Robb Wolf – Keto and Xanthelasma, High Blood Sugar, Mindset Change
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News Topic:
Show Notes:
Dr. William Cromwell discusses the LMHR
Questions:
High Blood Sugars
Eric writes:
Hi Robb & Nicki – long time listener and fan! I’m hoping you have some thoughts or suggestions on this one.
Background: I’m a lean, 56 yo male who follows a lower carb (50-75g daily) / higher protein diet (1+g/body weight). I’m very in tune with my diet given my wife is a T1D following Bernstein. I lift weights 3x/week and run about 20 miles/week (because I enjoy it). Admittedly, my work stress is high and I work about 50-60 hours/week. I get about 7.5 hours of sleep nightly and do all the sleep hacks to ensure I’m getting restful sleep. I’ve been wearing a CGM in hopes to better understand a recent A1c test of 6.0. I also had my fasting insulin level checked and it was 3 – so I don’t think I’m insulin resistant.
The CGM consistently shows fasting glucose around 115 and staying there through mid afternoon, when I’ll typically drop into the 90s. I see spikes for exercise as high as 160, but come back down within 1-2 hours.
I’m trying berberine (even though I don’t have a carb load) and l-theanine for the stress spikes, but so far, I’m not seeing much change
Could this all be stress related?
Any suggestions on how to fix this?
Could this be gluconeogenesis from too low calorie? I don’t think I eat too few calories and am about to embark on some tracking to see where I am.
Keto and xanthelasma
Fredrik writes:
Hi Robb and Nikki,
I have a question about a condition I heard you mention once on the podcast, xanthelasma. Basically yellow spots around the eyes. I have been on paleo since 2009 and keto since 2012 and you were some of the first people I found on my journey. It really has changed my life for the better. Back in 2009 I was training 5-6 days a week as a 28-year old with good performance but still had a less than optimal body composition and generally did not feel great.
Now many years later on keto, as you guys often say, I look, feel and perform much better. There is just one nagging issue, yellow spots around my eyes. They started to occur after about three years on keto and I had a couple of them removed surgically but they are now coming back slowly. Obviously I cant keep on having surgery, so what to do? I have theorized that dairy might be a contributing factor but the problem of just trying to remove something is that I will not know if it is effective until years later.
I have tried but it is very hard to find any useful advice for this online. Some people mention that supplementing with bile salt could help, what do you think? Physically and mentally I feel my absolute best on keto bordering to carnivore so I really want to maintain that. Dairy has also been really helpful for me to get enough calories for my workouts (three days a week of heavy weights and two days of either running or cross country skiing). So how do I know what to do and is dairy a likely contributor? Also, what else, other than dairy, could I eat to get in the calories for not just maintaining but building muscle? Protein is at 150-200 grams per day btw and aiming for around 2600-3000 calories a day.
Thanks for all your great work with the books and podcast!
/Fredrik
Weight loss/mind change
Mark writes
Robb,
Long time follower, my wife and I went to Nutrition seminar in 2009 at crossfit Monrovia. I like listening to yall.
I am the former football/rugby player that eats too much food and sits at a desk. It has come to a point now that Life Insurance is requiring me to lose 60 pounds. I need to get to 231 pounds at 6’0″. Currently i range between 285-295. I have tried diets the last couple of years for challenges, clean it up for a month and lose 30 pounds, super focused, lift, train without burning the joints. Skip meals, Skip Carbs. I lose the weight. Then i go back to normal life and eat my normal food which is too much.
The question is how do i reset my need to eat and take in extra calories. Should I consider counseling? I eat as a feeling. I eat the same as I used to when I was playing rugby.
I do also follow Dan John and I try to use Easy Strength for lifting. But I have not found a balance where i steadily lose. I have been maintaining my weight at about 285 with what i normally eat. My sleep is ok, Normal is 10:30 pm to 6 am. I sit at a desk 30 hours a week. I lift 15 minutes once a week. I play/run/yard work one time a week also. I have heard you talk about this before where we have been trained to gain and grow. Now that I am not trying to keep muscle mass on I have trouble shutting off eating. I still have not written my food down, like in the ketogenic reset. Is it habitual and I need to change how I eat for 25 days? Or is there another mental change needed?
Mark
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Transcript:
Nicki: It’s time to make your health an act of rebellion. We’re tackling personalized nutrition, metabolic flexibility, resilient aging, and answering your diet and lifestyle questions. This is the only show with the bold aim to help 1 million people liberate themselves from the sick care system. You’re listening to The Healthy Rebellion Radio.
The contents of this show are for entertainment and educational purposes only. Nothing in this podcast should be considered medical advice. Please consult your licensed and credentialed functional medicine practitioner before embarking on any health, dietary, or fitness change. Warning, when Robb gets passionate, he’s been known to use the occasional expletive. If foul language is not your thing, if it gets your britches in a bunch, well, there’s always Disney+.
Robb: Welcome back, friends, neighbors, loved ones.
Nicki: Hello everybody. This is The Healthy Rebellion Radio, Episode 178. [inaudible 00:00:58]-
Robb: So Nicki always asks me, “What are we going to talk about at the front of this?”
Nicki: What’s our… we call it the pre-ramble, the pre-ramble. What are we talking about, Hubs?
