A Late Summer Harvest

It's been a good year for gardening in Seattle, at least in my garden. Thanks to great new tools* and Steve Solomon's recipe for homemade fertilizer, my house has been swimming in home-grown vegetables all summer. I'm fortunate that a friend lets me garden a 300 square foot plot behind her house. Here's a photo of part of today's harvest; various kale/collards, zucchini, tomatoes and the last of the pole beans:

Perfect for the Eocene diet.

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Another Simple Food Weight Loss Experience

Whole Health Source reader Sarah Pugh recently went on a six-week simple food (low reward) diet to test its effectiveness as a weight loss strategy, and she was kind enough to describe her experience for me, and provide a link to her blog where she discussed it in more detail (1).

Consistent with the scientific literature and a number of previous reader anecdotes (2), Sarah experienced a reduction in appetite on the simple food diet, losing 15 pounds in 6 weeks without hunger. In contrast to her prior experiences with typical calorie restriction, her energy level and mood remained high over this period. Here's a quote from her blog:

Well, it looks like the theory that in the absence of nice palatable food, the body will turn quite readily to fat stores and start munching them up, is holding up. At the moment, the majority of the energy I use is coming from my insides, and my body is using it without such quibbles as the increased hunger, low energy, crappy thermo-regulation or bitchiness normally associated with severe calorie restriction.

I can't promise that everyone will experience results like this, but this is basically what the food reward hypothesis suggests should be possible, and it seems to work this way for many people. That's one of the reasons why this idea interests me so much.

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Losing Fat With Simple Food-- Two Reader Anecdotes

Each week, I'm receiving more e-mails and comments from people who are successfully losing fat by eating simple (low reward) food, similar to what I described here. In some cases, people are breaking through fat loss plateaus that they had reached on conventional low-carbohydrate, low-fat or paleo diets. This concept can be applied to any type of diet, and I believe it is an important characteristic of ancestral food patterns.

At the Ancestral Health Symposium, I met two Whole Health Source readers, Aravind Balasubramanian and Kamal Patel, who were interested in trying a simple diet to lose fat and improve their health. In addition, they wanted to break free of certain other high-reward activities in their lives that they felt were not constructive. They recently embarked on an 8-week low-reward diet and lifestyle to test the effectiveness of the concepts. Both of them had previously achieved a stable (in Aravind's case, reduced) weight on a paleo-ish diet prior to this experiment, but they still carried more fat than they wanted to. They offered to write about their experience for WHS, and I thought other readers might find it informative. Their story is below, followed by a few of my comments.

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Another Fatty Liver Reversal, Part II

A month ago, I wrote about a reader "Steve" who reversed his fatty liver using a change in diet. Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) is a truly disturbing modern epidemic, rare a few decades ago and now affecting roughly a quarter of the adult population of modern industrialized nations. Researchers cause NAFLD readily in rodents by feeding them industrial vegetable oils or large amounts of sugar.

Steve recently e-mailed me to update me on his condition. He also passed along his liver test results, which I've graphed below. ALT is a liver enzyme that enters the bloodstream following liver damage such as hepatitis or NAFLD. It's below 50 units/L in a healthy person*. AST is another liver enzyme that's below 35 units/L in a healthy person*.

Steve began his new diet in November of 2008 and saw a remarkable and sustained improvement in his ALT and AST levels:

Here's how Steve described his diet change to me:

I totally eliminated sugar, heavy starches, and grains. Started eating more whole, real foods, including things like grass-fed beef and pastured pork and eggs, began supplementing with good fats and omega-3 (pastured butter, coconut oil, cod liver oil). Ate more fruits and vegetables instead of refined carbs. Also completely gave up on the idea that I had to eat only "lean" meats. After my last results, the GI doc said that I wouldn't need the biopsy at all, that things were great, and that if I kept it up I "would live forever."

He did experience some side effects from this diet though:

My triglycerides also went from pre-diet measures of 201 and 147 to post diet 86, 81, and 71.

The added bonus, of course, was that my weight went from 205 pounds to 162 pounds and my body fat percentage from 24% to 12% in the matter of five months--all without the typically excessive cardio I used to try unsuccessfully for weight loss.

The liver is the body's "metabolic grand central station". It's essential for nutrient homeostasis, insulin sensitivity, detoxification, and hormone conversion, among other things. What's bad for the liver is bad for the rest of the body as well. Don't poison your liver with sugar and industrial vegetable oils.


* The cutoff depends on who you ask, but these numbers are commonly used.

How to Fatten Your Liver
Excess Omega-6 Fat Damages Infants' Livers
Health is Multi-Factorial
Fatty Liver Reversal
Another Fatty Liver Reversal