Fat Head finally made it to iTunes.  If you haven’t seen it yet, now’s your chance to rent or download it.

Here’s a link.

(Sorry, U.S. iTunes only for now … we’re still trying to get away from our foreign “distributor,” who hasn’t distributed anything and has ignored my many requests to put the film on iTunes overseas.)

Busy weekend.  With the last of the electrical work done (I hope) on the house, we were finally able to put the rugs on the floors, move our furniture back against the walls, and unpack (mostly, anyway) the rest of the boxes.

It’s a treat to have some real space again.  In the apartment, my office was a table in our bedroom.  No filing cabinet, no shelves … I didn’t even have room to hook up speakers to my computers.  My other two computers were in storage.

To fill orders, we took supplies out of a closet, printed labels, then put together the packages on our bed or on the floor.  Sometimes the packing tape picked up a strand of hair from the floor, and I wondered how the Fat Head fans would feel about receiving a DNA sample with their orders.  I had to constantly remind myself not to commit any crimes.

As of yesterday -– after a trip to Costco for some industrial-strength shelves –- my office in the new house was at full working capacity.  I’d write in a closet if need be, but I feel more creative when I have some space around me … and when Chareva isn’t sleeping five feet away.

Other than unpacking and arranging, I didn’t do much over the weekend.  I finally caught up on emails tonight, which gives me an opportunity to share more letters from readers.

A Reader Update

Back in March I heard from a woman named Gretchen:

I am a 42 yr old mother of 2, and when I was 35 I was diagnosed with stage 2b breast cancer, I beat it! Then 24 months later I was diagnosed with Uterine cancer. I beat that too, but in the meantime I kept gaining weight. My oncologist had told me to eat fruits ! Tons of fruits, a lot of blended fruit drinks. I was also then put on a low fat diet, which I followed faithfully for 2 years.  I gained almost 200 lbs!  In a 4 year period, I was always tired, I was always starving! I didn’t know if it was really worth living anymore. Even though I beat 2 cancers, all the excess weight and starvation was killing me slowly, I could barely walk, my hips just killed me. My gums receded, my hair was a mess. I kept getting odd sores all over.

Then one day I woke up and said enough is enough, and I went online and guess what I found? I found you! I ordered your movie, and from that day forward, I finally feel like I am getting  ME BACK! I now know why I am FAT, why I will always be FAT if i keep eating carbs. I gave up carbs that day, I am following Atkins, and on there Forums I am always telling people to watch your movie. I tell everyone about your movie.

I can happily say that not even a full 3 months later, I am down 51.8 lbs, I have dropped 4 sizes. I can walk again with no pain, I can work out and I have gone back to work. I still have a long way to go. But now that I know what I learned from your movie, I know there is no stopping me now.

Thank You , Thank You, Thank You! You always have a place in my heart. Which will be beating for  a long, long time now because of you.

Sincerely,
Gretchen

Yesterday, I received a progress report from Gretchen:

I thought I would give you a follow up! I have now lost a total of 164 lbs in less than a year. Omg can you believe it?  I can’t, and I see myself every day… lol.

Once I got it into my head that this is a lifestyle,  it all fell into place so wonderfully. I have not cheated once, not at all, and have no desire to.  In fact, on the few days I felt weak I actually re-watched your DVD and the weakness went right away.

I wanted to share with you my Journey on Atkins. Thank You! Thank You! Thank You!

I happily accept your thanks, Gretchen, but you’re the one who lost 164 pounds in less than a year.  Outstanding!

Lose the Wheat, Lose the Rash

Mr. Naughton,

I wanted to write and thank you for all of your many efforts to spread the word about eating a low carb, high fat diet.  Growing up I didn’t struggle with weight, but once I hit 25 I started packing on the pounds.  I also had this pesky eczema on my scalp.  It got so bad several times that I needed a prescription for antibiotics because it got infected.  I spent a lot of time feeling self conscious because I had such horrible dandruff, and the puss from the infection on my scalp made my hair look like I’d never washed it in my life.  (Sorry, that’s really gross I know)

When we watched Fat Head about a year ago it was like a gong going off in my head.  I knew that sugars were bad, I’d cut them out several times, but keeping them out of my diet constantly was always problematic.  When I realized that the grains I was eating were just as bad if not worse I made a huge shift in my eating habits.  Going low carb was easy, doing the high fat was a little bit more of a struggle until I realized that my skin was feeling better than it ever had in my life.  Over the past ten years alone I’ve tried countless remedies, medical and holistic to attempt a cure for the rashes on my scalp (and occasionally my face and neck) nothing worked.  Suddenly the itchiness, flakes, oozing and pain were gone, almost overnight.

