Whee, This Health Stuff is Easy!

I don't like throwing out personal stories I receive from others too often.  A lot of health gurus out there make a bad habit of selectively sorting out all the favorable testimonials they receive and busily go about propagandizing their work - and believing it themselves.  I may have once been into telling everyone how awesome I was, mostly because I knew I had really stumbled upon something amazing and no one was paying attention and it was driving me crazy.  But I don't have that kind of time anymore, I'm too busy learning.   This, however, is a classic case of honeymoon chasing, and restricted eating gone awry - and it's well-written enough to be VERY enjoyable to read. 

We'll keep it totally anonymous, but I will say I'm glad I took her by surprise and made her realize.  She wanted me to post it tomorrow, but I told her "I can tell you right away I can't wait another day."  Sorry, I'm on like a total 80's binge right now.  I met a girl who crimps her hair and owns the movie Space Camp, so I'm really trying to step it up.  By the way, the title of this post stems from the fact that I'm starting to believe that this whole speeding up the metabolism and healthy eating/living thing is a heck of a lot easier than I ever imagined.  Which is amazing news.

For more discussion on many of the topics covered below, download THIS FREE EBOOK.    

"I was alternately vegan and vegetarian for years, had an interim period of (still mainly-vegetarian) SAD omnivory, and then discovered paleo after a crippling six month bout of IBS/chronic diarrhea. Prior to paleo I also had: a multi-nodular thyroid adenoma appear that would occasionally blow up to the size of a ping-pong ball, severe amenorrhea (maybe two menstrual periods a year), severe depression, reactive hypoglycemia, arthritis, anemia, non-stop respiratory and sinus infections, seasonal allergies, lethargy, memory problems and brain fog and probably some other stuff I am forgetting.

Most of this stuff cleared up after going paleo, luckily. However, after the honeymoon period of like "Holy shit! I can run around and do stuff now and feel good! AAAHHHH! This is the best diet in the world!" (about 9 months), I found many of the health problems creeping back into my life. The biggies were: my hair became so brittle that I eventually had to chop it off because it was breaking off every time I touched it, my daily diarrhea came back, my thyroid cyst started to increase in size again, I became fatigued as hell, my now regular period became plagued with cramps, my blood pressure was super low, and the original mental clarity I got started to fade. Total fast track to bummer town--I wasn't sure where to go from there.


Then I found your site. I had been aware of it, of course, but hadn't really checked it out until recently due to the whole "Matt Stone is a douche" thing that seems to have a life of its own in the paleosphere subconsciously steering me clear. Then, two weeks ago, Chris Masterjohn linked your "Protein--A Closer Look" article and it was one of those really formative light switch moments. I empathized with your diet history because it paralleled mine in many ways—initial good experiences with mostly fruit going downhill, initial good experiences on LC going downhill, etc. I read the whole thing closely, went on to read other entries, watched some of Josh Rubin's videos, downloaded your free e-book, and looked up everything I could find about Ray Peat.

Holy #$%*ing shit! Between all of them it was like the smack I needed to try something new and it all made so much sense intuitively. I found a summary of Peat's dietary guidelines that someone made on the internet (noting that he emphasizes a lot of the things that I love to eat and crave often and that paleo dictum advises to limit, like dairy products and fruit, and deemphasizes a lot of the things that paleo folks fetishize but that I have to force myself to choke down, like tons of red meat.) I combined these guidelines with your HED ones and modified my current diet thusly:

--less muscle meat
--more bone broths and supplemental gelatin
--more coconut oil, less bacon grease for cooking
--addition of some daily fruit
--less oily fish and more white fish and molluscs
--more dairy products
--addition of white rice
--upping veggies and starches (was never VLC or anything, but eliminated the guilt of taking more veggies than meat on my plate)
--having a little homemade sweetened tapioca pudding every couple days

Small changes in the grand scheme of things, but evidently a big friggin' deal to my body. Within a single WEEK my temperature went from the high 95s/low 96s (where it has consistently been for most of my adult life) to staying somewhere between 98.5 and 99.3. In fact, the heating system broke at my work three days ago and I didn't even notice--normally I would have been bundled up and shivering. The white coating on my tongue that has been there for the past six months is gone (so the whole discussion of reversing thinking on candida diets in that interview you did with the Rubins made me high five the air!).

