Keto Clarity: Your Definitive Guide to the Benefits of a Low-Carb, High-Fat Diet (3 page)

Turning It Around: Finding Dr. Atkins’ Low-Carb, High-Fat Approach

My mother-in-law had given me diet books for Christmas in the past as a not-so-subtle reminder that she thought the man her daughter married was fat and needed to do something about it. I pretended that this wasn’t hurtful, but it was. Hey, I knew I was a very large man and needed to get my weight under control. I just needed to find a healthy plan that would work for me. But that year, she gave me just the plan I needed to make that happen. The book was
Dr. Atkins’ New Diet Revolution,
which outlined the diet created by the late, great Dr. Robert C. Atkins. I had heard so many things about this diet, good and bad, but I had never taken the time to actually read the book. Now that I owned it, I had no excuse not to find out what the Atkins diet was truly all about.

Funny enough, back in 1999, when I was doing that virtually no-fat diet, one of my friends asked me if my weight loss was the result of the Atkins diet. “Are you kidding me?” I responded. “No, that’s one of the most unhealthy ways you could possibly use to lose weight.” In fact, I added, “I would
never
do a low-carb diet like Atkins because it’s too unhealthy.” Famous last words. It just shows my ignorance and stubborn refusal to open my mind to other possibilities beyond the conventional dietary wisdom. Considering that today I’m best known as the “low-carb guy,” there’s a certain bit of irony in those words. Never say never.

Reading Dr. Atkins’ book from cover to cover in the week between Christmas and New Year’s, my initial reaction to the concept of a low-carb, high-fat diet was utter contempt. How on God’s green earth can you eat more fat, like butter, full-fat cheeses, and red meat, without negative consequences to your health? Doesn’t this Dr. Atkins guy know those things will clog your arteries, give you heart disease and cancer, and ultimately kill you? And what did he mean, cut way down on carbohydrate-based foods? Who could ever live without bread, pasta, sugar, and starchy foods? Aren’t they what give your body the energy it needs to operate? What a complete and utter farce of a nutritional plan! Again, ignorance is bliss, and it all has a humorous twist looking back on this now over a decade later.

After mulling the book over during the next couple of days, I came to the stark realization that every single previous attempt I had made to lose weight involved cutting down on my overall fat intake, avoiding saturated fat in particular, eating lots of “healthy” whole grains, and counting every single calorie I put in my mouth. While this way of eating resulted in some initial, nominal weight loss, it always ended with my going back to my old eating habits and ultimately getting right back to the weight I was before I started (and eventually even heavier). I wanted to avoid that trap this go-round, and the low-carb, high-fat diet was the one weight-loss strategy I had never really tried before. Although I’d said just five years prior that I’d never go on the Atkins diet, here I was, primed to make it my New Year’s resolution to lose weight on the famous low-carb approach.

On January 1, 2004, I took the plunge and started on the Atkins diet. It was a complete shock to my system. Up to that point, I had been consuming, on a daily basis, two whole boxes of Little Debbie snack cakes; big plates of pasta; sausage, egg, and cheese biscuits from McDonald’s; honeybuns and giant chocolate chip cookies from 7-Eleven; and sixteen cans of Coca-Cola. Yes, I was a bona fide carb addict, through and through. I was easily consuming well over 1500 grams of carbohydrate in my diet every single day, and I didn’t even think twice about it. Is it any wonder my weight got up to over 400 pounds?

Now I was suddenly shifting my diet from that ungodly amount of sugary, processed carbs down to just 20 grams a day. If you don’t think that will have a physiological effect on your body, let me tell you—it does! I’ve never taken any drugs in my life, but if this comes even close to what it feels like to detox from crack cocaine or heroin, then remind me to never start.

Thankfully the pain of transitioning from my old diet to the Atkins diet only lasted a couple of weeks before I began feeling energetic and alive again. It was as if a dark cloud of despair had been lifted from my head and I realized that this was what “normal” was supposed to feel like. For the first time in my life, I began to feel hopeful that I was going to finally grab back the reins and take control of my weight and health.

