Ketosis – More Than A Diet

To some, Ketosis just means a life with minimal carbohydrates…

For others,  Ketosis is more than no carbs…

For others, Ketosis is a life giving fuel that can rapidly transform your body and change your life forever.

My friend Cathexis is very passionate about ketosis and has had great success with it.

He is the one that introduced me to it and I am forever grateful for that!

Alright buddy, they are all yours!

-Matt

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The Road To Ketosis

First things first, let me introduce myself; my name is “Cathexis” and I am 34 years old.

The past 10 years has been a journey that I could have never imagined in my younger days. I’ll try to make this brief, but this information is pertinent to my credentials.  It will also give you an understanding of why I so fervently went searching for all these new understandings.

When I was 23 years old I was in a car accident.

I was going about 85 mph down a highway in Jacksonville, Fl, and there was a maintenance vehicle driving in front of me about 3-4 car lengths ahead.  A ladder fell off of the top and was bouncing its way towards my windshield.

I over reacted and lost control of my vehicle and went into the guardrail at a 45 degree angle head on and worst of all; without a seat belt. I was thrown into the passenger side door with such force that it ripped my scapula off my back, broke my nose, shattered my glasses, and forced 3 of my ribs out of place.

I was alive though.

The shock and adrenaline made it so that I didn’t feel anything. I was unconscious till the police arrived and when I came to I was running around like a mad man trying to make sure my new car was okay.

It was not; and neither was I.

The doctors said there wasn’t much they could explicitly do for me because the types of surgeries needed to resolve the rib and scapula issues are extremely rare with low success rates, but my physical therapists and doctors at that facility assured me that it was possible for me to fix it naturally with the correct therapies.

They were partially right and my pain issues were not heavy at first.  I was also younger and more resilient, but as time went on and further injuries happened through working and living, things got progressively worse. I ended up having a specific injury when I was trying to lift a large 50lb bucket with my right arm where I tore my labrum and ripped a tendon, along with agitating my floating ribs.

This was around 2008 and I was living in Florida. During this time the doctors in the area were notoriously over prescribing pain killers and benzos and I fell victim to those offerings. I was able to stay away from narcotics for about 5 years before this secondary injury and I’m happy for that. Unfortunately this injury led me to go on hydrocodone and somas (a muscle relaxer) at first to numb the constant pain.

I then got the run around from the doctors about how to ‘fix’ my issue; their answer was always ‘just use the pain killers till we figure something out.’  Then they would just send me to get an MRI, send me to another doctor to read that, send me to back to the first one to then go over a therapy etc etc.  I wasn’t able to get any actual help from them.

They guided me down the path from hydrocodone, to oxycodone and then 3 years later to methadone for long term pain management and eventual ‘maintenance’ (the system’s way of weaning someone off pain killers that includes putting someone on the most addictive type of opiate).

During this time, while eating the Standard American Diet (SAD) of high carb, low fat; I ended up gaining 120lbs.

I was originally 160lbs most of my life, but through the process of going on pain killers for so long and eating this particular diet and not being able to move much, I was up to 280lbs in no time.

Also my doctor said my triglycerides were up to 300+ and I was in heart attack range. I had terrible acid reflux daily as well as 2 previous issues with ulcers.

I felt like death day in and day out.

This was my life at 32 years old: broken, dependent on pain medicine to function, and everything around me was falling apart.

I knew that I had to get off the pain medicine and I tried numerous times to either wean off of them or go cold turkey. The pain and agony you go through with pain killer withdrawal when you have a baseline pain issue is something that I wouldn’t even wish on all my worst enemies collectively.

Your body becomes a torture mechanism and you are utterly trapped in it. During this downward spiral I gained the 120lbs, I lost someone I cared about immensely after being with her for 6 years, I was living at my parent’s house out of necessity, and I lost my long standing, good paying job.

I was trapped, and trapped in a way that was so overwhelming that there just didn’t seem like there was a way out, ever.

