This week I'm gonna attempt to hack my cholesterol results, using something
called the Feldman protocol, and it's starting right now. Hey, guys. Welcome to
A.D. Keto. My name is Aaron. This is the channel where you can watch a weird dad
do the ketogenic diet. I do some keto food vlogs, I talk a little bit about
keto science, and I do some keto product reviews. If this is your first time here,
please consider subscribing, and if you do, be sure to click the bell icon, so you
get a notification whenever I upload new content. I'm going to do the Feldman
protocol this week. If you're not familiar with the Feldman protocol, it is
a way of kind of "hacking" your cholesterol results, over the course of
just as few as three days. And it was created by this guy named Dave Feldman,
who is not a scientist, he's not a medical professional. Dude's an engineer,
and put his engineer's brain into figuring out what was going on with his
cholesterol. He, like me, is a hyper- responder, and you can read all about
this stuff over at his website which is cholesterolcode.com. You can also check
out some of his presentations that he's given, talking about this stuff. Really
fascinating, especially for someone like me, who's kind of always had high
cholesterol, but saw it go even higher when he started a low carb / keto diet.
CholesterolCode goes into a lot of the different things he's found, but the
thing that I'm most interested in, and the thing I'm gonna try this week, and that
I'm going to document here in this video, is called the Feldman protocol. And the
premise is this: your lipid system is a dynamic system that is used to deliver
energy to your body, and for people on low carb diets, that usually means that
LDL goes way up, like it did for me. And
the basic theory behind it is that for the three days prior to your blood draw,
the higher your fat... the more fat you eat, the lower your cholesterol will be. The
purpose of this experiment is basically to hopefully stop my doctors from
pushing statins on me. I'm hopeful that at the end of these three days, the
results that I get will kind of ease their minds. So I'll show you right here
my numbers from before I started keto. These were my cholesterol numbers
when I was on atorvastatin. 20 milligrams of atorvastatin. My total
cholesterol was under 200, HDL was about 50, and LDL was around 119. Triglycerides
were about 138. These numbers really pleased my doctor, but I felt miserable.
I really felt bad. I had a lot of muscle aches and a lot of foggyheadedness.
I chalked it up to just getting old, and didn't really realize that they were
side effects of the statins that I was on. I've got a whole video up here about
my history with statins and high cholesterol that you can check out, but
I'll show you... I'll show you again, here is my most recent blood panel. This is
after going off my statin medications. This is about after...about 10 months of
keto. The most striking number is that total cholesterol of 373, which a lot of
people look at and sort of...don't know what to make of it. But you can see that
my HDL has gone up, my triglycerides have plummeted. I'm gonna bring these numbers
back at the end of this experiment, and see where things end up. But for now, I'm
going to just eat over 4,000 calories a day for the next three days, keeping
everything keto as much as I can. I'm going to vlog that, and it should be
interesting. So I will see you guys tomorrow morning. Top of the morning!
Tuesday morning. I'm gonna start packing in the food here in just a minute.
There's a couple things I have to avoid. Coconut oil and MCT oil have been shown
to confound this experiment a little bit, as well as coffee. So for the next three
days, I'm gonna be draggin' Draggin' butt. I stepped on
the scale this morning to see where I was at the beginning of this,
and I was at 218, which is pretty high. About as high....about as much as I have weighed
for the last couple months. But I wanted to just track where I ended up after
this thing, so I'm probably gonna be well over 220 by the time this thing's over.
I've got all my food pre logged. I like... spent the last couple days, like, trying
to figure out exactly what I was gonna eat, to try to make it a little bit
easier.
There it is. Six sausages, six eggs, with some EBTB. I also had four tablespoons of
peanut butter, three tablespoons of Kerrygold butter with cinnamon. Off to a
fatty, fatty start.
Lunchtime! I have got in this bag two hard-boiled eggs, beautifully colored
from Easter. This used to have a half a cup of macadamia nuts in it, and now it
doesn't. I've been nibbling on them most of the
morning. I also have Trader Joe's oven-baked cheese bites. These are really
good. And this bag of pork rinds. Kind of
slumming it today on this first day for lunch. But it's gonna pack in some
calories, and it's gonna get me where I want to be. Time for dinner. Gonna reverse-
sear a steak. I feel like I can eat it. I'm not feeling too crazy-bad. So all signs
point to yes.
So I'm wrapping up the first day. I don't feel too terrible. I had a ton of
stuff to eat today. I had a big old New York strip steak for dinner, and this is
the last bit of food that I'm having today. It is Keto Connect's cookie dough
recipe, that they just put out. Timing couldn't have been better, because I was
looking all around for a fat bomb recipe that did not have coconut oil. This is
just butter, cream cheese, almond flour, stevia, and erythritol. I'll put a link to it
right up here. But so good. When I finish this, I will be sitting at 4,674
calories on the day. Here are my macros. Everything looks pretty good. I'm feeling
okay. I feel like I could do this two more days in a row, so that's I'm gonna
do. See you tomorrow morning!
All right, so day two. I'm doing up some pork belly!
All right, guys. So it is day two. I'm back for lunchtime in my favorite parking
lot once again. I'm gonna have me my cheese... cheese bites, a half a bag of pork
rinds today, and then I have two hard-boiled eggs. And there's a little
less than half a cup of macadamias, because I just can't help myself.
