I was swamped with work recently, so I just now got around to reading Richard Nikoley’s excellent new e-book Free The Animal: Lose Weight & Fat With The Paleo Diet.  (Sorry, Richard … would you consider labeling me fashionably late?)

The “e-book” part is important.  I don’t own a Kindle or other digital reader because I enjoy the feel of an old-fashioned paper book in my hands, but I have a digital copy of this one stored on my computer, and I’m glad I do.  Throughout the book, Nikoley cites blog posts (from his own blog and many others), online articles and YouTube videos as resources and –- you’ve got to like this –- embedded links to those resources right there on the page.

Great feature.  As much as I believe in tracking down sources, sometimes I don’t feel like glancing back and forth between a bibliography and my computer screen while trying to accurately type in a URL that’s 75 characters long. With the e-book, I just click the link.

(For those who buy the paperback book, Nikoley provides the URL of a web page with all the same links, by the way.)

But enough about the joys of hyperlinks. I enjoyed this book because it’s Richard Nikoley being Richard Nikoley:  analytical, humorous, encouraging, provocative and — as you know if you read his Free the Animal blog — occasionally pissed off!

Weaving together strands of evolutionary logic, findings from research, and personal experiences, Nikoley argues the case the book’s title suggests:  the key to lasting weight loss and superior health is to stop following the advice peddled by the anti-fat hysterics and to eat like our paleo ancestors:

Good health is natural. It’s not something that needs to be industrialized or drug-induced. By eating natural foods available to us, humans can enjoy good health and longevity. Technology should not separate us from or destroy the natural or man-made habitats we and non-human animals need to live and thrive in good health. The key to being lean, strong, and healthy is in your head. Use your intuition, just like animals do… The burden is squarely on you. Modern institutions only want to sell you stuff. They don’t care about your belly or health. They care about their bottom line and your spending.

Free The Animal: Lose Weight & Fat With The Paleo Diet is an easy read (you can tackle it in an afternoon), but covers a lot of ground.  The easiest way to describe the topics covered is to list the chapter titles:

• The Paleo, Primal, Ancestral Lifestyle
• Your Inner Animal
• The Standard American Diet And Other Diet Health Disasters
• Fat Is King
• The Cholesterol Con
• Natural Disease Prevention
• Eat Like A Caveman
• The Power Of Fasting
• Evolutionary Exercise And Fitness
• A Primal Weight Loss Plan
• Recipes And Supplements
• Success Stories

Before describing what a paleo diet is and why you should be living on one, Nikoley explains what’s wrong with the diet the “experts” keep pushing on us.  Did I mention that he gets a little hot under the collar now and then?  Well, here’s why:

… Another reason grain is said to be healthier than animal fat—the real reason, in my opinion— is that if you do a little research, you’ll find that the ADA is in the pay of the world’s leading companies promoting and profiting from obesity and ill-health by producing cheap, highly processed “food.” You have to dig deep, but if you look at the fine print of any alphabet soup “health” institution website, you can usually find who’s paying them to admonish you with unhealthful advice. The American Dietetic Association is sponsored by Aramark, Coca-Cola, Hershey, National Dairy Council, Abbott, CoroWise, General Mills, Kellogg’s, Mars, Pepsico, Unilever, Soyjoy . . . you get the idea. The American Diabetes Association’s list of sponsors is essentially the same, with the big drug companies thrown in. Do you think these companies are paying the ADAs to diss sugar-water drinks, processed foods and other sources of carbohydrate overload? And if not, how kindly are the ADAs going to take to having its affiliated dietitians and nutritionists contradicting ADA guidelines and policy?

… Think about it: fatty meats and eggs are wonderful, nutritious foods with literally millions of years of evolutionary credentials, not to mention the visceral pleasure almost anyone in their right mind gets from eating them. Yet they get tossed aside by self-important minions. And who are the self-important minions? The experts who have been telling us for years that fat is unhealthy, that’s who. The ones who have blood on their hands, as far as I’m concerned. They have, through their arrogant ignorance and disregard for the unassailable logic of human evolution, condemned millions upon millions to moribund lives of physical unattractiveness, obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and the list goes on. As we can see by looking around or looking it up, the statistics get worse year after year, in the very face of the experts’ changing advice. But do they ever show humility? No, the best we get is more authoritarian arrogance. “You eat too much. You don’t exercise enough. You haven’t been listening to us and you’re not properly following our diktats.”