I initially attributed this mostly to the added fat content in my diet.  As I started reading some of the books on your recommended reading list I realized it was just as much that I had taken out the harmful grains, especially the wheat.  Some of the other health benefits that I wasn’t expecting when I started this diet: insomnia gone, tooth pain gone, energy out the wazoo, depression a distant memory.

I don’t think I would have ever stumbled onto this diet on my own.  Thank you for presenting the information in such a straightforward, entertaining format.  Having this diet has changed so many things about my health and outlook on life.  I initially started because I was over 200 lbs and couldn’t stand to look at myself in the mirror anymore.  I haven’t actually lost that much weight, about 15lbs.  But my jeans are huge on me now, my body has changed soooo much.

Thanks again,
Moselle

Moselle’s story is a reminder of why I don’t even own a scale anymore:  this diet isn’t about losing weight.  It’s about health.  Losing weight is a nice side benefit.  But if Moselle’s jeans are huge on him after losing 15 pounds, I’m guessing he’s seeing a shift in body composition, with less fat and more lean body mass.

Fifty-something and feeling good

Dear Tom:

Being 50+ (1961 model) I’ve started to come to terms with the annoying little concept that I might not be immortal after all. I think that you might guess what brought this to my mind: being tired all the time, feeling woozy after a meal, excessive sweating, thirst, weight gain and loss of anything slightly resembling physical endurance.

And then came your movie, which I watched in Israel on the YES SatTV network. To be honest, I thought I was going to watch a parody on “Supersize Me” – because that’s how it was advertised in the TV guide. I was completely floored and then I smacked myself on the head because I’ve been working for close to 30 years in the field of medical diagnosis and while knowledgeable enough to recognize the symptoms of the Type II Diabetes creeping on me I never gave any thought to what might be causing it.

Your movie led me to reading Gary Taubes “Good Calories, Bad Calories” and Kendrick’s “The Great Cholesterol Con”. Getting these books through Amazon was the best on-line purchase I ever made since the invention of the Internet.

Fast forward the last two months and I’m now 7Kg lighter and boy…you wouldn’t believe what other changes cutting the carbs and going high fat did for me. The wooziness after meals? Gone. The tiredness that led me to become a couch potato? Gone. The general doom and gloom attitude? Also gone. The only thing that is thing that is marring the general happiness is the anger I’m feeling toward myself for buying the official party line lock stock and barrel and accepting all the BS I’ve been force fed by the medical establishment during the last 15 years.

So thank you again for the work and effort you put into getting Fat Head done and published worldwide. You got yourself another admirer.

Claude

Don’t be angry with yourself for buying into the official party line, Claude.  Most of us bought into it.  Heck, when I worked for a little health magazine, I not only bought the party line, I repeated it in print.  The good news is that it’s now easier than ever to find those all-important opposing views.  Thank heaven for the Internet.

Been there, done that, bought the t-shirt

We had a little PayPal mixup on an order for a Wheat Is Murder t-shirt, so I wrote to the buyer to straighten it out.  Garth, who ordered the shirt, confirmed the order and mentioned that he and his wife had watched Fat Head and it changed their lives.  His wife Rhonda emailed shortly after to expand on that statement:

This is the wife back at home base.  I can’t contain myself any longer, I have to elaborate on “Changed our lives.”

We don’t feel hungry anymore.

We don’t have to weigh portions or feel guilty about eating.

We don’t feel this sense of panic that we might miss a meal if we’re not close to food ALL the time.

We actually understand now what it means to feel full and put down the fork when we’re satisfied.

We’ve lost weight, but know that even when we plateau that we’re healthier on the inside and that is what is important.

We have a physical and mental sense of better health.

We’ve never felt so right, so righteous about an eating style before.

Our oldest daughter has always been ‘busy’ and as soon as she was in preschool it became apparent that something wasn’t quite right. By the end of the year she was referred to a developmental clinic and we were just waiting for the appointment, waiting for the diagnosis of ADHD or something like that. Nothing severe, but symptoms were there.  But then we saw your film. And then we read Taubes and Wheat Belly and took our family off of wheat/grains. Within a couple days she became ‘present,’ started conversations with us, and became more focused on tasks. One month later she had her appointment and the doctor does NOT have concerns of her having ADHD.

Thank you, Tom. Loved the movie. Changed our lives.

Rhonda, you just gave me a fabulous Christmas present.  I’m going to pass the present on to Dr. William Davis as well.

