Natural Fat Loss
Permanent Fat Loss & EFAs

For more than 20 years, like most Americans, I wrestled with my weight. As a teenager, I was underweight. When I hit my thirties, I became overweight.

My lifestyle as a business traveler – eating fast-food and indulging in fine restaurants – took its toll. I won the "fat middle" award that couldn’t be given back. Exposing my condition in a swimming suit was embarrassing. I began to understand the agony most women go through when bathing suit season comes each summer.

I started training with a professional body-builder. Over a 2-year period I lost 25 pounds and gained a good amount of muscle, yet I still held on to the "love handles." This demonstrated that adding muscle and even losing weight doesn’t automatically decrease body fat. I followed a "politically correct" high-carbohydrate, low-fat diet during this period. Later, after I stopped the intense body-building, I continued a similar diet.

My job was demanding. Food was one of the few pleasures I didn’t want to deny myself. I would eat little fat or sweets 5-days-a-week, then I would indulge on the weekends. This system took enormous willpower during the work week. After years of effort, I couldn’t understand why my excess waistline still wouldn’t come off. It didn’t appear "genetic" because my parents’ waistlines were slender.

Then, one day, I started awakening to new possibilities. While watching an old movie, I noticed that all the actors appeared to be in good shape. Although I knew Hollywood feeds us selected images, I started to wonder if something was different back then compared with now. Could the answer to the obesity epidemic be hidden in these old movies, I wondered. What was different back then?

Soon after watching some of the old movies, I visited a dog kennel, hoping to find a German Shepherd puppy. I had owned two previous German Shepherds over the years, and they had both developed hip disorders in later life. (This has long been considered a genetic weakness of German Shepherd breeding.)

I wanted to minimize the potential problem. So, I asked the kennel owner what could be done. What he said shocked me. His kennel virtually never found this disorder in their dogs – at any age. I didn’t believe him at first. Having heard that the disorder was a genetic problem, I asked how his results could be so good. His reply was very clear: "We feed them proper food – the type of food an animal in the wild would eat. The hip disorder has to be food-related, because it takes 5-10 years to develop."

This explanation sparked an explosion of new ideas, with a whole new train of thought. I started thinking about degenerative conditions that take many years for their effects to be seen.

The breeder then showed me what was in typical commercial dog food. One of the components is ground chicken feathers. "Only a starving dog would ever voluntarily eat these, and no responsible breeder would knowingly feed this to his dogs – regardless of how much advertising hype was used to describe them as good," he said.  From that moment, nutritional topics started taking on a different focus for me.

The solution to my waistline problem had to be powerful enough to fix the cause of the obesity. After months of thinking about this, it occurred to me that food processing could be the answer. If this was true, it also would answer many unanswered questions. It could explain why all the common approaches – like lots of vigorous exercise and low-fat, low-cholesterol diets – don’t really work.

 

For the first time, I started thinking about what was really going on. It was time to throw out all the popular theories and actually look at the problem. As a Life-Systems Engineer, I knew that any valid theory has to be based on real facts. The deeper I looked into it, the more I realized we are surrounded with nutritional misinformation:

 

• The low-fat, high-carbohydrate plan doesn’t work.

 

Too many people I know (including myself) remained overweight on it.

 

• The low-cholesterol concept doesn’t add up, either:

 

Research clearly shows that blood cholesterol doesn’t rise when high cholesterol food is eaten.

Several physiology books clearly state that there is no known cholesterol-sensing mechanism in the body.

The body doesn’t seem to adjust or control blood cholesterol levels directly.

One author said there should be a cholesterol sensor in the blood, and the absence of one was a genetic oversight. This is an excellent example of nutritional researchers being so sure of their theories that they’ll state them as truth – second-guessing God – even when it means ignoring the facts. If there is no cholesterol sensor in the bloodstream, (yet, there are sensors for many important substances that require regulation) then, like it or not, we must recognize that a cholesterol sensor is not required.