In the chapter on Natural Disease Prevention, he relates a personal story about the power of paleo diets to overcomes diseases –- one that’s similar to hundreds of personal stories I’ve heard from Fat Head fans:

My mom, in her early 70s, is a Type 2 diabetic. I have witnessed that the “help” she used to get from the medical establishment went beyond malpractice. When she was diagnosed some years ago, there was considerable confusion about what she ought to eat. She was aware of the low-carb advice, but her doctors were telling her to eat low-fat—advice that is pervasive throughout the medical community. As we all know, it is very hard to maintain a low-carb diet that’s also low in fat. You have to eat something. Making up the difference with protein can get very unpleasant. Just in terms of sheer mass, fat is more than twice as energy efficient as either protein or carbs. On this recommended low-fat diet, my mom’s blood glucose levels kept creeping up. She’d have huge swings, with spikes well over 200 and more.

To put that in perspective, a normal pancreas will release enough insulin to keep blood glucose no higher than about 145 mg/dL as an absolute spike; normal is in a range of about 80–100. Finally, the doctors determined she had to go on the self-administered shots. She’s no dummy. She could see the downward progression. Type 2s always get worse and worse.

Then my mom went on a super low-carb diet, with no concern for how much fat or protein she ate. She consumed no grains, no grain products, and very limited fruit. Her blood glucose quickly stabilized between 85 and about 105 most of the time. She had been used to shooting two types of insulin, a fast-acting and a time-release; a few weeks into the new diet, she was able to drop the fast acting one. Then, she and my dad hitched up the 5th-wheel trailer for a camping trip. She forgot her insulin at home. They were only a couple of hours away, so it could have been acquired, but she decided to just monitor her blood glucose level closely instead of going home. It stayed in the healthy range: she went the whole weekend without a shot.

One of the reasons I enjoy Nikoley’s blog is that (like yours truly) he’s a libertarian who believes in providing information and then encouraging people to experiment and find their own path.  He doesn’t expect people to follow orders, and he doesn’t issue any.  There’s no “do exactly what I say or you’ll stay fat and then die” nonsense here.  He spends part of one chapter explaining the benefits of grass-fed beef and organic foods, but then writes this:

However, I want to be as inclusive as possible. You can reap the benefits of Paleo by buying food from grocery chains. I also don’t want to discourage someone from the Paleo scene because they feel they don’t measure up if all they can reasonably source is grain-finished meat due to budget or other considerations. It’s a personal choice. Your emphasis should be on getting results first.

I don’t force myself to be a Paleo “purist.” I go out to eat, attend dinner parties at vegetarian friends’ houses, and indulge a little during the holidays. But concentrating on real food and passing on processed carbohydrates has resulted in 60 pounds of fat loss, massive reduction in blood pressure, cessation of prescription medications, fabulous lean muscle and strength gains, and a host of other lifestyle improvements.

I first learned about the benefits of intermittent fasting from Nikoley’s blog.  (I just finished a 24-hour fast last night, in fact.)  If you’ve never tried it, he describes how to get started in the chapter titled The Power Of Fasting. Trust me, once you’ve fasted a few times, you’ll wonder why you ever thought you had to eat three or four times per day, day in and day out.

The chapter on exercise is good too.  Like me, Nikoley used to walk for miles and miles, then wonder why he didn’t lose weight.  (He actually gained 25 pounds over a few years, despite walking thousands of miles.)  I still walk for pleasure, but I’ve learned from people like Nikoley, Fred Hahn and Dr. Doug McGuff that the best exercise for health and weight control is brief, intense exertion.  That’s the method that allowed Nikoley to lose more weight and vastly increase his strength — at age 50.

One of the real pleasures of being a blogger is hearing from readers who’ve made dramatic improvements in their health.  Nikoley passes on some reader success stories in the last chapter (complete with before-and-after pictures), but finishes the book by pointing out what more and more of us have realized:  sure, it’s great that overweight and sick people can re-claim their health and vitality, but it didn’t have to be this way.  If not for the misguided “experts” out there, we wouldn’t have needed to find a road to recovery:

Every single day in this country and around the world, people are subjected to conventional “wisdom” and advice from the likes of Oprah, Dr. Oz, the medical and drug company establishment, the government-institution establishment, the industrial-agriculture food establishment, the talking heads in the media establishment, and health columnists. What kind of advice? Advice that keeps people in their 20s and 30s, and even children, in many cases, obese, immobile, and sick. What’s worse, it keeps them dependent on a system constructed for others’ profit.

And isn’t that what it’s really all about, at the end of the day? The authorities don’t want you using your own mind. They want nothing to do with your reasonable and rational self-experimentation on your own body. No, what they want is for you to recognize their “superior” intelligence and privileged access to information only they know how to properly interpret. They want you to need them—to always look to them for your answers.