Why I can never run for president …

I checked my Facebook messages over the weekend and saw one with this heading:

Ummm Tom – thanks for getting me pregnant!

After a moment of panic, I remembered that I haven’t been a blackout drinker in a long, long time …  and one of the benefits of being fifty-something is that if you are stupid enough to out-drink your memory, you can’t possibly get anyone pregnant in that condition without medical implements being involved.  So I read on:

Thanks to seeing your Fat Head documentary and starting to eat low carb, we have managed to get pregnant, and I am 41! We only found out a few days ago and the baby is due in about 7 weeks! I didn’t even realise I was pregnant, it has been such an amazingly easy pregnancy! So thank you from my husband and me – we owe you deep gratitude – you and your documentary are not only changing lives, but helping create them!

If the baby is a boy, I hope they’ll consider naming it after me.

We’ll be leaving town this week to visit the grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, the Younger Sister and the Older Brother for Christmas.  I’ll check comments when I can, but I doubt I’ll have time to write a post.

Happy Holidays to all of you.

On the Carbohydrates Can Kill show

Another listener-roundtable discussion featuring me and some Fat Head fans is available on Dr. Robert Su’s latest Carbohydrates Can Kill podcast.  You can listen to it here.

Fat Head on cable

Fat Head is now available as a pay-per-view selection on these cable/satellite networks:

• Charter
• Rogers (Canada)
• Mediacom
• Cogeco (Canada)
• Suddenlink
• Eastlink Communications
• Wave
• Blue Ridge
• Access Communication
• Source Cable
• NorthwesTel Cable
• Bluewater
• Seaside
• Burlington Telecom
• Morristown
• KPU
• Tullahoma Utilities
• Valley Communications
• Cable Cable (CCSA)

Doesn’t it just figure that our own local cable system (Comcast) isn’t carrying it?  Sheesh.

Student Bodies

Some students at Western Illinois University put together a YouTube slideshow promoting Fat Head:

Nice to have some youngsters out there working as guerrilla marketers.  Thanks, guys.

Moving into our renovated farm house wasn’t exactly like a scene from one of those hone-renovation shows on HGTV … you know, where the homeowners go away for awhile, return to a perfectly-renovated home with everything in place, then weep for joy.

Our renovations are almost but not quite finished.  Rather than pay another month’s rent on the apartment, we went ahead with the move.  Consequently, my HGTV moment was more like this:

“How come there aren’t any faceplates on the outlets?”

“They’re doing that next week.”

“They’re not done with these baseboards, are they?  I see a lot of splatters from the walls.”

“They’re coming back to do another coat next week.”

“Uh … didn’t we used to own some nice big rugs?”

“They’re in the garage.  We can’t put them on the hardwood floors for 10 more days.”

“So the movers have to come back and move all the heavy furniture again?”

“That’s right.”

“You know, I don’t want to criticize your furniture arrangements, but–”

“We have to keep all the furniture three feet from the walls until the painters and the electrician are done.”

Take it from me:  if you ever feel you’re blessed with an abundance of space, move all your furniture three feet from the walls.  It’s amazing how quickly it all converges in the middle of the room.

We didn’t have a working kitchen until Sunday.  We knew that would be the case, so you can imagine how happy Chareva was when one of my co-workers at BMI invited us to his place for Thanksgiving dinner.  When I called home to pass along his invitation, the conversation went something like this:

“Hi, Honey.  Would you be interested in spending Thanksgiving with—“

“Yes.”

Despite having to step around stacks of unpacked boxes to navigate a room, we’ve already enjoyed some out-in-the-boondocks moments.  Wednesday night we saw two deer running across our front pasture.  As we left for Thanksgiving dinner on Thursday, we drove past five wild turkeys hanging around our loooong driveway.

Jim, the aforementioned co-worker who hosted Thanksgiving, is a big man with a big laugh, a big heart and a big family – six kids.  (No, he’s not Catholic or Mormon.  He told me people ask him that all the time.)  He’s also surrounded by his extended family.  Together they all own 25 acres of hilly countryside north of Nashville, with everyone living just down the road from everyone else.

With so many relatives (plus several friends) in the house, Thanksgiving dinner was served in three different rooms.  The food was terrific, and since it was a holiday, I didn’t concern myself with carb counts or which foods would qualify as paleo.  I skipped dessert, but only because I was full and a slice of pie didn’t appeal to me.

The girls didn’t skip dessert.  None of the kids did.  Perhaps because he’s raised so many of them, Jim had wisely planned ahead with a full lineup of activities to keep the sugared-up kids busy after dinner.

