Blog Archives

“Only when we are no longer afraid do we begin to live.“

Dorothy Thompson

Happy New Year to everyone. You will notice it’s been a while since my last post on this blog. One of my resolutions for the new year is to share more about my personal journey into ancestral health as it happens. My family and I are still living the life-style and still reaping the benefits.

In case you wondered, I have maintained my weight loss, indeed many people comment that I have leaned out further recently. This makes it 18 months I have maintained normal weight. By summer it will be two years, which will be a major milestone achievement. Most studies show that the vast majority of slimmers are back to their old weight or heavier two years after achieving their target weight. Here is a nice article by Ned Kock on this topic with a few links to some of those studies:

All Diets Succeed At First, And Eventually Fail – Ned Kock

My current area of interest is how I reestablish what I call metabolic resilience. What I mean by this is that my metabolism is back to a state where maintaining my weight does not require me to carefully manage the macronutrients my diet. Don’t get me wrong, I consider my diet both healthful and enjoyable, and easy to maintain for the long term. But I would also term it a therapeutic diet. I believe my low-carb diet allows me to maintain a healthy body composition by working around my insulin sensitivity. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say my diet works around my glucose intolerance. In any case, my low-carb diet does not directly address my metabolic weaknesses. At least not to the degree that I would like. It would be good to know that my weight is not going to suffer, if I find myself in a situation where I have to rely on less than ideal food choices for more than a few days.

Jimmy Moore’s example has caused me to reflect a great deal on this (check out his Livin’ La Vida Low-Carb website). Jimmy achieved an incredible weight loss of 180 Lbs back in 2004. The experience made him a passionate advocate for low-carb living, and he is one of the most energetic and prolific activists in the ancestral community today. Despite maintaining a low-carb diet, Jimmy started putting the weight back on. Then last year to address this he started his now famous nutritional ketosis experiment, which has been very successful for him. He discusses this in this episode of his podcast.

Jimmy often describes himself as metabolically deranged to a point where he cannot tolerate any starch and very few carbs of any kind. Whilst I am very happy for him that he is getting back to normal weight through nutritional ketosis, I feel it would help Jimmy and many others if someone came up with a way to measure and track the relative metabolic resilience of an individual.

I don’t believe permanent ketosis is a natural state for the human body. I do believe it’s effective and healthy for some of us to stay in ketosis to maintain normal weight. But wouldn’t it be better if we recovered the ability to switch our metabolism between states without consequences for our weight?

So this is what I am exploring right now. Soon you will see posts here about exercise protocols as well as diet and supplementation strategies for metabolic conditioning. I will also explore how you can measure and track your metabolic resilience starting with insulin sensitivity.

That’s it for now. Why don’t you share with me and other readers what you are focusing on in 2013? Please leave a comment.