They want you to be skeptical—but only towards information that contradicts their diktats. They want to be the authority, the last and final word, always and forever, and they aren’t going to give that up without a fight.

Well, they’ve got themselves a fight.

Damned right they do.

Keep fighting, Richard.  You’re one of the reasons we’re going to win.

I received some nice emails lately that I thought I’d share.

No more ‘freshman 15′ for this student

Tom,

First of all I want to thank you for all your work and research that went in to the movie Fat Head.  I found the movie easy to watch thanks to your humor, but also because it was full of facts and most of all transparency, something that I really appreciated.

After watching your movie the first time (around September) I decided that I would try your low carb-high/fat-diet to see if it would do any good for me.  (I’ve always been a little bit overweight even when I was in great shape.)  Almost immediately I dropped around five pounds, but unfortunately after a few days I quit the diet due to harvest and spending such long hours in the fields.

After New Year’s I went back to school to finish up my degree, and after a disagreement with my roommates about the effect of fat on a healthy diet, I made them watch your movie to settle the argument –  after which they realized that they had been misinformed.  After this incident I decided to again go on your diet and have been religious about keeping my carb intake day to around 100g per dat, while my caloric intake remains around 2000 per day (sometimes a little lower).

I can say that it was everything you have said it would be.  The first week I sorely missed carbs and spent long hours dreaming about bowls of pasta and freshly baked bread, but after a few days these cravings died down and I no longer felt hungry in between meals.  After a week I had already lost six pounds.  Now after only two weeks of changing my diet by simply cutting out carbs, I have lost an astonishing 16 pounds, and besides looking better, I feel great.

Again I just want to thank you for dispelling the health myths that have been perpetrated by our government and their scientists.  You now have another disciple spreading the word.

Sincerely,
Phillip

Excellent, Phillip!  (I’m not a disciple-seeker, but keep spreading the word.)

A former vegetarian goes low-carb

Dear Tom –

I’ll try to keep this short and sweet.  I’m sure you get these by the thousands but I just wanted to tell you how grateful I am that I saw your documentary. When I was a young kid I had all the energy in the world, I was last to come in from recess every day, but when I turned 8,  I would come home from school and eat a pb&J with my dad and a lot of potato chips, and then two or three hours later have a big plate of enchiladas or spaghetti when my mom got home. I put on weight FAST, and then ceased being active because it’s no fun being the fat kid on the team and I didn’t have the energy anyway.

My aunt was a doctor, and around this time started advising my mom that all the fat in our diet was bad. So we switched from whole milk to fat free, from eggs and bacon for breakfast to cheerios and fruit, and my dad decided it was best for him to become a vegetarian. Well two years later, my dad passed away from a heart attack. My father was an incredibly healthy man (aside from the diet).  He was an iron worker, and when he came home from work he rode his bike for miles. He was actually in the mountains riding his bike with a friend when he died. We were devastated and couldn’t understand why such a thing could even happen to a man like him.

After my mom and I moved to a new state, we got a house with a swimming pool and she bought a big trampoline, and I lost all kinds of weight without even noticing until none of my old clothes fit. Looking back now I realized that my mom, who’s always been naturally thin, never had any starchy or sugary foods in the house at this time.

When I turned 14, urged by what can I only imagine now was pure insanity, I became a vegetarian for about two years. I felt horrible all the time, my eyes were sunken in and my hair started falling out. I gained back a lot of the weight and it felt like I was always sick. So under the advice of my aunt, I went on a super healthy low-fat diet and worked out at least an hour a day until I was glowing red and drenched in sweat — and didn’t lose a pound.

I gave up for a couple years and got all the way up to 180 pounds, until last December. Your documentary has changed my life. I’m 19 years old, and the best part is I feel like a 19-year-old-now. I get up early for school or work every morning, I never feel tired throughout the day, and I can fit into all the cute clothes I’ve always wanted to wear but was too embarrassed. I’ve already lost 14 pounds since New Year’s with little effort on my part. I don’t count calories like I used to; in fact I don’t even think about them any more.

I’ve been telling everyone who’ll listen about the benefits of low-carb, including my husband, mother and grandmother. I’ve been reading your blog like a maniac and email bits and pieces to people, like your post about cholesterol and Alzheimer’s to my grandmother. I showed your post about nutritionists and mechanics switching jobs to my husband and he thought it was hysterical. I’ve even talked him into to eating this way; he’s loving it and feeling all the benefits despite formerly having a bread addiction. I can’t say thank you enough! Thank you thank you!