Robb: I have no idea.
Nicki: Well-
Robb: We have kind of a sick kid.
Nicki: We do. We do. She had, I think we mentioned, fever a week and a half ago, and now she’s having some digestive-
Robb: Issues.
Nicki: … distress.
Robb: But she also said that Nicki made her a green curry and-
Nicki: She loves green curry. And then, we also got some spicy chicken wings from-
Robb: Whole Foods.
Nicki: … Whole Foods, that the girls typically love.
Robb: And they were really spicy.
Nicki: But they were particularly hot, so I don’t know if she got a little excess capsicum kind of response going on, or what, but it’s not good.
Robb: Other than that, I’ve got nothing.
Nicki: Oh man. Well, the big talk these days is last week’s Super Bowl game. We never watch it.
Robb: Is that the big talk?
Nicki: Well, I mean, the masses flock to the bread and circus.
Robb: Okay, fair enough.
Nicki: We actually did watch this particular circus. This is our first Super Bowl we’ve watched in 10 years.
Robb: 15 years, 10 years.
Nicki: Maybe 10 years.
Robb: Yeah, we watched one at your dad’s house ages ago.
Nicki: It’s been a while. It’s been a while But I had a chuckle with the ladies at our community day at CC yesterday, because most of them hadn’t watched it, but they had seen clips of the commercials. And so, everybody always talks about the Super Bowl commercials, and the couch potato one was hilarious.
Robb: That tickled many a fancy.
Nicki: So I pulled up the video, and we were all laughing around the table at the lunchtime. And so, if you haven’t seen it, I’ll actually put a link to it in the show notes. It was for something called, I think it was Pluto TV, or some sort of-
Robb: Streaming-
Nicki: … streaming TV service that I’d never heard of before, but they did this pretty clever, “At this farm, we grow couch potatoes.” And the visuals are just amazing, and it’s good for a little belly chuckle.
Robb: Indeed.
Nicki: Okay, we’re recording this one early this week, it’s February 13th, because Robb has to travel for a little bit for LMNT, so he’ll be out of town for the next couple of days. So, what’s our news topic, Hubs?
Robb: News topic is the Oreo cookie treatment lowers LDL cholesterol more than high-intensity statin therapy in a lean mass hyper-responder on a ketogenic diet, a curious crossover experiment. And so, this is Nick Norwitz, who is a… I believe he already has his PhD, and then he is at Harvard School of Medicine pursuing his MD as well. And he coauthored this with our good friend Dr. William Cromwell, who’s our lipidology guru. He did extensive work with specialty health and all of the risk assessment stuff that we did in Reno.
Nicki: And many of you have gotten your blood work through Precision Health Reports, so that’s also Dr. Cromwell’s-
Robb: Gig, jam, jamorama. So, this was just interesting. If y’all have been following the lean mass hyper-responder story, I’m actually doing a write-up on this thing, and we’ll hopefully have that out on or about the time that this podcast releases, but an interesting phenotype of lean people who are active and who have oftentimes eye-wateringly high lipoprotein levels, specifically LDL, and lots of concern around it, because, I mean, it’s at or above the levels that we would see with familial hypercholesterolemia. And there are camps that assume that because their insulin levels are low, all is good, there’s no risk factor here, kind of more the Taubesian, insulin is the devil and cause of all things wrong. And then, there are other folks, including Bill, who feel like this probably is something to be concerned about, but maybe not full Peter Attia, where there’s a whole suite of issues at play here.
And there was another more recent paper that looked at the relative atherogenic status of lean mass hyper-responders and Bill did a really phenomenal analysis on that. It was somewhat hilarious and also disheartening when you would look at the comments, and it is YouTube, and the YouTube comments are just about universally like, you lose all hope in humanity. But some of the conclusions that folks drew… I feel like Bill has, not only is he a genius with this lipidology topic, a very balanced and reasonable approach to the whole thing.
And Nick did this experiment where he established a baseline, subbed out basically 400 Calories worth of lipids, supplanted that. And it wasn’t just lipids, but the total Caloric load, including 100 grams of carbohydrate from Oreo cookies. And what was interesting is that his very high, I forget what his LDL was, I think it was above 500, it was really remarkably high, it dropped 71% in about a week, which… This is one of the things about the lean mass hyper-responder topic that Dave Feldman really deserves a hat tip for, is that when I first talked to him back at the Ketogains shindig that I presented at and Dave presented at in 2016, he shared data that suggested that these lipoproteins could change over the course of a day or two days, dramatically change. And it hasn’t rewritten the lipidology textbooks yet, but it should. It’s a really fascinating data point.
And then, Dave put forward this idea of the lipid energy model, that the elevation in lipoproteins are a consequence of this super high throughput of lipids going through the system, and you end up with a consequent elevation in lipoproteins at the end of that whole story. And I’ve had some questions around the veracity of that, and part of that may have been my understanding of what they were putting forward, and I detail all that stuff in the paper.
But this thing’s really interesting. Nick reestablished a baseline and then went on pretty aggressive statin therapy, 20 milligrams of Lipitor, I think, or rosuvastatin, I forget which one, and he only got a 31% reduction in cholesterol levels. And so-
Nicki: In the same period of time?