Thanks mostly to repeated messages by the mainstream media, the Atkins diet has a reputation for being all about consuming gobs of meat, eggs, cheese, and bacon every single day. Contrary to popular belief, that is
not
the Atkins diet—not by a long shot! While the Atkins diet is too complicated to describe in just a couple of sentences, we’ll talk about it in more detail in chapter 2. For now, know that Dr. Atkins did not write about just cutting your carbohydrate intake, eating “low-carb” packaged foods, and consuming only meat, eggs, and cheese.

So how did being on the low-carb, high-fat Atkins diet work for me? By the end of the first month, I had shed a total of thirty pounds. Holy cow! At the end of the second month, when I’d started going to the gym to do something with all this extra energy I suddenly had surging through my veins, another forty pounds were gone. By the end of one hundred days, I had lost one hundred pounds, and I knew something special was happening.

Words cannot describe how I felt going through this incredible journey, and I truly will never be the same again. Although it wasn’t an easy road by any stretch of the imagination, I am so thankful I found the healthy low-carb lifestyle, because I went on to lose a total of 180 pounds in one year. More important than my weight loss, though, is the fact that low-carb living gave me my health back. All of those prescriptions I was taking for high cholesterol, high blood pressure, and breathing problems were history within nine months of being on the Atkins diet. Who says your health doesn’t improve on the low-carb lifestyle? (We’ll have plenty more to say about that later in this book.)

Let me express here my incredible gratitude to Dr. Atkins for helping to change my life through his diet. Since I read his book, my life hasn’t been the same. I’m honored and blessed to have a very popular health blog and three highly respected iTunes health podcasts dedicated to spreading the message of low-carb living.

Though I never had the privilege of meeting Dr. Atkins in person, none of the success I have seen would have been remotely possible without the inspiration and education that came from that amazing man. His legacy is still making ripples in the world over a decade after his tragic death due to an accidental fall on an icy New York City sidewalk. His memory lives on in those of us who have picked up the baton and continued the race for low-carb living. God bless you, Dr. Atkins, for saving my life and the lives of millions of others who are still benefitting from your passionate zeal about low-carbohydrate nutrition and what it can do for our health.

And hats off to Jackie Eberstein, a registered nurse who worked with Dr. Atkins for three decades in his New York City clinic and who continues to teach about low-carbohydrate lifestyles today. Additionally, Veronica Atkins has been instrumental in continuing the legacy of her late husband by creating the Veronica and Robert C. Atkins Foundation and funding research professorships at prominent universities around the United States, including the University of California, Berkeley; the University of Texas, Southwestern; Columbia University; the University of Michigan; Washington University; and Duke University.

Giving Back: Showing Others How I’m “Livin’ La Vida Low-Carb”

As 2005 rolled around and people began to comment on my very noticeable weight loss, they wanted to know how I did it. After telling my Atkins low-carb weight-loss success story at least a bazillion times, I finally decided I would create an online journal or website to talk about what I did and help others find the same success I did. I had barely even heard of a blog when I decided to start one in late April 2005, but a friend of mine told me how incredibly easy it was to set one up and start writing right away. Sharing my thoughts in written form had been a passion of mine since high school, long before the Atkins diet was ever on my radar screen. So it only made sense to combine my enthusiasm for and skill with the written word with my newfound commitment to healthy living the low-carb way. It was a match made in heaven, and I was ready to take on the world! And I’ve never looked back.

Almost immediately people began flocking to my new blog, which I dubbed
Livin’ La Vida Low-Carb
. The blog’s readership has grown exponentially since it first went online in April 2005, and it now reaches nearly 200,000 visitors each month. I’ve always been excited about educating, encouraging, and inspiring others who are overweight, obese, and unhealthy to do what I did. Because I’ve been there myself, I am able to share firsthand experiences of the struggles that come with being a sick, morbidly obese man, what it took to climb out of that hole, and the triumphs I experienced when I did. It’s my passion to be a beacon of hope for those who think, as I once did, that they are destined to be fat and unhealthy forever. Never, ever give up!