All right, so I just hammered those items. Couple of eggs, my pork rinds, and my
cheese bites. The plan for dinner tonight is some 80/20 ground beef. I'm going to make
four patties -- two for tonight's dinner, and um... I think two for lunch tomorrow.
But tonight, definitely ground beef and some more of that cookie dough. I was so
excited to eat the rest of that cookie dough when I got home that I just didn't even
think to shoot it. But I'm about to put burgers in the oven for my dinner.
It'll put me at around forty seven hundred calories for the day.
Okay, so dinner is in front of me. it is 1.2 pounds of 80/20 ground beef, which I
made into two burgers that sort of fell apart a little bit. So I've got a couple
of patties, and then just a mound of little employee burgers. So just a little
bit of AlternaSweets with it, and then I'm gonna be done, and it's gonna
put me at about 4,600 calories today. God! 4,600. That's a lot of calories.
Hey guys, so it's the end of the second day of this protocol. I had a decent day. I
didn't sleep well last night. A lot of restlessness. I didn't... I probably
got like 4 hours of sleep, a lot of tossing and turning. Don't know why. Might
have been just been because I had so much food in me, but I'm feeling pretty
tired right now. I got through the day, managed to pack away four thousand seven
hundred and seventy nine calories. There you can see my macros -- almost perfect
keto macros. But man, I ate a lot. Tomorrow I'm planning to eat even more. I'm gonna
crack 5,000 calories for the last day of this thing, and then blood work on Friday.
So I'll see you guys in the morning. I'm going to bed early. Good night. I'll see
you in the morning.
Top of the mornin'. Okay, third day. Day number three. Day three. Sooooo... Not
feeling too terrible. I slept a little bit better last night, but
I gotta say, I'm excited to be done after today.
So I'm home for lunch. I'm gonna do up two of the last hard-boiled eggs from
Easter, half a cup of macadamias, and six servings of the KC cookie dough.
(I made another batch.)
I'm done eating! I came home from work, and I was so excited to dig into the
rest of that cookie dough that I ate it, and I ate a hamburger patty without
documenting any of it -- no photos, no video, and then after that, I ate two more
burger patties, bringing my total number of calories for this third and final day
of the protocol to five thousand two hundred and seventy seven. Here you can
see my macros. It's a whole lot of fat, which is good. And so I stopped eating at
7:30 tonight. By the time I go for my blood work tomorrow morning, I will have
been fasting for thirteen hours, which is perfect -- right between the twelve and
fourteen that the protocol kind of calls for. So I'm very excited tomorrow morning
to get my blood work. I'm most excited to be done eating so much. I have felt okay.
I've...but I've felt tired the last few days, I think mostly because I have had
zero coffee. Normally I have a least two cups a day, but I've been taking that down to zero. So I've
been a little fatigued, but I'm very excited to see what my numbers look like.
I won't know for a few days after the blood work is drawn, but I can't wait to
see. So I'll see you tomorrow morning. I'm gonna weigh myself and see how I did on
the scale. I can't imagine it went down, but we'll see. So see you in the morning.
Okay, so I'm here. I'm gonna get my blood work done this morning. When I woke up
this morning, I was... I weighed in at about 220 point 8 pounds, but then, you know
what? I took a shower, and I got out, and I weighed myself again, and it scales said
218.8. I'm not too worried about the weight. I knew I would crack into the 220s, but
not worried about it. So I'm gonna go get my blood drawn, and then the next time I
see you we'll be talking about the results!
All right, guys. So it's been a few days since I've finished up the protocol, and I
wanted to share with you my results. First, let's take a look at what I ate
this week. A review of all those calories I packed away. I started day 1 at 4,600
calories, and just ramped it up from there. And again, here are my numbers from
November 2017. And then after this 3-day protocol, here are my new numbers. My
cholesterol actually went up, which was confusing. I expected it to go way down,
and I was initially disappointed. But then I looked at a couple other of these
results, a couple other of these changes. My triglycerides are as low as they've ever
been in my entire life. Remnant cholesterol is at eight. Single digits,
which is very good. I tweeted to Dave Feldman, and I was like,
"What do you make of this? Like, why didn't my cholesterol drop? And he replied with
this. You know, he said that my triglycerides and HDL, plus my LDL,
definitely puts me in lean mass hyper responder territory. And he said that if
I am a lean and athletic low carber, you know, I do run. I don't know how
exactly lean I would consider myself, but I do run quite a bit, between 12 and 15
miles a week right now. He said that these numbers, as far as he is
concerned, make a perfect mechanistic sense. So there's that. All in all, it was
a very interesting experiment. I think at some point, I'd love to do the next tier
of this protocol, which is eating very low calories for three days, followed by
blood test number one, then three very high-calorie days, followed by blood test
number two. Those results would actually be very, very interesting, compared to
what I had this time, where all I had to go on was blood work from six months ago. My
goal when I started was to have my doctor lay off with the pushing the
statins. And I went in to discuss these results, and he never once mentioned
statins, which is a major victory, as far as I'm concerned. I think he saw my
triglycerides, saw that my HDL was really high, and everything was... those were two
markers that are pretty important, so no mention of
statins, which was nice. So I hope you guys enjoyed this video. Do check out
Dave Feldman's website. It's cholesterolcode.com. There's all kinds of
fascinating research going on over there, and that's gonna wrap it up for this
video, guys! Hope you enjoyed it. I hope you have a fantastic da,y and I will see you
next time.