For starters, they got to walk a horse around the barnyard and then ride it.

Later, the kids all participated in a shooting contest with a BB gun.  As you can see, Alana developed her own technique for drawing a bead on a target.

Sara turned out to be a natural dead-eye, placing second in the contest despite never holding a gun before.  If I take up hunting someday, I may have to bring her with me.  I’ll spot, she can shoot.

After the shooting contest, all the kids, three dogs, and three adults set off for an hour-long hike and scavenger hunt in the forest behind Jim’s house.  The kids took along their lists and dutifully checked off the items they found as they tromped up and down the hills, jumped over logs, climbed rocks, swung from branches, and waded in a stream (despite instructions from the adults to stop wading in the stream).

As we were hiking up the last hill to return to the house, Alana announced, “This is the best Thanksgiving ever!”  I didn’t ask how many Thanksgivings she actually remembers.  I remember quite a few, and I have to say, running around a forest in the hills of Tennessee on a cool, sunny day certainly felt like a fitting way to spend Thanksgiving.  Over the river and through the trees kind of stuff.

When we said our goodbyes and left for home, Alana fell asleep in the car almost immediately.  She continued sleeping for another 12 hours.  I guess the best Thanksgiving ever can wear a person out.

I spent the rest of the weekend engaged in manual labor.  As I mentioned when we first bought the farm, we got a great deal because the elderly widow who lived here for decades had let pretty much everything go.  The wooden floors and stairs, for example, all looked like this:

The good news is that the wood has been refinished.

The bad news is that sanding and refinishing all that wood left a layer of sawdust on nearly every surface in the house.  The sawdust was still there when we moved in last week.  So Chareva and I spent all Friday and Saturday removing it.  After we moved some furniture around (at least three feet from the walls, of course), I vacuumed all the walls, doors and baseboards, and she followed behind me with a damp rag.

It finally occurred to me to snap a picture of a wall that was partly vacuumed.  You can see how thick the sawdust was.

Take it from me:  if you ever find yourself complaining that your house isn’t spacious enough, try vacuuming every square inch of it.  You’ll quickly realize just how big it is.

As we were clearing sawdust from Chareva’s office, two wild turkeys paid a visit to the back yard outside her office window.  I managed to grab the camera in time to snap a picture of one of them before they scampered off.

We’re still more packed than unpacked, the house needs more work, my office is crowded with furniture placed three feet from the walls, the rugs are in the garage waiting for the wood floors to fully set, and there are holes in the ceiling where vents for the heat are supposed to be.  Everything feels unsettled.

On the other hand, the girls had a terrific time running around the Tennessee countryside with Jim’s kids, the layer of sawdust is finally gone, the wood floors sparkle, and I’ve got deer and wild turkeys showing up on my land.

The best Thanksgiving ever?  I don’t know, but it’s definitely near the top of my list.

It’s moving day, the first of two.  I woke up this morning in the apartment; tonight after work I’ll drive to the farm house and start living there.  Our PODS will arrive from storage on Wednesday.  With any luck, I’ll have my home office up and running by Friday.

You may recall that after Chareva’s birthday dinner at a Chinese restaurant, my one-hour post-meal glucose level was 219 mg/dl.  After two hours, it was still near 160.  Since Chareva packed up the kitchen yesterday afternoon, we went to Red Lobster for dinner.   Here’s what I had:

• One crab cake appetizer
• Lobster-artichoke-cheese dip on about six tortilla chips
• A Cobb salad with bleu cheese dressing
• A bite of Sara’s clam chowder
• One lobster tail
• Two skewers of garlic shrimp
• Four large scallops
• Two crab-stuffed shrimp (because Chareva couldn’t finish her dinner)
• Broccoli drenched with drawn butter

In other words, I feasted.  An hour later, my glucose level was 101 mg/dl.

A diet that keeps your blood sugar under control doesn’t have to be boring.

Geez, I’ve been so busy lately, I totally forgot to post about my second Listeners’ Roundtable interview on Dr. Su’s podcast.

You can listen to it here.

Speaking of busy, Chareva talked to the renovators and the movers this week, and the upshot is that we’ll be moving from the apartment to the farm house on Monday, with our other belongings arriving from the storage facility on Tuesday.

You can imagine how relieved she was when one of my BMI co-workers invited us over for Thanksgiving on Thursday.  Who wants to make a big dinner two days after a move?

Anyway, I’ll check comments when I can, write a post if I manage to find time, but I may be more or less out of commission for a few days.