(Just a funny little side note about my aunt:  she probably only gets about 10% of her calories from fat, and she is probably one of the most irritable, grouchy, unhappy women I know.)

Thanks again,
Sarah

Now there’s an interesting correlation:  do low-fat diets make people grumpy, or do grumpy people prefer low-fat diets?  In my case, it was certainly the diet causing the grumpiness.

Either way, Sara, I’m glad to hear you’ve rejected the low-fat nonsense and feel great — as a young person should.  (The good news is that you can also feel great when you’re 53 … trust me on that one.)

Still another former vegetarian goes low-carb

Some months ago, I heard from a woman named Rae.  Here’s that letter first:

Hi Tom,

I know you must hear this all the time, but “Fat Head” made such a huge impact on me. I watched it around the time I was considering bringing 18 years of vegetarianism to an end. What I learned inspired me to learn more, and I realized how I became very overweight while eating a low-fat grain-based diet, why I struggled with depression much of my life (which only began when I became a vegetarian, but I never saw the connection), and why I had to constantly fight the urge to eat whole sticks of butter chased by a bottle of olive oil – obviously my body was telling me something, but I just thought I was a weirdo for craving fat the way I did! And I thought fat was the reason I became fat in the first place!

I’ve been so busy getting reacquainted with fat and meat that I forgot to eat my ‘heart healthy whole grains’ and lost about 35 lbs (and still going!) without really trying. I feel incredible!

THANK YOU!

Rae

That was back in July.  Now here’s a hot-off-presses update from Rae, which included the pictures below:

Hi Tom!

I emailed you several months ago when I had lost about 35 lbs after seeing Fat Head. I wanted you to know now I’ve lost nearly 80 lbs since Fat Head made me re-think everything I had ever learned about food and nutrition. I wish it had been around 10 years ago so I wouldn’t have wasted my 20s being an obese depressed vegetarian. I don’t know how to express my gratitude to you. I do tell people to watch Fat Head when they ask me how I lost weight. But some people are so resistant to anything outside of conventional wisdom! Even though I’ve gotten serious results, because Oprah doesn’t endorse what I am doing, it must not be real. Oh well!

Understandably you might not want to open a file from a stranger, but I just wanted you to see the difference you made. Fat Head totally changed my life. You must get these emails all the time – you’re wracking up some impressive karma! Please don’t stop doing what you’re doing!

Rae

One of the advantages of being married to a secure woman who knows I adore her is that I can say things like this without getting in trouble:  Rae, you don’t just look far leaner and healthier – you’re officially a hottie now.  (I know this because I showed Chareva your before-and-after photos, and she said as much.)

Congratulations, and way to go!

By the time the last few renovation tasks were completed and we’d unpacked all the boxes and arranged all the furniture, it was time to leave town for the holidays.  It’s only been in the past few weeks that I’ve experienced really living here on the ol’ mini-farm.

As I was going through our 2011 pictures to gather material for the Naughton Family 2011 DVD (my version of a photo album), the before-and-after really sunk in.  As I explained when I announced that we’d bought a mini-farm, it was only because of Chareva’s considerable imagination that we ended up here.  I took a quick look at the place and was ready to bolt.  It doesn’t make a good first impression when the front pastures look like this:

Well, no big deal … someone with a bush hog can take care of that mess.  I wasn’t put off yet.

Then we saw the house.  Every single window looked like this:

Even the garage doors had huge burglar bars over them.  There were security cameras everywhere, with wires hanging loosely from the walls and ceilings.  The doors — even the ones inside the house – had multiple deadbolts on them.  I assumed the owner had a touch paranoia.  Later, as the owner was moving out, Chareva learned part of the paranoia was because of this:

Yup … the previous owner was the old-fashioned type who kept her savings in a basement safe.  I guess if my entire net worth was all in one place, I’d have it surrounded with burglar bars and security cameras as well.

She never spent any of that net worth on little matters such as cleaning, so the entire house was filthy.  I don’t know if you can tell from this picture, but the stairs and floors all over the house were covered with dust, mold, dirt and dog hair:

As a guy, I don’t put a lot of thought into how a bathroom should decorated, but this sure didn’t make me want to buy the place:

The attic was also infested with wasps, some of whom made occasional sorties into the house.  The roof over the front porch looked like a wasp airport — the O’Hare version, with constant arrivals and takeoffs.

So when Chareva told me we needed to snap this place up before someone else did, I thought she was joking at first.  That’s why she’s the artist and I’m not.  She was seeing what the house and land could be, not what they were.