I have tons of energy, am sleeping much better, my breath and body odor is noticeably better smelling, my brain is working again, my thyroid cyst is noticeably smaller, my bowel movements are solid once more, my libido is coming back and no menstrual cramps this month. How much of this is the diet, how much the return of spring and sun, and how much is joy about throwing old attitudes out the window I do not know, but whatever the percentage, thanks, dude--I feel better than I have in many many months. Keep on researching and blogging and adapting--you are totally helping people."

Female Masculinity, PCOS, Hirsutism

I’ve been fascinated with female masculinization, particularly facial hair growth or what is called hirsutism, ever since I heard about Diana Schwarzbein’s bout with a syndrome known as Stein Leventhal (Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome or PCOS basically). Okay, it started back before that, when Rebecca Romijn was the bearded lady in the movie Dirty Work, but that’s unrelated.



Recently this issue has been popping up again and again. For starters, last spring I had a female roommate who:

1) Was not menstruating
2) Had freakishly hairy arms that hadn't always been like that
3) Was super thin but stored fat in the lower back area only (male pattern fat storage)

Of course, this person was a misguided health fanatic that hadn’t always had these problems. Although I purposefully didn’t get into it with her knowing that there wasn’t the slightest chance I could transmit real knowledge into her gluten-free, dairy-free, vegetarian, low-calorie, alcoholic brain (I once heard her say that having a tooth abscess during a bout of the Master Cleanse was a sign of just how detoxifying the cleanse was, and that she was thinking of trying it again!), there is no doubt that she could have improved if not completely overcome her issue in a month by eating the food (ETF). It would have worked something like this:

1) ETF-ing raises thyroid output

2) Thyroid hormones flip the switch to decrease estrogen production and begin synthesizing more progesterone out of LDL

3) This decreases the amount of luteinizing hormone (LH) produced – (LH triggers the production of androgens – male hormones) while increasing free circulating progesterone which triggers a greater production of follicle stimulating hormone (FSH) – which in turn triggers ovulation and menstruation down the road

Voila – less androgen production, menstruation restored, and let’s hope it would increase some blood circulation to her brain as well.

This scenario was very similar to what you might see with someone with an eating disorder. Although some of the excess hair growth with anorexia is more like a peach fuzz, male-pattern hair on the chest and face as well as male-pattern baldness is very common.

But as any 180 junkie knows, there are many parallels between a person who is actually starving and a person who is overweight – and the key underlying commonality is a low metabolism/hypothyroidism.

So in those with insulin resistance with excess body fat you see the same kind of patterns emerging. Correspondence with a woman named Carla (not her real name) on Facebook recently may be of interest to you…

Carla noted that prior to her pregnancy she was always a warm 98.6 degree F kind of gal. Then she had a kid and suddenly noticed that her body temperature had plummeted to 97.2. Coinciding with this was of course, post-pregnancy weight gain of, I think she said 30-40 pounds without noticing much of a change in her normal diet and lifestyle patterns, and the development of thick, black facial hair. This is pretty classic PCOS/Stein-Leventhal kind of pathology. What fascinated me and is something that is NOT part of the known mainstream medical diagnostic portrait (anything of relevance rarely is) is that she noticed a coinciding drop in body temperature going along with all of this.

I can only assume that her body exhausted its capacity to produce progesterone during pregnancy, and when that faucet shut off she was left with a lot of metabolically-suppressive, androgen-stimulating, unopposed estrogen. But there are many other theories one could dream up, including perhaps her body’s unloading of her metabolically-stimulating short and medium chain saturated fats into breast milk while leaving nothing but linoleic acid (omega 6) in her body to stimulate estrogen.

This happens to a lot of women. Many women gain weight or can’t lose it after pregnancy, as well as enter into a mental state indicative of progesterone shortage (not totally unlike that experienced during PMS – presumably caused at least in part by insufficient progesterone levels at a time when they should be high). Anyway, she should get some relief if she can get her body temperature up. Not sure if she will pursue it or not. An excess of calories from coconut and dairy fat as well as carbohydrates would definitely help though.

Then we have ol’ Sheila – a 180 standby in the comments section both here and at the 180 Metabolism Blog. Sheila is a natural big testosterone producer for a woman, which led her to being coerced into female bodybuilding due to her hormonal profile for it. Bodybuilding led her to becoming very muscular, very lean, very cold, and very infertile. While she’s not out of the woods yet, she has at least brought her temperature up somewhat, had her period return after a very long vacation, and noticed an improvement in her overly-masculine voice and muscularity (if I’m not mistaken, I’m pretty sure she said that or something like it).

