I thought I knew everything I needed to know to be healthy
I thought I knew what I needed to eat I was wrong I thought I knew how often I needed to eat
I was wrong I thought I knew about food quality I was wrong I think the food that I was eating
and the quality of the food that I was eating was actually very very poor
and I mean I used to eat two to three times a day maybe even four or five depending if I had snacks
or not versus today I eat once a day clearly what I thought I understood about eating and food
was incorrect but add to that that I thought it was important and critical to exercise in order
to lose weight I was wrong I lost all of the weight that I lost without exercising at all
now if you remember correctly I started off with a hip issue even if I wanted to exercise back then
I wasn't able I couldn't even step up on a sidewalk much less do vigorous exercise the
only thing that I would did a little bit of during the period of time that I lost weight was walking
and considering that I had done much more strenuous things to lose weight in my history
I'm I know for a fact that it wasn't the walking because
for seven six to seven months before I actually started losing the weight I had been walking every
day religiously because of my hip and my my pain in my hip trying to help myself to be able to sit
like what I'm doing right now so that i could work and the only thing it gave me was relief
to be able to sit but my weight remained stable the entire time I had actually given up on losing
weight nothing had worked before and I didn't see any good reason why anything would start to work
at that stage in my life but i had a goal solve my hip the pain that I was living
so knowledge is the key to every breakthrough in history we learned something and things change and
what did I learned that changed the direction of my life I learned sugar causes inflammation
my hip was inflamed and sugar was contributing to its staying inflamed that pain that I was
living every single day was amplified because of the garbage I was eating
I learned that sugar causes weight gain I learned that after the fact
but it still helped me to understand that there was no escaping that if I eat sugar
some of that sugar was going to be stored as fat even if I ate less than 20 grams of carb per day
so pointing that out I want everyone to think about that even if you eat a very small amount
of sugar some of it gets stored and the reason for that is that sugar is toxic so
sugar gets stored because if it's more than five grams of sugar in your bloodstream at any point in
time that's very dangerous now if I eat anywhere up to five grams in like even if I eat one gram
when I eat that one gram of sugar since I already have five grams in my blood because that's my body
keeps me at I've already pushed my body beyond and some of that's gonna get stored some of it's going
to get used and as much as possible my body's going to try to get rid of us because our body
has multiple systems to manage sugar there's storage there's use and there's elimination
and they're always at work trying to see how can it keep us in a good place because
we are eating sugar despite not needing to eat sugar because our body makes sugar and it makes
all the sugar that you need now what our body can't push through us so for elimination
it uses energy and stores oasis as fat so learning that sugar was as much of a toxin in my body
as alcohol or cocaine helped me to change my beliefs about sugar being harmless
because all of a sudden I realized that when I was a kid and I think back on like my behavior
when I was in the kitchen searching for junk food now my parents didn't buy junk food when I
was a kid being from the Caribbean and you know growing up in the islands it's it's not about
junk it's about eating healthy food it's keeping yourself alive there's not money to be wasted on
foolishness so we didn't snack and do desserts in our household when i was growing up because
my parents didn't see that as something that was important to do so we ate food and we were
thankful that we had food to eat and I'm actually very grateful to my parents for that because
that beginning did keep the amount of junk food that i was eating low for the beginning of my
life now of course school did impact that because once I started to go to school and I had friends
who had you know cookies and chocolate bars and all this junk and I did get exposed to that but
on my day-to-day at home I still had my dose of sugar so I'm not blaming my friends I had rice and
potatoes and and pasta and sandwiches I was having for for lunch and breakfast sometimes I'd have
bread with my breakfast um and of course there was like the cereal that I had for breakfast so
there was lots of occasions in my house that I was eating sugar and this constant scavenger hunt that
I ended up on once these extra kind of fun sugars got added to the mix turned my life into this like
need to quench this I need some some sugary something right and obviously as I got older
and I had more access because you know you get an allowance and now you can buy things at school
and at the corner store and whatever and all of a sudden on my own I was buying junk food and it was
years of poor eating that followed more junk was added to my daily routine and I remember that
there was a period of years in my life years where if I didn't have a chocolate bar that was strange
so uh chocolate's my thing right I love chocolate and
and I ended up eating it on a daily basis for many many years and that toxicity of sugar like alcohol
has an excitatory effect on the brain causing the release of dopamine and other neurotransmitters
that cause you to want to have more and more and more so it's this weird thing right because our
body makes sugar but it makes it in such small amounts that it's manageable and it gets the
job done which is quick energy that we need to do certain things but when we have it in excess
it touches so many different processes because it's also part of our system for taking care
of ourselves and repairing the system when something goes wrong if you break something
cut something hurts something in your body sugar gets deployed if you're stressing and worried
sugar gets deployed so there's lots of reasons and times where our body is using sugar to help us to
manage things and mood being one of them and that the release of some sugar can be good for