I started researching the literature and discovered that most recommendations we have been "fed" are based on limited studies with small groups of people. These special results have been generalized and applied to everyone – a matter of convenience overrunning logic.

I began to realize that we must be careful not to make generalizations based on elite groups, such as professional athletes. Although some specialized nutritional programs may work for them, these individuals are by no means representative of the general population.

Elite or specialized groups are not representative of the general population.

While listening to the radio, I once heard a guest say that the degree of flexibility between men and women is the same because world-class male gymnasts can do the splits as easily as world-class women gymnasts. Yet, it is generally conceded that the average man has much less flexibility than the average woman.

The one nutritional concept that seems to have virtually universal agreement is that many nutritional researchers feel the others are wrong. Credibility in the nutritional field has reached an all-time low, and no wonder, given the low success rates.

Our team’s personal experience illustrates the need for a completely different theory.

Our team’s conclusions have none of the inconsistencies of the popular theories. You will be able to draw your own conclusions as to both their correctness and effectiveness.

Let’s look at some popular misconceptions which have supported researchers’ invalid conclusions:

 

• My gut’s better than your gut

 

You may hear the argument that man’s gut is closer to the length of a vegetarian’s gut than to a carnivore’s. (Here we go comparing man with animals again.) The average human’s gut is proportionately many times longer than that of a strict carnivore (meat eater). Humans have a weaker acid concentration in the stomach (10 times weaker than a carnivore’s). Carnivores need a shorter, more powerful gut to quickly digest raw meat, bone and feathers. Humans can’t digest bone and feathers – that may be why we have no desire to eat them. Nor do we normally eat raw meat – so we wouldn’t need a shorter or more acidic gut.

However, people like to eat fish. Fish gives us necessary protein plus a few parent omega 3 EFAs and is easier for us to digest than red meat. Did primitive man rely heavily on fish? If he did, this could readily explain the difference in digestive systems between man and carnivores.

Most of us aren’t fortunate enough to obtain really fresh fish. Store-bought fish smells unpleasant. A "fishy" smell is a sign that the EFAs are going bad. Fresh fish has no smell and tastes buttery – not at all like most store-bought fish. If you don’t particularly like fish, it may be because you have never had truly fresh fish.

The fact that certain cultures like raw fish (sashimi and sushi are routinely served in Japan and many other countries) is direct verification that we may have had raw fish as our protein basis thousands of years ago.

Furthermore, we must account for the fact that man likes to eat meat, fish and fowl. Most of us do enjoy it frequently. Even if we stop eating meat for a while, our desire for it remains.

Unlike most animals, man is capable of eating many types of food. Animal protein plays a significant role in the human diet. We have teeth suited for eating meat as well as teeth for eating plants. We are called omnivores – because we are designed to eat both plants and animals!

 

• Ancient history argument

 

We sometimes hear the claim that 5,000 to 10,000 years ago man ate such and such .... This cannot be substantiated, because no complete or reliable records are available. Yet, several very important differences become clear.

• There were no man-made food preservatives, chemicals, or additives like we have today.

• Farming was done without the use of synthetic fertilizers or man-made pesticides.

• Commercial food processing didn’t exist.

Those people of long ago apparently received the full nutritional value from the food they ate. When these factors are accounted for, it is obvious that such comparisons aren’t "apples to apples." Nothing conclusive can be deduced from a comparison of diets then and now.

• "We’re all different"

Othr theories suggest that differences between blood types (A, B, AB, or O) are the reason food is metabolized differently. This goes back to the "We’re all different" school of thought. Are we really all that different? I have one heart; so does everyone I know. We can each live with only small variances in most important parameters. Sodium in the blood can range between 135 and 145 milli-equivalents per liter. So the sodium range varies just 4%. This is a rather narrow range. If it could vary by as much as 50%, then perhaps there would be some real differences – at least in physiological terms. If your sodium level was too "different" from the 4% range, you would surely die. Blood plasma calcium levels are rigidly regulated to stay within a 3% range.