Last but not least for your interest, and to better help us all understand the hormonal and metabolic peculiarities of female masculinity, is a woman that I met recently. She contacted me after bringing her body temperature up 3.0 degrees F in 30 days following my overfeeding program. Prior to this she was a low-carb oriented Weston A. Price Foundation devotee and has been for years. She told me she has always been on the masculine side with excessive facial and chest hair.

And, not surprisingly, she has had her hormone levels tested and testosterone is off the charts, estrogen is moderate to high, and progesterone is about as low as can be. As a general rule I think it’s safe to say that testosterone is the default hormone for women to produce (they do so in the adrenal glands) when progesterone cannot be manufactured properly (due to stress, low metabolism typically). This high ratio of estrogen to progesterone by the way is very typical of a woman with breast cancer, and well, she’s definitely got breast cancer (bringing her body temperature up via RRARF didn’t help in the limited time she was able to try it by the way – and probably isn’t the best approach in late stage cancer despite its theoretical ability to increase cancer-obliterating cellular respiration).

Anyway, this female masculinity and PCOS stuff is interesting. If you are a woman and lean – having done a bunch of restricted diets, battled with eating disorders, engaged in hardcore competitive athletics – particularly endurance exercise, and stopped having your period and had some other complications develop… eat and eat some more.

On the topic of PCOS, which is more commonly something overweight women experience, beware of the approaches that just flat out tell you that PCOS is from “insulin resistance” and that you should cut out all carbohydrates. While this may seem like a miracle cure at first as you medicate your impaired glucose metabolism and temporarily bring your insulin levels down within normal ranges, eventually you will have to face the root cause of your impaired glucose metabolism instead of just avoiding it. Carbohydrate restriction, because it increases your exposure to stress hormones and “tends to shut down thyroid function” as Dr. Atkins put it, usually takes you to a dead end in a few years or less – with a myriad of new health problems like mood disorders, constipation, adrenal fatigue, mineral imbalances, and who knows what else.

The root cause, like most things, is probably a quintuple combination of excessive polyunsaturated fat accumulation in your tissues (which is estrogenic), excessive consumption of xenoestogens (toxic chemical pollutants) and phytoestrogens – soy being the worst offender, oral contraceptive use, excessive stress and inflammation, and repeated attempts at weight loss through any of the popular approaches ranging from doing lots of “cardio” to calorie restriction.

In other words, as usual, many of these health problems are caused by a “healthy low-calorie vegetarian diet with lots of healthy fats and healthy soy products and a healthy exercise program and healthy lifestyle” as we commonly define them in the 21st century. Eating and living in 180-Degree opposition to that should help tremendously. If all else fails, try natural, non-synthetic thyroid and progesterone supplementation.

If that fails too, join the circus. If you are anything like me, you’ll find hanging out with midgets a lot more fun than trying to eat a very low carbohydrate diet. And, you may find romance with an incredibly sexy, well-dressed man – just don’t be surprised when his fiancé shows up and throws egg salad sandwiches at you.

A Long Kiss
Big Top Pee-weeat MOVIECLIPS.com

Perfect Pregnancy

While RRARF (my program for increasing metabolism) is a new program not even two years old yet, I figured it was time to get something out there on the topic of pregnancy and fertility right away. The bottom line is that RRARF can be extremely helpful for not only helping couples achieve fertility, but making sure pregnancy, delivery, and the development of a very strong and healthy kid are all at their best.

We’ve now seen that RRARF can restore missed periods with great consistency, and that these missed periods are often directly attributable to reduced metabolism (and the low progesterone production that accompanies it). Metabolism up, period returns. In most of the cases dealt with thus far, it really is that simple.

 "Speaking of periods, I think mine have been regained by this diet. For about 5 years my periods were sporadic at best and the last year there was no period. Apparently if you don’t have a period for 12 months or more you are considered to be entering menopause. I’m only 38 at the moment so definitely not prepared for menopause. I tried taking hormones previously without any success. My sex hormones were very low where they were supposed to be higher. My growth hormone was virtually non existent. My endocrinologist had no answers for me other than I was getting older.


Within 30 days of starting this diet, I got a normal period without any PMS or pain! Normally I’d be crippled by the pain in my lower back and pelvis. First 3 periods were also normal. Then the next few were getting lighter and shorter and this month it was late. About a week ago I stopped my thyroid meds in preparation for a blood test. Well guess what? One week after stopping the meds my period came back totally normal! So it seems my thyroid dose had become too high. This could all be coincidence of course, but it’s looking pretty good for the RRARF way of life."


