[6] Harari, Yuval N. author. Sapiens : a Brief History of Humankind. New York :Harper, 2015.