Robb: Same… It actually was, they allowed it to run longer than the Oreo cookies. So, this is something that we’ve seen frequently, substituting a certain amount of Calories, upping carbohydrate content, and then just looking at what the cholesterol levels in these lean mass hyper-responders actually go to. And it’s pretty striking. You can have a remarkably profound change in lipoprotein and cholesterol levels. The interesting thing is, there are a lot of people, myself included, that just seem to run best at that ketogenic, almost carnivore kind of level, and I don’t think Nick noticed too much difference in his cognitive performance and things like that, although I’m not totally sure gut health and whatnot.
There’s some people that are really in this kind of cul-de-sac, where you have super high lipoproteins. You have concerns about that. Some people also report, and I’ll talk about this later with one of the questions that we have, they’ll do two years of carnivore, see this lean mass hyper-responder phenotype, and they actually see significant progression in their coronary calcium score, which is not great, but what are you going to…? What’s the trade-off there? Do you start putting more carbs in and feel like garbage, or do you keep doing what you’re doing, potentially have a cardiac… some sort of vascular event? So, it’s worth a read, and Nick writes this thing up really nicely. Particularly some of the IRB ethics type things were funny, because it’s a easy-to-read paper, and it covers a lot of pertinent metabolism and biochemistry around this topic, so it’s worth checking out.
Nicki: Nice. And your paper is coming soon, your article, or-
Robb: Almost done, I’m just putting some spit polish on it, yeah.
Nicki: Okay. All right. The Healthy Rebellion Radio is sponsored by our salty AF electrolyte company, LMNT. The truth is, everyone needs electrolytes, but if you’re an active person and/or on a low-carb diet, you really need electrolytes to feel and perform your best. So whether you’re training for strength, endurance, or just trying to make it through a grueling workday, don’t skip the electrolytes. Coffee or a caffeinated energy drink might seem like a good idea, but it won’t sustain your energy levels the way that adequate sodium will. Believe me, your body and your brain will thank you. From Citrus Salt to Raspberry to Watermelon and Grapefruit Salt, as well as Chocolate Salt, Chocolate Caramel, and Chocolate Medley that can be enjoyed hot, LMNT has several amazing flavors that you can add into your rotation to keep you hydrated, energized, and ready to perform at your best. You can grab yours at drinklmnt.com/robb. That’s drink L-M-N-T dot com slash R-O-B-B.
Robb: Wunderbar.
Nicki: Wunderbar. What number is that, Hubs?
Robb: It’s the 150.
Nicki: Robb has these… What do you call those? [inaudible 00:11:35]-
Robb: Just the grip trainers
Nicki: Hand squeezers?
Robb: Yeah.
Nicki: All right. Sorry, diversion.
Robb: And I had been tinkering with them when I first received them. The 100-pound grip trainer was doable, but challenging, and I’m now closing the 200-pound one pretty consistently.
Nicki: And there’s something like grip strength is correlative to cognitive health or-
Robb: Well, just a bunch of different things, but the thing is, is I think it’s indicative of what one is generally doing. I don’t think that training your grip specifically is going to give you enhanced longevity, yeah
Nicki: Gotcha. Gotcha. Gotcha. But somebody with a stronger grip is presumably more active and just stronger overall and-
Robb: Correct.
Nicki: … leads to healthier-
Robb: Yeah, well and the way I would look at it is they are being more active, and so, their grip strength is probably greater, yeah.
Nicki: Gotcha. Okay. Onto our questions. We’ve got three this week. This one’s from Eric on high blood sugars. “Hi, Robb and Nicki, longtime listener and fan. I’m hoping you have some thoughts or suggestions on this one. For background, I’m a lean 56-year-old male who follows a lower-carb, between 50 and 75 grams daily, slash higher-protein diet. I get one or more grams of protein per pound of body weight. I’m very in tune with my diet, given my wife is a type 1 diabetic following Bernstein. I lift weights three times a week and run about 20 miles a week, because I enjoy it. Admittedly, my work stress is high, and I work about 50 to 60 hours a week. I get about seven and a half hours of sleep nightly and do all the sleep hacks to ensure I’m getting restful sleep.”
“I’ve been wearing a CGM in hopes to better understand a recent A1C test of 6.0. I also had my fasting insulin level checked, and it was three, so I don’t think I’m insulin-resistant. The CGM consistently shows fasting glucose around 115 and staying there through mid-afternoon, when I’ll typically drop into the 90s. I see spikes for exercise as high as 160, but come back down within one to two hours.”
“I’m trying berberine, even though I don’t have a carb load, and l-theanine for the stress spikes, but so far, I’m not seeing much change. Could this all be stress-related? Any suggestions on how to fix this? Could this be gluconeogenesis from too low-Calorie? I don’t think I eat too few Calories, and I’m about to embark on some tracking to see where I am.” That’s from Eric.