-Princess

There have been a couple cases of successful pregnancy when there was miserable failure prior. And we’ve got a couple of proud couples (Swede and Brock and their respective women folk) now that went through a preconception period of whole foods overfeeding and have reported to me that their newborns were in the highest percentiles in all of those newborn measurements and indicators, more muscular and lean than a typical baby, happy, laid back, and infection-free in their early months, and with ravenous appetite for ankles as evidenced by their incurable ankle biting.  RRARF has done great things for the milk production of pregnant moms as well...

"My breastfed baby, went from pooping once every 4-7 days...to 2-3 times a day."
-Stephanie

This may all be pretty simple physiology going on here. The thyroid gland appears to be one of, it not the, chief controller of the conversion of cholesterol into steroid hormones. Speed it up and you have a bigger pool of these hormones to dip into.

The most important hormone to increase from a pregnancy standpoint is of course, the mother of all female youth hormones, progesterone – as in “pro-gestation hormone.” After reading through Ray Peat’s books I understand more completely the role of this hormone, and why RRARF would raise levels substantially by not only increasing thyroid activity but also lowering cortisol production (this is key as, under great stress, food-deprivation, over-exercising, or sleep loss progesterone is converted to cortisol).

Progesterone has many key features such as making your kid’s brain bigger (a large head size to body size ratio, according to Peat, is an important indicator of overall health of the ankle biter), and since nature is sophisticated, progesterone also improves cervical elasticity, making big-headed delivery a lot more comfy – relatively speaking. High levels of progesterone from metabolic excellence could certainly explain Weston A. Price’s report of the ease of child labor in healthy isolated tribes.

While there is a lot of information out there about making sure you get plenty of nutrients prior to conception such as butter, cod liver oil, liver, eggs, milk, and other foods that Price witnessed being given to couples as part of their “native wisdom” preconception nutrition program, and that’s all fine and dandy, once again there is WAY too much focus on what people are eating these days and WAY too little focus on how their bodies are functioning – which is usually pretty poor. In my experience, all the cod liver oil and low-carb Paleo food on the planet is not enough to optimize fertility and excellent pregnancy, which requires pumping up the metabolism to its maximum for optimal nutrient absorption, stress hormone decrease, and progesterone rise – just to name a few.

Often the advice being given on the nutrition fringes for fertility is simply too low in carbohydrates. The carbohydrate is a very key fertility trigger due to its pro-metabolic and anti-stress (therefore pro-progesterone) properties, one that is more important today than ever as virtually all modern humans are adapted to having a steady supply of carbohydrate throughout each and every day.

The bottom line is pretty simple though. The big worry is not to have carbophobia for fear of gestational diabetes. The big fear is not exposure to mercury or other toxins which, if you live on planet earth, is more or less unavoidable. Where I believe the battle of good fertility and pregnancy to be won and lost is in the function of the body itself. When the body is fed all the things it could ever need in surplus, stress is low and sleep is high, and all is as peachy as can be – the metabolism picks up to its maximum potential (and a morning temperature nearing 99 degrees F in women after what happens? Ovulation of course which is when the ratio of progesterone to estrogen rises, coinciding with a rise in sex drive and other happy things – estrogen is powerfully anti-metabolic in both sexes, and progesterone is like Kryptonite to estrogen).

But note, this takes, especially with the pre-conditioning of a society that associates health with anorexic eating behavior, serious chowdown. Women and men alike are way too accustomed, when trying to eat healthy, to eat steamed broccoli, salads, low-fat foods, lean meats, granola, and various little sprouts and vegetable juice concoctions. No no, I’m talking about eating a Close Encounters-sized pile of mashed potatoes (half butter by weight) with every meal and steaks the size of the Old 96’er that John Candy gobbled up in the movie The Great Outdoors. See Chief for more details, just don’t tell him you need to get pregnant or he might take that the wrong way and show up at your house tomorrow in nothing but his tribal banana hammock.

Go to the 180 Metabolism Blog for a related post and some upcoming good stuff on how the wrong pre-conception, peri-natal, and natal nutrition can make your kid much more likely to develop obesity.

I also hope to delve into some interesting related material soon, such as the progesterone connection in women’s health issues including, but not limited to, gaining weight after pregnancy and postpartum depression (after depleting reserves of this hormone during pregnancy). Should be real, and it should be fun. 

For more on RRARF for use in pregnancy or otherwise, stay tuned to the latest work I’ve got coming out in a brand new eBook called Diet Recovery – coming to a website near you very soon.