In October 2006, I began doing what I’m perhaps most famous for when I started my iTunes podcast,
The Livin’ La Vida Low-Carb Show with Jimmy Moore
. It has since become one of the top-ranked health shows on the Internet today with nearly 900 episodes featuring mostly informal interviews with the best and brightest names in diet, fitness, and health. I have two other iTunes podcasts—
Low-Carb Conversations with Jimmy Moore & Friends
and
Ask the Low-Carb Experts
—that I also use to spread the message of healthy living far and wide.

In August 2013, I released my book
Cholesterol Clarity: What the HDL Is Wrong with My Numbers?
with an internationally acclaimed publisher, Victory Belt Publishing. It features the expertise of my coauthor, Dr. Eric C. Westman, an internist and researcher from Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, as well as exclusive interviews with twenty-nine of the world’s foremost experts on cholesterol. I’ve been privileged to foster some truly meaningful relationships with a virtual who’s who of everyone who matters in the world of health. That includes Dr. Westman.

I first met him in person at a low-carb nutritional health science conference in Brooklyn, New York, in January 2006. I had been blogging for less than a year but had an intense desire to learn more about low-carb eating, which had helped me shed the pounds and given me my health back, so I could share it with my blog readers. I was invited to a symposium put on by the Nutrition and Metabolism Society, which featured extremely technical lectures from medical doctors, diet researchers, and various other experts. My eyes were completely glazed over by the medical jargon being thrown around. My education in political science and English wasn’t much help as I tried to make sense of it all.

When one of the lecturers started talking about a treatment concept known as PEP-C during his talk, the gentleman to my right leaned over to me and whispered, “Shouldn’t that be a Diet PEP-C?” That man was Dr. Eric Westman. Right then and there I knew there was something special about him. As I got to know him and heard the story of how he initially got interested in low-carb diets, I realized he had a similar drive to get this message out to the people who needed it most. And it was his experiences with patients like me, who found success in achieving weight loss and regaining their health by reading Dr. Atkins’ book, that led Dr. Westman to seek out answers about why the diet worked so well. That search led him to contact Dr. Atkins directly back in 1999.

Dr. Westman wrote a letter to Dr. Atkins, who called him and personally invited him to see how he treats patients with nutrition. So he took a trip to New York City to visit the Atkins Center for Complementary Medicine and observed how Dr. Atkins and his staff were helping patients suffering from obesity, diabetes, and many other chronic health issues using low-carbohydrate nutritional therapies as part of their medical treatment. Seeing all the incredible health improvements Dr. Atkins was getting in his patients, Dr. Westman asked if he would be interested in funding a study to scientifically demonstrate the effects of a low-carb, high-fat diet. He agreed, and Dr. Westman began to conduct the very first clinical trial on the Atkins diet.

The findings from the original pilot study, which followed fifty people on a low-carbohydrate diet over a six-month period, were presented at the American Heart Association’s annual meeting in Chicago, Illinois, in November 2002. It showed that patients on a low-carb, high-fat diet lost weight and improved their cholesterol levels. But Dr. Westman wanted to see how the results he was witnessing compared to those on the popular low-fat diet. So he followed up the pilot study with a full-fledged randomized, controlled trial consisting of 120 people who were taught how to follow a low-carb diet or a low-fat diet and adhered to it for six months. What he found was that both groups showed improvement, but the low-carb diet was better for weight loss and improved metabolic syndrome best. The results of that study were published in the
Annals of Internal Medicine
in 2004 and paved the way for a bevy of groundbreaking research on carbohydrate-restricted diets.

The Next Step: A Ketogenic Diet

So you might be thinking right about now, “Your story of transforming your weight and health is great and all, but what the heck does all of this have to do with the title of your book,
Keto Clarity
? I haven’t heard anything about that yet!” I’m so glad you asked. Once you understand our own experiences with nutrition and the positive impact that it can have on your health, then you’ll be ready to learn why a low-carb, high-fat diet may be just what you need to improve your health—and that is where the idea of keto (short for
ketogenic
) comes into play. Just as we did for cholesterol and heart disease in
Cholesterol Clarity
, we’re going to make the ideas behind keto and the reasons it works easy to understand and apply to your own situation.