Robb: Man, this stuff is really interesting, because you have somebody that probably, again, kind of like the lean mass hyper-responder, like looking at them from the outside, Eric probably looks like a savage, probably lean, athletic, especially compared to the general population. But we definitely see stuff like this pop up, where there’s this irritating upward trend in blood glucose levels, and where the heck is it coming from? Eric had a question, could this be gluconeogenesis from too low-Calorie? Well, it certainly could be from gluconeogenesis, and the driver of that could be an immune response, like some sort of a food that we don’t do well with is part of the reason why when we released Wired to Eat, we had that tracking of postprandial glucose, both with regards to the carb type, but also just the type of food it was, because you can get this kind of weird immunogenic drivers of blood glucose. Not really getting the sense that that’s the case here, but it could be.
He asked the question around could this be a deal from stress from too low of Calorie. Could be, and this is where it would be super helpful… Maybe at some point, we make this little bit of a criteria where you do a week, at least, of Cronometer, track everything, document it, because Cronometer has a free version. And then what’s your supposed Caloric needs from like a Ketogains calculator? Where are you in relation to that? And then, instead of just speculating on this stuff, this would give us a lot more concrete information. So, that’s one spot that I would start. I would check that out.
I would also maybe go through something like the Precision Health Reports and get the full lipidology panel, which is going to look at triglycerides, cholesterol, LDL particle count. It looks at some of these, I don’t want to say obscure, but more stable markers of inflammation, and I’m blanking on the name of it. It’s not C-reactive protein, but it’s another marker of inflammation that Bill Cromwell really likes, because it isn’t as transient with like, you get a cold and C-reactive protein goes through the roof, and then you clear the cold, and it plummets. This thing is kind of painting a picture of a more consistent inflammatory status. So I think that something like that would be valuable. I like the idea of introducing berberine. So, I would get a sense of where Calories are. I would do some sort of a more comprehensive lipid metabolic panel to get a sense of what’s going on there. And then, the only other thing that sticks out to me here is the seven and a half hours of sleep. Is that seven and a half hours in the rack, and if it is-
Nicki: Or are you actually snoozing during that time?
Robb: And the interesting thing is, to get seven and a half hours of sleep, for most people, means you need to be in bed for closer to nine hours. And it sounds like Eric works a lot, 50 to 60 hours a week. He’s grinding away at that stuff. So, that certainly could be an issue, just like the mental stress around that and everything.
But the only other thing that’s interesting that could be directly addressed or modified is that sleep piece. And we know for certain, even though his insulin score wasn’t super high here, we know that a day of missed sleep makes people as insulin resistant as a type 2 diabetic. We know that a week of short sleep, like an hour short sleep over the course of a week will dramatically impair oral glucose tolerance and insulin status and whatnot. It’s maybe not showing that on the fasting insulin test, but that’s the only thing else that leaps out at me, is maybe he’s just not getting enough sleep, not enough restorative, restful sleep.
I go back and forth on sleep trackers. I think they can be helpful. I think they can start becoming kind of a pain in the ass too. But maybe some amount of sleep tracking or monitoring to really establish like, are you getting as much sleep as you need? And given the demands that he has, what else is he going to do to carve out an extra hour of sleep, an extra hour of rack time?
Nicki: 20 miles a week is-
Robb: Not excessive.
Nicki: … not excessive, so that shouldn’t be-
Robb: It would kill me, but for Eric, it’s probably not a big deal, yeah. Yeah.
Nicki: Alrighty. Well, Eric-
Robb: I mean, if you think about it, people can scoot along reasonably easily at four miles an hour, and so, you got like three hours, something like that, of cardio a week, and, yeah, I doubt that that’s too much.
Nicki: Okay. There’s always meditation too, Eric. If you feel stressed from just work and just what’s between your ears, thinking about all the things that are on your plate, we’ve talked about it a ton, but that Ziva Meditation, Stress Less, Accomplish More is the book by Emily Fletcher, it can be Life-changing. And the whole reason she got into meditation was because of insomnia, and I know you’re not an insomniac, but it can definitely help with sleep also. So, that might be another angle to take to both help directly with the stress, but also indirectly with the sleep that will help with all of it.
Robb: Potentially, all this. So, I guess to recap, let’s do some investigating in sleep. Maybe that’s a sleep monitor at a minimum. Are we talking seven and a half hours in the rack? Are we really legitimately establishing seven and a half hours of actual sleep? Maybe get our arms around what that sleep quality is. I like the Morpheus platform, because, it doesn’t track your sleep specifically, but it gives you a readiness score the next day. And man, that thing’s been pretty on point. When I’m fighting a cold or something like that, I’ll wake up the next day, and I’ve got a 72% recovery or something. And then, I would love to see just what are your supposed Caloric needs in a given day and then tracking that so that we actually know what’s going on. And then a little bit of blood work, again, I love the Precision Health Reports folks, just to tick all the boxes. Then we’ve got something that we can really look at and not guess.
Nicki: Mm-hmm. Okay, next question is from Frederick and on keto and xanthelasma. Not exactly sure on the correct pronunciation of that. “Hi, Robb and Nicki, I have a question about a condition I heard you mention once on the podcast, xanthelasma, basically, yellow spots around the eyes. I’ve been on paleo since 2009 and keto since 2012, and you were some of the first people I found on my journey. It really has changed my life for the better. Back in 2009, I was training five to six days a week as a 28-year-old, with good performance, but still had a less-than-optimal body composition and generally did not feel great.”