In comes my younger brother, Jacob.

He was a big guy all of his life and he had been doing a ton of research into the endocrine system and how weight loss actually works. New studies were found left and right and authors like Gary Taubes, Mark Sisson, Dave Asprey, Kristin Loberg, David Perlmutter, and scientists like Robert Lustig were going against the grain (pun intended) of the medical INDUSTRY to point out flawed old science that was being used regularly and was making America and the world VERY sick.

Going down this rabbit hole of studying the human body and the endocrine system was the beginning of a whole new life, it just required putting in the work to understand the science and implementing it effectively.

During my studies I found that not only could you effortlessly change one’s weight but you can fix a LOT of issues that are commonplace now a days.

My brother left his career in the airline industry to come down and take me out of the situation I was in. A family member agreed to let us house sit her house in south Florida while she was away and I was going there with a mission to change my life. After about a week of discussing our new understandings of the body we both decided to implement this new way of eating as drastically as possible.

The diet we were investigating was called a “Ketogenic Diet.”

The New Paradigm

Paradigm – a worldview underlying the theories and methodology of a particular scientific subject.

We’ve been told that weight loss is about eating less calories than you expend and that fitness equals weight loss. These axioms are not only incorrect and old science but they are harmful.

Weight loss is 100% HORMONAL and this is something that is not discussed in the current mainstream.

Insulin, Leptin, Ghrelin, and Glucagon are the main actors on the stage of how your body either stores or consumes fat.

We all know of insulin and we hear about it commonly but to be sure, it needs to be said what its function is; when you eat any carbohydrate, it is converted to glucose in the liver and insulin is produced in the pancreas in order to mitigate sugar in the blood.

At the bare bones of it; Carbohydrates are SUGAR; they end up as Glucose, all of them.

Bread, pasta, grains, rice, sugar, lactose, fructose, soy, potatoes and several starchy vegetables like carrots, are all carbohydrates.

The body converts that material into Glucose and uses it as energy immediately. Your pancreas then produces insulin to remove the deadly sugar from your blood and during this whole process these hormones are triggering your body to STORE all the fat you’ve consumed in the past 12 (or so) hours (S).

I know that these issues can start to get heavy so let me simplify it: Insulin is the hormonal trigger to store fat and Leptin is the hormonal trigger to eat from your fat stores (S).

Insulin is a result of carbohydrate and sugar consumption. When you suppress insulin, by eating less than 20 grams of carbs a day, your body creates leptin which signals to your body to eat from its fat stores (LOSE WEIGHT) while regulating hunger as an opposition to ghrelin (S).  During this process of suppressing insulin you go from using Glucose as your primary fuel to using what’s called ‘Ketones’ as a fuel.

Ketones are created in the liver as an alternative fuel and are synthesized from the fat that you eat and the fat in your body; but they are only created during the right circumstances and that is when your carb intake is lower than 20g a day (S).

When I was younger I was told that your body can eat fat from its fat stores but no one ever told me HOW.  Well, this is how.

I tried to grasp all of this when I was much younger, but I realized there was so much more I needed to understand about the endocrine system for me to really get it.  It was overwhelming, so I didn’t pursue the knowledge.  But honestly, I just didn’t know where to start.

The internet has changed everything.

Many people have now synthesized this information which allowed me to be where I am today by just starting.

This is a path.

If you care about yourself and you want to have a healthy and productive life, then you need to take these things very seriously.  The quicker the better.

I honestly wish I delved into all this at that young age, it really isn’t as difficult as people may think.

This information is far from difficult when explained right and that is what my goal is here. These are the mechanisms of weight loss that are hidden from us through jargon and authority either intentionally or not (that’s another topic in itself and I’ll save that for another day).

When I chose to go down the path listening to what mainstream science and media was telling me about weight loss the end result was 280lbs with a slew of health problems and I was more confused than ever…Just by eating (mostly) the standard recommended daily allotment of carbohydrates for years.