us on certain occasions but then if we're having it all the time it can also become very negative
so that I learned that I was addicted was the biggest learning that changed my commitment to
healthy living because I'm not supposed to be addicted to like I first of all I
didn't go through life trying to be addicted to anything I went through my entire life trying to
never be addicted to anything and that's a punch in the face to find out that you do all this work
to not be addicted to anything and then find out and things that I could I'm not addicted
to cigarettes I'm not addicted to alcohol I'm not addicted to any other drug and haven't tried
any other drug I made a conscious decision to keep myself away from things that were
addictive to find out that food companies have been lying to us about a the fact that
and this food companies it's the government it's whoever that when they say that we need to eat
carbohydrates that's a lie our body makes all that we need so the fact that this information
is being pushed towards us as something we need sugar is a necessary something for us to eat
and then it keeps us all in a position where we are slaves to sugar was very frustrating for me
to learn because all of a sudden my healthy way of living my desire to be a an addiction-free person
was no longer the case and I used to laughingly and jokingly say I'm a chocoholic until I actually
now understand that I really was addicted to chocolate and sweets and bread and pasta and
rice and all these things that used to make me fidgety at night because I needed to have that hit
right and I can't be addicted to something if I'm trying to help other people manage their life
and their addictions and I need to keep myself on track what are you that's incompatible with being
an addict are you a celebrity are you a pastor are you a teacher are you a doctor are you a parent
do you have anybody relying on you
and understand that if I have people relying on me
but I'm addicted to something and I'm not doing anything to fix that
I lose some credibility so I took the steps I needed to take to get that under control
I'm no longer addicted to sugar it's not easy right because you let it in and it grabs you again
you do have to be on top of things but wellness workers I want you to understand that better to
be on top of things and live your life in a way that you're not creating internal damage that's
gonna harm you it could be a week down the road it could be a year it could be 15 years
when it hits like how my hip hit it destroys everything your health is the most important thing
that you have so let's fight for it so another long comment of the day today and if you want to
be in the comments of the day all you need to do is post a relevant comment and I will read them
out like this so garbage man says yeah that's more or less what I decided to do I first added fat
and removed the carbs and then I learned about food quality beyond macros though I had already
been watching Dr Berg's videos before I went keto it was serendipitous that when I diagnosed was
diagnosed diabetic I had already seen his channel regularly as I went along I learned about fasting
and exercise in context in no particular order so I quickly learned that over and above macros food
quality and timing mattered if anything would have helped when I started it would have been
a very short and sweet start here page or video it would have said something like prioritized
protein how much is right for you lower your carbs and not adding sugar starch on grains
eat more fat to substitute for the energy that was in the carbs throw out any seed oils and replace
with healthy oils learn more about food quality learn more about fasting learn more about exercise
each one of the first four steps should have more info to take the audience down
the rabbit hole as far as comfortable for the audience member at that time these
more info options would basically be what's in the learn more about food quality deep dive
and I've probably left stuff out but that's how I would expect the journey
to be logically structured out you can't do it all at once so start with in my opinion
the first four the real the really confusing part for most people would be preconceptions of what's
healthy like healthy heart oils healthy fruits and grains etc. they really should probably be
mentioned up front and the audience encouraged to deep dive into those topics as time and effort
permits it would be a shame to buy a bunch of stuff and find out you bought unhealthy stuff
after you've bought it that would probably be a good reason for an overview upfront my ultimate
guide would probably be a web page with the above section that has an introductory video and links
on each or as necessary pages with links to videos I'm sure many content creators have wrestled with
this that's why personal coaching is so much more effective it would be awesome to develop
some public domain courseware from what I can tell only intellectual property issues would spoil it
and what I want to say to that is that he talked about grains and fruits and I feel like that's
something that i didn't mention in this video but I will just point out that fruit was another huge
learning curve for me because we've all heard about the fact that high fructose corn syrup is
dangerous unhealthy we should stay away from it like the plague but then we ignore the fact that
high fructose corn syrup is anything that's around the 50 50 glucose fructose and interestingly
that's what sugar is is 50 50 glucose fructose but it's also like the makeup of most fruit is 50 50.
so we tell people to run away from high fructose corn syrup but then encourage them to eat fruit
which has the same makeup and I feel like we are mistaken in our understanding about
whether or not fruit is healthy obviously I have videos on that if you want to check those out
um so I'm just I'm just pointing it out here that that was another thing that I learned in my stay
away from sugar I already didn't like fruit and it just reinforced that i don't need to make myself
like fruit but I used to force myself to eat fruit and I then stopped doing that wellness
warriors healthy prioritize health over the taste of food that's what you need to do to make sure
that you stay on track keep yourself in the best possible position to have a long healthy life I
love making these videos for you guys talk to you next week