“Now, many years later on keto, as you guys often say, I look, feel, and perform much better. There’s just one nagging issue, yellow spots around my eyes. They started to occur about three years on keto, and I had a couple of them removed surgically, but they are now coming back slowly. Obviously, I can’t keep on having surgery, so, what to do? I have theorized that dairy might be a contributing factor, but the problem of just trying to remove something is that I will not know if it is effective until years later.”
“I’ve tried, but it’s very hard to find any useful advice for this online. Some people mention that supplementing with bile salt could help. What do you think about that? Physically and mentally, I feel my absolute best on keto bordering to carnivore, so I really want to maintain that. Dairy has also been really helpful for me to get enough Calories for my workouts. I do three days a week of heavy weights and two days of either running or cross-country skiing. So how do I know what to do, and is dairy a likely contributor? Also, what else other than dairy could I eat to get in the Calories for not just maintaining but building muscle? My protein is at 150 to 200 grams per day, by the way, and I’m aiming for around 2,600 to 3000 Calories per day. Thanks for all the great work with the books and podcast.”
Robb: Frederick, this is a great question, and I was thinking about a bunch of stuff. And hopefully, I can keep it all straight in my head now. One question that I would be curious about is your APOE status. And we do know that people with a APOE4, either 4/4, 3/4, the combination of that, it does seem like they can maybe have more adverse cardiovascular issues with elevated cholesterol levels. That’s another question that it would be really interesting to know, is, what is your cholesterol levels, what do your lipoproteins look like, LDL-P, ApoB. When you poke around and look at this condition, it’s commonly associated with elevated cholesterol, elevated lipoproteins. And, to some degree, there’s a thought that for at least some people, the elevated cholesterol, the body is literally trying to find a place to stick it. And so, it just starts depositing it in different places in the body. And that theory isn’t universally accepted, but it kind of makes sense. And so, again, I would be curious about your APOE status. I’d be curious about just your overall lipid panel. Again, plug in Precision Health Reports, again.
Nicki: I’ll put a link in the show notes for that.
Robb: Yeah. That would be interesting. Dairy is interesting in that, as a standalone, and if you look at dairy fats relative to other saturated fats in particular, it does seem to disproportionately elevate cholesterol and lipoproteins, at least in some people. It doesn’t do it in all people. I think that I’m one of these folks that I have to be a little bit careful and drop it in intermittently. I’ve found some success with coconut milk. I’ll do a curry type thing. I have to be careful on the curry now too, because I’m reactive to nightshade. So, if I do manage to live another 50 years, it’s going to be a long 50 years of very repetitious food.
And I feel for you. On my very non-active day, in theory, just to keep me alive, I need about 2,400 Calories, just keep the lights on and the engine running. If I do a good cardio session, if I do a really frisky jiu-jitsu session, my total Caloric needs for the day may be like 3,600 Calories on the day. And god damn, it’s hard to get, depending on what types of food I eat. I have been finding that chuck steak and chuck roasts are really legit, because I like them, everybody in the family likes them, and I think that they have an even higher fat content than rib eyes do, across the whole cut of meat. So I find that if I do something like that, it’s relatively easy to get a big whack of both protein and fat Calories. And then, I’m kind of good to go from there. But I feel for you. I’m in a similar spot there. But, I guess to recap, [inaudible 00:26:15]-
Nicki: So you do think that dairy could be a likely contributor, because-
Robb: It could be a contributor, yeah. And this is where… What would be interesting is to know his lipoprotein status, his cholesterol status, and if it’s high, then maybe we do some tinkering to try to mitigate that. A good note, and we just talked about with the Oreo cookie thing, some amount of carbs can dramatically drop the cholesterol levels, and so, that could be a route to it. But it sounded like Frederick is also-
Nicki: Feels great on keto.
Robb: … feels great on… so maybe that’s not the right way to go. But maybe 30 grams of carbs a day end up changing it. I don’t know. This is something that Bill Cromwell and… I’ll try to remember to put that talk that he had in the show notes also, because I think it’d be valuable in this. He recommended adding 20 grams of carbs, and are you still in ketosis? Does it take you down a little bit of ketosis? But does it cut your lipoproteins in half or something like… or drop them by 20%? Because I think that if he has elevated lipoproteins, elevated cholesterol, and we can figure out a strategy of either a little bit of carb reintroduction, a different fat application, like olive oil or something like that, maybe nuts. I know that the seed oil folks freak out about the recommendation of nuts, but you just get painted into a corner here. You got to figure out which devil you want to pay on this.
And so, I still am kind of in the camp that if you look, feel, and perform well now, that that’s probably overall good. And then we can start catering to what the under-the-hood lab work looks like and doing some tweaking on that. And so, maybe you can sub in avocados or olive oil or something like that. But I got to say, it’s so easy to do a bunch of whole cream. I’ve done this thing where I’ll do whole cream. I’ll whip it and put a-
Nicki: Cocoa powder.
Robb: … tablespoon of cocoa powder and some stevia in it, and it’s like a chocolate mousse, and I can get in 500 Calories of fat easy doing that, whereas trying to do five tablespoons of olive oil, I’m probably going to shit myself, and it tastes horrible. And so, you just end up in this stuck spot and people say, “Well, just add some carbs.” Well, I try, but, again-
Nicki: And you feel awful.