She ended up serving as the unofficial on-site contractor while I went back to full-time work as an independent programmer.  My only role in the renovating and decorating (besides paying for it) was making occasional suggestions.

Now that Chareva’s vision is a reality, I thought I’d share some before-and-after shots.

The garage (which the previous owner used as an unfinished basement) is now the girls’ playroom.  The garage door is gone, replaced with a wall, door and window.  We still need to find a long, narrow rug for the floor, but the girls enjoy watching TV, playing Wii and creating art projects down there.

I wasn’t crazy about the previous owner’s taste in colors:  aqua blue and white (dirty, unwashed white).  Here’s the entryway before and after:

Here’s the dining room, before and after:

We don’t normally pack so many chairs around the table, but had friends over for dinner yesterday.  More on that later.   Here’s the living room before and after:

The master bedroom before and after:

Even the halls and stairways look better now:

In the house we rented after moving to Tennessee, Chareva’s “office” was one side of a large room she shared with the girls — their playroom.  Not great for focusing on work when they were home.

Now she’s got her own:

She can see down into into the kitchen from there, which makes it convenient if she’s working on a project while something’s cooking on the stove.  I took this picture from her office stairs yesterday as she was preparing a big ol’ pot of her low-carb chili:

The kitchen is the one room in the house we decided to deal with later.  The only change was having the floor re-tiled.  Chareva was making chili yesterday because we invited my friend Jim from work (who had us out to his house for what Alana later dubbed “The greatest Thanksgiving ever!“) and his family out for a visit.

One of the many aspects of living here that I love is seeing how the girls have taken to it.  Before our Saturday visitors arrived, we had the shin-deep grass in the front pasture cut.  The girls decided to gather up some grass for mommy’s compost heap, and (of course) play in the stuff.

Now that’s good, clean (in a manner of speaking) fun.

For my own version of fun on the farm, I decided to turn that pasture (for now, anyway) into a three-hole frisbee golf course.  Jim and I played several rounds together, while Sara and two of his girls did likewise.  (Despite assuring me he had no experience with the game, Jim scored a string of birdies.  I didn’t.)

I read up on Frisbee golf courses online.  I could create a regulation nine-hole course around the property, complete with shots through trees and over the creek, the kind of challenges that make the real courses interesting.  I may do that … but of course eventually I’d be sharing the course with whatever critters Chareva decides to raise.

And perhaps with critters she doesn’t decide to raise.  Last week, she took this picture out our bedroom window one morning around 6:00 a.m.  The lighting is lousy because of the hour, but you get the idea.  Deer were ambling around our front yard:

We’re not exactly farming yet.  Chareva still has to pick her locations for raising chickens and planting various gardens.  We’d like to grow pumpkins and sweet potatoes somewhere on the property, and Sara is determined to raise a few watermelons.  Sheep, a dairy cow, maybe a goat … that’s all up in the air for now.

But I can already tell you I love life on the little farm.

Our digital distributor (the one I like) emailed me today that Fat Head is now on iTunes … I swear it was up there a few weeks ago, but maybe there was an issue.  (Some of you may recall Netflix first put up a version with a missing audio track, which they later fixed.  The Guy From CSPI just isn’t as much fun without those gizzidleydoinks and whooshes.)

Anyway, here’s the link again for Fat Head on iTunes.

If you’ve already seen it and liked it, a positive review wouldn’t hurt the traffic any.  If you’ve already seen it and didn’t like it … uh … go give a one-star review to “Super Size Me.”  That’ll show me.

I’m nearly done with the data conversion that’s been occupying my evenings.  If you sent me an email this week and I haven’t answered yet, I’ll get to it this weekend.

I haven’t had time to post on Paula Deen’s status as a new celebrity diabetic, but the Older Brother did a nice job over on his blog.

I’m busy tonight with a hairy data conversion for one of my software clients,  so this is a short post.

I don’t know if this is pathetic, funny, a positive sign, or a combination of all three:  The makers of Karo corn syrup would like you to know that their product doesn’t contain any high fructose corn syrup.

I found this photo while going over my collection from Christmas. My mom had a bottle of this stuff in her kitchen, apparently to put in some kind of Christmas dessert I didn’t eat.  (If memory serves, we used to put dark Karo syrup on our waffles during my sugar-laden childhood.)

In case you’re wondering about the difference, high fructose corn syrup undergoes an extra step in which enzymes convert more of the glucose from the corn into fructose to make it sweeter.

I recommend you avoid corn syrup of either variety.