Metabolic Health
Here Are 3 Nutritional Mistakes Caused My Metabolism to Malfunction.
Fortunately, I corrected “Fat Gain & Weak Muscles” by learning the truth and adopting sustainable lifestyle choices.
The Power of Learning from Mistakes
Who doesn’t make mistakes? Like many people, I also made numerous mistakes that caused me severe health issues and suffering in my younger years.
But, in hindsight, they were necessary for me to learn facts and grasp reality. Learning from mistakes and not repeating them helps us grow.
In a previous story, I shared my seven mental mistakes that made my life miserable.
In summary, they are overconsuming misinformation, not challenging beliefs, suffering from confusion, hedonistic tendencies, choosing wrong priorities, addictions, and unrealistic expectations.
In this story, I focus on the overconsumption of misinformation, particularly from nutrition science, shaking my beliefs and reducing my confidence in its methodologies.
I’d like to introduce these three mistakes that messed up my metabolism and caused unnecessary suffering for several years without going into scientific detail. I provided sufficient scientific evidence on these points in my previous articles.
Fortunately, I explored the viable solutions buried in the literature. Providentially, the old wisdom is more transparent nowadays, thanks to the freedom of information implemented by the Internet.
1 — Frequent Meals and Fancy Snacks
Traditional sources advised eating frequent meals hypothesizing the thermic effects of the food for burning calories.
In other words, the belief was that the more often we eat, the more calories we burn as part of the digestive process since our bodies need calories to digest our food. They associated fasting with starvation which was nonsense.
This speculation made sense to me. Therefore, I followed the wrong advice like millions of other people. However, this theory was missing a critical metabolic factor.
The missing part was the massive impact of insulin hormone causing fat accumulation much more than the caloric implications. Obsessing calorie counts, and ignoring the hormonal effects of food, was another blunder.
Initially, I used to eat three main meals and did not know about snacking in my childhood in the sixties.
However, when I started college in the seventies, many friends consumed a small amount of food during the breaks, like between breakfast and lunch, lunch and dinner, and before bedtime. It sounded so cool, so I joined the snacking bandwagon.
Miserably, in a year, I gained substantial fat and felt awful. Studying technology in those days, I had no idea about the human body and metabolism.
However, when I started learning about human anatomy and metabolism in science classes, I came across the impacts of hormones on the body and brain. Learning about the role of hormones, especially insulin and cortisol, was game-changing knowledge for me.
When I cut snacks, I felt a huge relief and lost some weight. However, the fundamental game-changing knowledge was learning about time-restricted eating coupled with a well-formulated ketogenic diet, including healthy fats, moderate bioavailable protein, and low carbs.
Refining this regime by experimentation, when I adapted my body to one nutritious meal a day and removed refined and unrefined carbs, I transformed my health to the desired state, as mentioned in several articles before.
2 — Refined Carbs and Excessive Sugar
The biggest mistake for me was believing that carbohydrates as essential for survival. When I learned that carbs were not crucial, I got upset and even angry with myself and those authorities who misinformed us for many years.
It was like an intellectual and emotional abuse in my psyche. Even fiber was not essential for me, but it is another story for next time.
However, rather than blaming others, I took personal responsibility and learned more about the role of carbs and how they affect our metabolism. Especially learning about the risks of refined carbs quickly converting into sugar was helpful.
Ironically, around 80% of my energy came from carbs, 19% from proteins, and only about 1% from fats hidden in vegetables and a few nuts, which I ate with fear. Another annoyance was the fear of healthy fats created by authority figures with misinformation.
The most extensive damage to my metabolism was done by so-called healthy fruit and vegetable juices full of sugar. When I learned the harmful effects of excess glucose, I removed sugar from my tea and coffee that I used to consume about ten cups of a day. It was a quick gain. Within a few months, I started losing weight.
Then, cutting fruit juice and later vegetable juices made a significant positive impact. However, eliminating desserts and grains, mainly by cutting bread, pasta, noodles, lasagna, potatoes, cakes, donuts, cookies, rice, and even honey, helped optimize my blood sugar levels and insulin profile. It was the first step to addressing my insulin resistance issues and reducing visceral fat.