Robb: … sometimes, you just feel like shit, or I feel pretty good on day one of it, but it’s day two, three, and four that I start feeling off, whether it’s gut stuff or starting to get back into that hypoglycemic thing. I always love it when people have these like, “This will fix your problem.” And when you’ve had gut issues and metabolic issues and you have neurological issues like I do, it’s a fucking Whac-A-Mole game, and you’re just trying to figure out like, what’s my least harm to try to get the best good out of all this stuff?
So, again, it would be great to know APOE status. It’d be great to know what your cholesterol and lipoprotein status is, and then we can turn back around and figure out a game plan. If your cholesterol levels are low, let’s say… so, the backside of this, cholesterol levels are low, LDL is low, I’m not totally sure what to do under that circumstance.
Nicki: Okay. Final question from Mark on weight loss slash mind change. “Robb, longtime follower. My wife and I went to your nutrition seminar in 2009 at CrossFit Monrovia. I like listening to y’all. I am the former football slash rugby player that eats too much food and sits at a desk. It has come to a point now that life insurance is requiring me to lose 60 pounds. I need to get to 231 pounds at six foot tall. Currently, I range between 285 to 295. I have tried diets the last couple of years for challenges, and I clean it up for a month and lose 30 pounds, super focused, lift, train without burning the joints, skip meals, skip carbs. I lose the weight. Then I go back to normal life and eat my normal food, which is too much.”
“The question is, how do I reset my need to eat and take in extra Calories? Should I consider counseling? I eat as a feeling. I eat the same as I used to when I was playing rugby. I do also follow Dan John, and I try to use Easy Strength for lifting, but I’ve not found a balance where I steadily lose. I’ve been maintaining my weight at about 285 pounds with what I normally eat.”
“Sleep is okay. Normal is from 10:30 PM to 6:00 AM. I sit at a desk 30 hours a week. I lift 15 minutes once a week, play, run slash yard work one time a week also. I’ve heard you talking about this before, where we’ve been trained to gain and grow. Now that I’m not trying to keep muscle mass on, I have trouble shutting off eating. I still have not written my food down, like in the ketogenic reset. Is it habitual, and I need to change how I eat for 25 days, or is there another mental change needed? Mark.”
So, one thing that pops out for me reading this question, because Mark specifically asks, “should I consider counseling?” And, right away, in my head, I’m thinking of Coach Prime, who we’ve mentioned before on this podcast, Cinnamon Prime. She is a mindset coach and darn good at what she does. And she’s worked with a lot of folks in our Healthy Rebellion community, personal friends of ours. And in our resets that we have had in the past in the Rebellion, she made a video for us that, really, I think helped with exactly what Mark is describing here. It’s easy to do something for the 30 days. That was the whole crux of your first book, The Paleo Solution. It’s like try it for 30 days, see how you look, feel, and perform. Anybody can wrap their mind around that, but it’s the do it for forever thing that ends up really hamstringing people. It’s like, “I’m supposed to not eat this for the rest of my life?” bread, gluten, whatever it might be. And it seems like a daunting undertaking.
Robb: The hope with a reset, and what I think happens for at least some people, is that it does become more of a habit than not. You get some upside. Part of my sales pitch was always, reassess. Is the improved energy and body composition and everything worth the stuff that you’re comparatively giving up? And for some subset of people, I think that that works. I think when we’re really honest about diet and lifestyle change, it fails far more often than it succeeds. I do think that there’s a cross section of folks for whom this becomes kind of the new normal, and they’re able to motor with it. And then, for so many people, it’s the draw of just easy foods.
You and I have talked about this more offline than maybe in the show, but, particularly right now, there’s all this… And Mark’s not necessarily talking about this, but there’s all this stress. There’s all this uncertainty. Nicki and I, I think we mentioned previously, imagining raising kids as single parents. It’s hard as two parents, and we’re okay financially. We don’t have that stress, in addition to everything else. We have a pretty good relationship. I think Nicki will kill me in my sleep someday and replace me. But we’ve got a lot of favorable stuff on our balance sheet, and it’s still hard.
And I got to… During COVID, during that last presidential election, we both gained some weight, because I was stressed the fuck out. I was like, I never-
Nicki: Stress eat.
Robb: … have stress eating, and I stress ate. It was just like, “Ah.” I have joked that I just want a big dose of Valium the rest of this year, and I just want to wake up sometime January 2025 and see what the world is. Is it a smoking crater or what? But it’s the buildup that I’m not really excited about. And food is just one of these things that, whether you’re rich or poor, you have access to shit that tastes really good and makes you feel good now.
And then you overlay that. I was in that powerlifting mindset, and I never got huge, but I was a lot bigger than I am now, and it was just always like, more food. And you ate to bursting, and I had to train myself to do that. Took a number of years to get me out of that. Super shitty digestion kind of facilitated that, mind you. So, Mark, intestinal parasites are a huge-
Nicki: No.
Robb: … boon on this… Go catch some giardia, and you may find it difficult to even maintain-
Nicki: This is a joke, folks.
Robb: This is not medical advice.
Nicki: No.
Robb: So I just wanted to throw that out there, as an aside. But you really had a gut sense around Cinnamon’s work and this mindset.