“LOW FAT, HIGH CARB, LOTS OF FITNESS, CALORIES IN / CALORIES OUT”

This is the mantra of the mainstream and it’s the only currently accepted way that fat loss occurs and is the ‘ideal’ diet for a healthy life (as they say).

It is completely wrong, completely backwards, and it is causing untold damage.

These ideas are based off of one scientist from the 70’s named Ancel Keys and he single-handedly made this country obese, diabetic, and filled with cancer; not to mention the early onset dementia and Alzheimer’s (S).  It’s dramatic what can happen to people who are given a diet based on broken science.

So much misinformation exists in this culture and diet is usually treated so personally, almost like a religion.  It’s hard to get the right information out to people because no one trusts anyone anymore.  Either everyone is trying to sell you something, or they are confused about how the body works themselves but proclaim to know the answers.

I’m here to tell you how this works and to simplify it in a way so you can make these drastic changes in your life. But it requires a paradigm shift. A new way of thinking about food.

When my brother and I went down to south Florida, we engaged this diet in the most direct and disciplined way that we’ve ever engaged anything and the results were astounding.

I lost 45 pounds (15 of that in water weight) in the first month and I was able to get away from the painkillers for the first time ever. The withdrawals and discomfort were still very difficult but the diet raised my constitution in a way that allowed me to finally step away from 3 years of constant opiate usage.

Because of the withered state I was in, a very large part of my muscles were atrophied.  It was during this time that I was seeing a doctor and doing my own version of physical therapy as well.

My version included pushups, pull-ups, and riding a bike about 2 miles every day or so. The fitness that I was engaging in was to rebuild my muscles and to improve my circulatory and respiratory system.  I do not attribute much of my weight loss to the exercise because the higher levels of fitness came several months after starting the diet.

After 3 months of the diet I had lost 75 lbs and fully recovered from a 3 year pain killer dependency.

Yes this took discipline, but I attribute most of my success to understanding the diet and implementing it the way that I did.

Switching your fuel source to ketones completely changes the game.

This is how it works:

HIGH FAT, NO CARB, LIGHT FITNESS, EAT AS MANY CALORIES AS YOU CAN (More the better)

This is the EXACT opposite of what we are told in the United States and I have had so many arguments with nutritionists, dietitians, and doctors who were schooled with old science and books written in the 70’s and 80’s (or even before). Insulin was discovered in 1921 by Frederick Banting but Leptin wasn’t discovered until 1994 by Jeffrey Friedman (S).

We’ve had a very long time to study an incomplete system and the understanding of insulin was implemented incorrectly into our mainstream science due to the lack of knowledge of the endocrine system.

You have to realize that glucose should be a secondary fuel and should not be our primary fuel as it is currently for 99% of the American population. Historically, we had always consumed a balanced natural diet with very few sugars, if any at all.  That was until production techniques and marketing allowed for industry to take over how we got our food (S).

Our body was not meant to consume those regularly and the older generations knew it. This issue of a high carb diet did not arise until the 70’s and we have been programmed to this false paradigm through advertising and lobbying (see Ancel Keys’ flawed science and how the food pyramid was constructed as our dietary guidelines (S)).

Just look around you! The amount of disease and sickness that surrounds us in America is overwhelming and the medical INDUSTRY is reaping the benefits from cycling you in and out and only “patching” you up.

Read this to see just how much money they are making.

Overall I have lost 120lbs.  I lost that in about 9 months, all with my doctor following my progress and hearing me out about what I was doing.

I was consuming 3500-5000 calories a day IN FAT and PROTEIN (mostly fat though).

But most importantly, I was restricting my carbohydrate intake to under 20g of carbs a day (and many days with zero).

There cannot be any sway on this issue, if you eat more than 20g of carbs then your body stops producing ketones and ejects the glucose as fast as possible. This is called “being kicked out of ketosis” (S).

This requires discipline, yes; but it becomes so much easier when you see carbs as what they are, a poison.  Something that we as humans are not supposed to eat in medium to large quantities (S).

