UPDATE: Texas in April, Diet & Coffee (Patreon)

Hey everyone,  I hope you're enjoying your morning. Mine has been good but I'm suffering from a little coffee anxiety (not actual anxiety from drinking too much coffee, but I only have 2 sips left and don’t plan to drink anymore so I have to somehow be satisfied with only two sips.) 

It's been a while without a video and I plan to have one up by the end of next week (As for what it’s about, not sure yet - see below). For now, I figure an update is in order.

[Note: I'm not affiliated with any of the links in here]

Where I've Been  
I spent most of April back in Texas. This was an awesome trip because I got to catch up with family and experiment with cheap good quality food. 

Over here in Tokyo, I can find grass fed beef at a specialty store (National Azabu) for around 500 yen (≈$4.50) per 100g, but at the farmer's market in Houston I was getting about 1lb (450g) for $6.00. Not to mention they had a bunch of different cuts, bones and even organ meats. 

If you happen to be in the area, the two places I bought from were: 

https://www.katerraexotics.com/ (Beef & Bison) https://www.libertyprovisions.com/  (Beef & Lamb) (I picked up a pasture raised chicken from another seller)

Then again, if you happen to be in Japan, https://www.themeatguy.jp/ has some reasonably priced grass fed beef & even bones and tallow. (No organ meats however.) I haven't tried anything from them yet but plan to soon. 

(I know this is not a fun post for my vegan/vegetarian friends... One of the big values of these animal products is their fat soluble Vitamins (A, D, E & K2). FYI, a good non-animal source of these is fermented foods. For example Sauerkraut gets you Vitamin A & Natto gets you Vitamin K2)

After loading up on some fat soluble, vitamin rich, high quality meats & bones, I headed over to my parents' house to stay with them for most of the time. Of course I wanted to just see my parents as it had been more than a year, but I also wanted to spruce up their diet a bit. It was a good opportunity to implement what I’ve learned from researching and personally testing different diets and foods these past few years.  My Mom had been interested in health since I can remember and luckily, thanks to her, my diet growing up was better than most. We mostly ate home cooked food à la Mom. Fast Food came once a month at best, we  rarely had sodas or sugared cereals (Froot Loops, Coco Cap'n Crunch, and if we did it was to be had for dessert). 

My parents have already been in decent shape and at a pretty healthy weight (my Dad does have GERD which I’ll talk about in another post). But it's hard to know if there's room for improvement without trying to make some improvements.

The easiest way to convince someone that X diet is better than Y diet would be to show them -- to have them experience how they feel normally for one day, and then the very next day have them experience exactly how they would feel six months into a new diet. Of course this is impossible without a time machine... so the plan was to modify their diet for 3 weeks and hopefully how good they are feeling on the diet would be apparent enough to want to continue it without me being there/nagging them over the internet.   Here are the changes we made:

-Cut out grains / grain products (Bread, Crackers, Graham Crackers, Cereals) 

*To "wean" them off bread, I swapped out their bread with some sprouted bread that my sister introduced me to. [Link to brand - https://bit.ly/2JZdx6e] Sprouting reduces the amount of Phytic acid in the bread, which makes minerals harder to absorb. [https://bit.ly/2KJv6IS] Sprouting also "predigests" the gluten. [https://bit.ly/2rrh8lU] That said, the plan is to swap to this, then wean off of it. 

-More Good Fats: Stick to Ghee/Grass fed butter for cooking, Olive Oil only cold on Salads, have plenty of Avocados around the house, Take 2 1/2 Tsp of Cod Liver Oil each day. This is the Cod Oil brand I use: https://bit.ly/2GkdIrm 

-Eliminate Sugar: Cut out except for the occasional Larabar [https://bit.ly/2rqdzwB - There's a couple varieties that are just nuts and fruit, this one is just cashews and dates. A good snack for the transition period, but at 15g of sugar per 48g bar it's better if these get eliminated down the road]. Sugar wasn't too much of an issue, as my Mom has been against Sugar since I was a lad. (Thanks in part to the book “Sugar Busters”) 

-Fiber: My Mom was already big on vegetables so no problems here. I did implement some gentle prodding to reduce starchy vegetables like potatoes and carrots.

-Nuts: I replaced the snack-y items (Chips, Crackers) with nuts (Mainly just Pistachios and Macadamias. Not peanuts - due to Lectins). Nuts are easy to overeat, so this is something that needs tweaking, but I thought it was better to be in a position where if they were going to overeat, it would be on nuts rather than crackers, chips, bread etc. I ate a few too many nuts myself while there. 

-No PUFA’s: Throw out any PUFA's (vegetable oils) that had snuck their way into the pantry. Olive oil is OK if unheated (and olives are technically fruits).

-Salt: Lowering carbohydrates lowers insulin, lowered insulin increases salt excretion. Also renal salt preservation mechanisms are weaker in older people. Just said to use as much salt as you want, and most definitely don’t consciously restrict salt. (Actually I think I should have been more pushy on this and actually had them track their salt to make sure they’re getting enough.)