Nicki: She coined a thing that we’ve used for, gosh, years now, called just for today, and she’ll talk about how our brains, evolutionarily, we never had the ability… We didn’t have refrigerators, so there was no need to… no ability, really, to stock up on food or plan for retirement or do any of these long-term things. We have very short-term-oriented brains. And so, again, to think like, “Okay, I’m cutting out these carbs, or whatever, for ever, because I need to maintain a certain weight for life insurance,” your brain just has a hard time with that. But if you say, “Okay, just for today, I’m going to not have this particular food,” or, “Just for today, I’m going to eat meat and veggies and some nuts,” or whatever it is that you’re trying to orient around here, Mark. And then, the next day, you wake up, and you say, “Just for today, I’m going to do the same damn thing.”
And then, she also talks about, and you’ve mentioned this too, Robb, it’s like, you’re always one meal away from being back on track. So let’s say Mark does eat the full amount of his-
Robb: Shuts down a buffet.
Nicki: … former rugby player self. That doesn’t mean that the next meal, he just says, “Fuck it, I screwed up. This is just how I eat.” It’s like, “Okay, the next meal, I’m going to do the next thing.” So, I’m not sure what your… It sounds like he’s done… He’s been in this paleo scene, and he saw you speak in 2009. He understands the moving parts of what to eat. It’s just a matter of mentally getting his head around like, “How can I make this sustainable for myself?”
And, so, Cinnamon does private coaching, so that would be an option. She also does group, I think she calls them mindset mastery programs, that go over several weeks with small groups. And I know she’s got one coming up here in the next month or so, so that might be an option. But we’ve talked about this with our oldest a few times, about mindset in particular, with, not regarding food, but gymnastics and just-
Robb: Life challenges.
Nicki: … life challenges, comparing your abilities and skillset to other people that are more advanced than you and feeling kind of bad about yourself in that way, and really talking a lot about mindset with her and that everybody needs a coach. And some people get business coaches. Some people get financial coaches. Some people get relationship coaches. Wherever it is that you’re having a challenge, and if you’re able to, if you have the means to find somebody to mentor you or coach you through that that has the tools…
Because it’s our own brains. Our brains are what are in our own way. We have these stories and these loops that we tell ourself. Again, we were just having this conversation with our daughter. We’re comparing ourselves to other people, “It’s easy for them. That person, it looks perfect for them and easy for them. Why is it so hard for me?” And we have this internal voice that’s just constantly chittering away. And sometimes, we need somebody to say the words that need to be said, because they know exactly how to coach somebody through something like that. So, anyway, he asked about counseling, so my mind immediately went to coaching from Cinnamon. So that might be an option, Mark.
Robb: No, I like that. And the just for today thing is interesting in that it makes everything into smaller bites. And so, when I did the Discovery Channel I, Caveman show, it sucked. It was cold, and I was hungry, and not much about it was fun, until looking back and you have some wistful rememberings of it. But the way that I got through that was I would just tell myself, “I’m going to stay here until noon.” It’s the morning. It’s like, “I’m going to stay until noon, and then at noon, I’m going to quit. I’m going to leave.” And then I’d hit noon. I’m like, “Well, I made it to noon. I’ll stay till dinnertime,” even though there was no dinner. And then, I’d hit dinner, and I was like, “Well, I’m just going to lay down and sleep. I’ll just wait until morning.”
And, for me, I was able to then take what was going to be multiple weeks, and I just broke it into like three- and four-hour chunks, because the idea of… I couldn’t let my mind go to multiple weeks of starvation and cold and misery. Couple hours, I could wrap my head around. And, in that way, I could chug through a day, chug through a day, chug through a day, get a few little wins here and there. And it was huge for me.
And I’ve talked to other people, like folks that have gone through the SEAL teams and different things like that. People have different strategies. Usually, these other people never admit that they say that they’re going to quit. It’s always like, “Well, I’ll just wait till later or whatever.” And maybe I’m just different that way. But, either way, I think that that just for today mindset, it’s magic, because it’ll keep you in the fight for the next meal, and then the next meal, and then the next meal, and then if we buttress that with the thing that you’re one meal away from being back on track, you’ve got a really solid strategy for navigating all of this.
Nicki: Mm-hmm. And it would be interesting to see what you are eating, Mark, because I wonder, like when you say you have trouble shutting off eating, there’s things you could do to make your meal less palatable, less desirous to continue eating. You can make it so that like, “Okay, I’m so freaking done with this particular food that I’m chewing, I don’t want another bite.”
Robb: Well, and again, this is-
Nicki: So that’s another avenue.
Robb: … where, if it fits your macros, people, I think, are really… I wish that they would focus on food quality a little bit more, because I think it’s harder if the food quality is low to turn things off. But if you figure out what your daily protein needs are and your total Caloric needs, and then, you’re maybe agnostic as to whether the remaining Calories are fat and carbs, and then you just weigh out… You’re like, “I’m going to have three meals today.” And let’s say your total Caloric needs for the day is 2,800 Calories, and you divide it by three, and each one is a little bit… 1,100-
Nicki: 12-something.