Later, exploring and practicing a traditional ketogenic diet, 70% healthy fat and 30% bioavailable protein, helped me become fat-adapted, leptin perceptive, and insulin sensitive. Removing carbs giving 80% of my energy was the best choice.
Contrary to traditional beliefs, cutting carbs did not kill me. Instead, it helped me transform my metabolism and flourish. Customizing my diet based on my needs, genetic makeup, and lifestyle goals was the best investment in my health and well-being. It was the catalyst to resolving 12 entangled health issues leading to a satisfying life.
3 — Fear of Healthy Fats
Like millions of misinformed and vulnerable people, I feared fats thinking they were evil for our health. Listening to self-claimed nutritional gurus instead of observing and tuning my body was an enormous mistake. It was my ignorance of not doing due diligence and exclusively acting on beliefs.
I accepted this naive mistake. Again, rather than blaming the information sources, I took personal responsibility to learn about the function and impact of healthy fats on the body.
My findings were eye-opening. Saturated fats were not the root cause of cardiovascular diseases, even though they have a causal effect. However, anything in the body, including water and some healthy nutrition in excess or deficient amounts, could have causal effects on a damaged system.
Therefore, blaming saturated fats for cardiovascular diseases was unfair and irrelevant, forgetting the criticality of inflammation mainly caused by metabolic disorders.
The body is designed to metabolize fat and use it as a primary energy source. Every cell in the body needs fat molecules and cholesterol to function. Organs, including muscle and skin, need fat.
Hormones need fat to balance. The brain and nerves need fat to perform. For me, cutting healthy fat was equivalent to depriving the body of its essential nutrient.
When I removed the fear of fat, especially after observing people who thrived on ketogenic diets since the 1920s and learning about the people in old cultures like Innuits who survived with high fat through anthropological studies, my body started functioning and performing much better.
When I increased my fat intake to 70% of my energy source, I gained a fat-adapted metabolism, using stored fat easily for energy and not making me fat anymore. The best part was gaining mental clarity and improving my neurological functions through ketosis, a by-product of a high-fat diet, time-restricted eating, and reduced carbs.
Conclusions and Takeaways
These three items might sound so simple and even trivial from the outset. However, they play a massive role in our metabolic health, causing millions of people to become obese.
All these points revolve around one single item: the hormonal effects of insulin on our metabolism to keep the bloodstream healthy by removing excess glucose seen as toxic to the body’s survival.
In hindsight, the solution looks so simple and neat. Just replacing refined carbs with healthy fat for energy and having adequate bioavailable protein to provide the building blocks for the body was the gist of the solution.
This crucial information was hidden in the body of knowledge and manuscripts of ancient wisdom.
I regret missing such a simple, viable, and doable solution caused by excessive noise created intentionally or unintentionally in some cases, ironically in scientific language.
Despite all my incapacitating suffering, I still don’t blame others and circumstances for my misery. I should have been more diligent by questioning misinformation. As this information was hidden in the literature seemed to be deliberately buried by people for various motives that we understand better now.
However, fortunately, it was not too late for me. I hope it is not for my readers too. Via various serendipitous encounters, I learned about facts and created my reality preventing myself from metabolic diseases
. Unfortunately, I was so close to a metabolically broken diabetic situation at its onset.
However, my bold and corrective actions substantially reduced the risks and put me in a metabolically flexible position. It is inspiring and empowering to learn from mistakes.
Therefore, I passionately pass along my insights. When Things Fell Apart, Three Attributes Brought Me Back on My Feet.
Here’s How a Mature-Age Couple Reversed Diabetes and Trimmed Their Bodies with Lifestyle Habits.
Here’s How I Got Healthier and Smoother Skin via 5 Lifestyle and Holistic Health Methods.
Thank you for reading my perspectives. I wish you a healthy and happy life.
As a new reader, please check my holistic health and well-being stories reflecting my reviews, observations, and decades of experiments optimizing my hormones and neurotransmitters. I write about health as it matters. I believe health is all about homeostasis.
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