I know this is a bold statement but I want to make clear that I am not talking about complex carbohydrates.  I am mainly speaking of sugar and also added sugars like: High Fructose Corn Syrup, enriched breads, rice, wheat and anything that is over 20 grams of carbs that does not include fiber.  Fiber is what makes a carbohydrate complex.

Eating a sweet potato or having broccoli is considered “slow-carb” in the ketogenic world.  A “slow-carb” has fiber that blunts the insulin spike that is associated with carbohydrates.

There are healthy functions of insulin.  It is still a hormone that balances weight, but we were never intended to spike that insulin 6 times a day.

You can stay in ketosis and have these complex carbs without being kicked out, but it’s the sugars and the enriched products that push those levels too high.

Type 2 Diabetes (to name 1 of many ailments), has been thrust on this world by the behavior of the sugar, the wheat, and the corn lobbies, to name a few.

We evolved our large brains over the past 150,000 years through a hunter/gatherer diet. Animal fat is the densest caloric material we can find and having that gave our cells the ability to be strong, fend off disease, and propagate a strong human with an ever-larger brain.

This diet allowed me to rapidly regenerate my body and correct all the issues that I’ve spoken of.

I know it’s controversial and my story is very revealing of a lot of private information, but I feel that it’s worth telling in order to show the dedication I have to this topic and to show that I have put in the work and received the results.

Now I just want to share it with as many people as possible.

I can also happily say that I’ve been present for some very large transformations from my family, who took the time to hear me out and explain what I know.  My results piqued their interest and both my parents who were Type 2 diabetics are completely cured from that affliction (among many other issues like pervasive heart burn and sleep apnea).

Their doctors took them off Metformin and declared that their blood sugar levels are within healthy ranges.  The doctors were astonished and said,  “Whatever you’re doing; keep it up!”  They also both have lost 30-45lbs each and they are the happiest that I’ve ever seen them in my life.

The first thing that a person has to do is recognize that something is not right with the way things are being presented; and recognize that what is happening in their life is not right.

Weight gain is a symptom of a larger problem.

It’s a distortion of the human body that is entirely created as a response to improper diet; not because you’ve ‘eaten too much fat.’ Fat is the healthiest substance you can put in your body (not trans fats or other industrially separated fats of course). I’m talking about the healthy fats that you are beginning to hear about nowadays (S).

I really hope that the information in this article isn’t too much. I feel that if the mechanisms of weight loss and gain are understood, then the discipline just comes naturally with the new paradigm.

Remove the poison and return to your perfect and natural state.

Look at every other creature in this world, how many obese deer do you see or type 2 diabetic tigers? This would only occur if there was a human hand involved.

It’s not something wrong with us or different about us, we still all have the same organs. What’s wrong is the paradigm. We have an incorrect understanding of how our body works and the misinformation that brought us here has to be uprooted and we need to form a different understanding.

A Ketogenic diet is as simple as to just stop eating carbohydrates and to start eating as much fat as you can.

This may be hard for some people because of all the junk we’ve been sold over the years but if you need to make changes in your life concerning your health, I cannot recommend a more effective path.

If you want to get started on ketosis, a sample meal looks like this (and is absurdly delicious):

1lb Hamburger meat made into 3-4 patties
1-2 Brats/Chorizo Sausage/Italian Sausage (your choice)
1-2 Cups broccoli cooked in butter
1     Cup portobello mushrooms sauteed in butter.
1/2 Avocado

I usually eat a meal like this mid way through my day and maybe snack on some pepperoni and cream cheese or something like that later.  More recently (the past year), I’ve been doing 24 hour intermittent fasting where I do not go into my ‘feeding state’ until as late as I can…usually around 10pm.

Being in a fasted state provides great benefits, but that is another issue I’ll be happy to discuss in future articles.  Also, fasting isn’t necessarily recommended to people just starting out anyways.

My desserts were usually strawberries or blueberries with whipped cream made with splenda (which in my assessment is a fine sugar alternative, although not optimal).