Robb: … yeah, then you’re good. And you at least start with that. And so, you preemptively… In your head, you’re like, “This is how much I’m going to eat, and I’m doing it just for today. And if I go over it, I’m one meal away from being back on track.” So I do think that that’s where bringing some weighing and measuring and that awareness into things can be a really powerful tool as well. And again, I would say that sticking with minimally processed whole foods is generally going to make that thing easier. I think it’s really hard to weigh and measure nachos and Pop-Tarts and stuff like that and be able to make it work. There are people out there that do it. There are figure competitors that brag about eating this way, and God bless them. That’s great if you can pull it off. But I think it’s tough to do.
Nicki: Another thing that she talks about, which I think is important, is figuring out the why. Okay, so the why is maybe so that you can get life insurance, but that’s not a very… That’s sort of like a need to do, but not like a meaningful… Maybe it is. For me, it would be like, “Ugh, I got to do this thing.” But being able to do… In her video, she talks about cartwheels with her grandkids when she’s 70. What’s behind wanting to get down to that 230 pounds mark.
Robb: And Mark, maybe it’s just outliving Greg Glassman. That’s a pretty good why.
Nicki: It is, actually.
Robb: It’s not a bad one.
Nicki: It’s not a bad one. So, anyway, I’ll put a link to her website in the show notes. And we usually send an email out when she does her group coaching. And I believe she’s got one slated here coming up in the next, I don’t know, four to six weeks or something. So, that might be something to consider. And again, if you don’t want to do the group thing, you can maybe do one-on-one coaching. And if it’s not Cinnamon, somebody. I do think mindset coaching is helpful. Just, we have baggage. Everybody has some sort of baggage, and we can get in a loop. And if you don’t have somebody directly in your life that can call you out on it and help you, and most often, spouses, it’s hard to do that, because we tend to resist-
Robb: Well, and it’s-
Nicki: … coaching from a spouse, even all sorts of coaching. But it just kind of depends on the dynamic, so it might be helpful to have somebody outside.
Robb: And just an objective set of eyes. I forget if we… We didn’t talk about, like I mentioned, the coaching that I did when we were in Texas. Were we hanging out with the LMNT folks when I mentioned that, or did I mention that on the show?
Nicki: It’s been so long, babe. I don’t remember.
Robb: Well, it was just like last week, so it must have-
Nicki: No, we were talking about it with Zoe, because we were talking about-
Robb: Oh, we were talking to Zoe. That’s right.
Nicki: … mindset stuff and struggling with internal voices.
Robb: And we were in a funky spot. Our online business had really changed, because Google changed the rules of engagement. And we’ve talked about that a little bit, like the Google Owl update. And so, the business that we’d spent years building just kind of overnight disappeared, and we had to do a lot of rejiggering, and there was a lot of unknown. And although I’ve made some pretty good progress internally over time, I knew that there were still some things holding me back, just kind of poverty, shortsighted mindset. And so, we [inaudible 00:45:59] a pretty good nut, particularly for the timing, and got some coaching. And part of it, I was just like, “If I’m going to spend this type of money on this, I am, by God, going to unfuck my problems.” And-
Nicki: Those who pay pay attention, they say.
Robb: Well, and what would your objective assessment of that process be?
Nicki: Yeah, yeah. I thought it was-
Robb: Like big change.
Nicki: … very helpful.
Robb: Big change, yeah. So, yeah, I think it would be worth a shot. And we love Cinnamon. She’s just amazing. And she has been instrumental in so many people in our community getting the success that they just never thought that they could. And she’s a wonderful person, so I think it’d be worth a shot.
Nicki: Cool. I think that’s it. I think that’s it.
Robb: I’ll track down the Bill Cromwell stuff for the show notes.
Nicki: Yep. We will put all of those things in the show notes. Oh, I know what I was going to talk about in our pre-ramble, is my new-
Robb: Your bees?
Nicki: Well, the legume flowering pollinator delicacy that I had never heard of, and you’d never heard of it either. I’m reading another book on beekeeping and horizontal hives, and I’ve read lots of books about keeping bees and what types of flowers and trees are the most helpful for pollinators, and I’ve never even heard of this plant before. It’s called sainfoin, and it’s a legume. It’s great in pastures, because it doesn’t cause bloat for any animals, sheep, cows, horses, whatever. It’s high in protein. It’s preferred over alfalfa by many of these critters. And I guess it comes from the Mediterranean regions of Europe and the Middle East. And then, it made it to the United States in the 1960s. And now, there is a couple of… It didn’t become very popular until, I guess, kind of recently. It’s becoming a little bit more well known because there’s a couple of varieties that do better.
But anyway, I’m like, “I’ve never ever heard of it.”
Robb: Me neither.
Nicki: Then I asked you, and you hadn’t heard of it. So, pretty interesting. So if you keep bees or you have land and you want to help our pollinator friends… It is a perennial, so I guess you have to-
Robb: Reseed.
Nicki: Yep. But anyway, sainfoin. And that’s all I got.
Robb: What’d you call me?
Nicki: That’s all I got. All right, folks, thanks for joining us. Please check out our show sponsor, LMNT, for all of your electrolyte needs. Have a wonderful week, weekend. We’ll see you next time. And, yeah, that’s all I got.
Robb: Bye everybody.
Nicki: Bye.
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