-Intermittent Fasting/TRE - Since both my parents’ work ends later at night, this tricky, but the plan was to try and finish eating 30 minutes earlier each night. This was the hardest thing to implement.

Results?
I didn’t want to tack on things to track to complicate the process, so unfortunately I don’t have any weight loss/fat loss blood work data. In retrospect, I really wish I had tracked a couple metrics as I an objective measure of progress would add motivation.  
About a week in, my Mom said "Hey... I'm never hungry anymore..." and that she had more energy. Later on she said she was happier in general (less mood swings).
I just checked in with my Dad and he said "I may have more energy. I seem to be tolerating my workouts pretty well. And I don't get that "ugh" feeling after eating a bunch of breads or baked goods." Though, earlier on when I asked him how the diet was making him feel, he said it was hard to tell as he’s had a constant stomach ache for a while now, thanks to GERD. 

Difficulties?
My Mom, while feeling good on the diet, recently told me she was experiencing some constipation. She was worried that all the fatty cheese and bacon, while delicious, was the culprit and that maybe she's just naturally more cut out for a vegetarian low fat high carb diet. I'd guess that the problem was coming from her body not being used to this new kind of diet composition, and/or too much cheese and nuts.
While I was cooking for them I focused a bit too much on making everything taste good and maybe went too liberal on the cheese. (Especially since CostCo has these huge blocks of KerryGold grass-fed cheese for super cheap.)
Honestly, had I stopped eating cheese & dairy in general in Japan because it doesn't make me feel that great, and it does make me feel a bit stopped up!  What’s funny is cheese gives my good friend in Tokyo the opposite problem. Sounds like that could be a good topic for a video.
What I suggested the following: 

▪Cut out cheese and bacon, and replace them with a bunch of fiber!

▪Let your focus be to pile on the fiber rather than cutting out fat. Load up on broccoli, asparagus, brussel sprouts, green leafy vegetables(great for a huge raw salad). Avoid letting the increase in fiber come from carrots, yams/starchy items.

▪Don't let your added fiber source be from fruit... It's way too much sugar per bit of fiber provided. (It's not reasonable to tell you to cut out your fruit snack, I just mean don't take "up your fiber" to mean "up your fruit")

▪Don't overdo it on the nuts

▪Reduce non-butter dairy (i.e. Reduce casein)

▪Put as much salt as you can enjoy... Since you're older and on a lower carbohydrate diet, your body isn't holding on to salt as much. Older people's kidneys naturally hold onto less salt and less insulin (from less carb) has the kidneys release more sodium. 

▪Try and move around more - see if you can get your heart rate up for 30 minutes a day

▪️Target: High Fiber, High Micronutrient, High Fat, Medium Protein, Low Carb, Very Low Sugar & No PUFA's

Note on Salt and Constipation: Sometimes before workouts I'll down 3 grams of salt beforehand and this really helps my endurance. I've also noticed that sometimes when I do this, it gets me suddenly ready to drop the ordinance. Anyone else had this experience?

Nuts and cheese may be big culprits if you're experiencing constipation on this kind of diet. People new to this kind of eating may be tempted to blame the fat (after all we have for a long time been told to hate fat...) but, while some more intricate mechanisms may be at play, it seems that having a bunch of fat bound with a bunch of protein is a culprit.
After all, a big cup of fat in the morning: butter coffee, actually flips my waste evacuation system online. More so than just black coffee. 

Coffee
Speaking of coffee, I’m reluctantly and very gradually weaning myself off of it: minus 1g of dry beans each day. I’m down to 26 grams of unground coffee beans (to about 480g of water). My current routine is to have Butter Coffee (or “Bulletproof coffee,” whatever you want to call it) around 10AM. I pour the coffee into a blender with 20g-30g of butter, 10g MCT oil, and 1g of Salt. It is awesome.  

The reason I’m quitting? Maybe in another post or even video I’ll explain the specific science, but recently I was talking to a friend about how after drinking my morning coffee I’ll get this awesome boost of focus and willpower and was saying “Why can’t I just feel like that all the time?” After about an hour or two it wanes and I arrive lower than baseline. Though, I remember a time where I wasn’t drinking coffee, and while I never had that coffee induced focus surge, my baseline focus and motivation were a bit higher. I'm hoping to get this consistency back. 

Video?
As for the topic of the next video, to be honest I’m trying to narrow it down at the moment. I’m toying with the following topics:
-Protein: How much do you really need? How much is too much?
-Lectins: What are they, why should you care?
-Gut Microbiome: Already did a video on this but it’s such a huge topic that deserves another look.
-Sugar: There's a million things I could say about sugar. Wondering if another video is necessary. 

What topics would y’all like to see covered? If you have any books / lectures to recommend, or just topics you’ve been interested in in general, I’d love to hear about them. 

That’s it for now.

-Joseph

P.S. 

-These kind of posts are something I’d like to make a weekly thing, so any feedback is appreciated!