I personally believe that Stevia is a far superior sugar replacement, but that is another article in itself.  There is a lot of conflicting information out there concerning if certain non-sugar sweeteners may raise insulin levels.

My rule is, if it doesn’t spike my insulin then I’m fine with it and I’ve seen first hand that splenda (sucrolose) and stevia reign supreme. I try to stay away from aspartame but I will have a diet soda here and there.

Another great dessert that I love to make (hell, I even eat it as a meal sometimes) is chunky peanut butter melted down with 90% cocoa, mixed with a decent amount of stevia.

This can be put onto wax paper and then in the fridge for amazing candies, or you can toss some almonds or macadamia nuts in and grab a spoon.  I do the latter, it’s a very quick setup.

Keep peanut butter on stock!  It is relatively carby but the fats that you obtain from eating it are a fair trade off, just don’t go overboard!  I’ve been kicked out of ketosis by eating a jar of peanut butter.

I sometimes like to add some coconut oil (or MCT Oil) in the mix to get some more fat out of it!

Plenty of options are out there for sugar/carb free living that allow you to still enjoy sweets.

I also love “No Sugar-Added” ice cream and there has been a nice push to have these options lately.  Just watch out for high sugar alcohols, some believe that they can kick you out of ketosis.  Just always have moderation in mind.  Less is More! < = >

But to start in the direction of ketosis, it’s as simple as removing sugar and carbs from your diet.  Push through any “keto flu” symptoms you may have and enjoy the rewards of using fat as your fuel as (I believe) was intended.

With mentioning that, I think it’s also appropriate to explain what the “Keto Flu” is because you may see those words while doing your research.

When your body makes the switch to Ketones, there is a short induction phase.  During this phase it is important to make an effort to consume more electrolytes than normal.  This prevents symptoms of the “Keto Flu.”

The “Keto Flu” is basically cold-like symptoms and lethargy as your body switches its fuel system from glucose to ketones.  Usually 3 days of observable lethargy is the worst you’ll feel.

The good news is that not everyone goes through this process.  If you do, it’s wise to supplement a large amount of magnesium and potassium (honestly, you should do that after the induction phase as well. A ketogenic diet requires more electrolytes than the Standard American Diet).

I love making bone broth to supplement these electrolytes.

I’ll buy a rotisserie chicken, eat it as my meal, then put all the bones in the pot.  Then I fill it with water, bring it to a boil, and simmer it for 24 hours.

Usually I’ll add a couple bullion cubes and there you have it…a healthy version of chicken stock!  All the potassium, magnesium, calcium etc that the chicken had in it’s bones will now be yours for the drinkin’.

Thank you for reading this article.

All I want to do in this world is share what I know and help as many people as I can.

This topic is certainly something you should do your own research on, but there are a ton of people who have come before me that have condensed this information in an effective way.

The book by Gary Taubes called “Good Calorie / Bad Calorie” really opened my eyes along with the Robert Lustig’s lecture on how sugar is treated in the body.  Those two resources will help you on your journey!

I’m now expanding my platform and am looking to help anyone grow and become the person they should be, so please feel free to contact me!
constant.cathexis@gmail.com

change-your-paradigm.com

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If that story doesn’t inspire you, I don’t know what will…

I am now a big fan of ketosis and low carb/ low sugar.

What drew me towards ketosis wasn’t the weight loss aspect.  No, it was the claims of “consistent energy.”  It was the claims of increased focus and better sleep.

All of which I have experienced myself. Not only do I feel like my energy levels are now stabilized (No more dips in my energy levels since I’m not spiking insulin), but my sleep has been much better.

I wouldn’t say the change in my energy or sleep was dramatic, but it is definitely noticeable.  But keep in mind, I’ve been trying to keep my body in peak condition my whole life.

So for me, noticing any positive change at all really tells me that ketones are a force to be reckoned with.  

Thanks for the amazing story Cathexis!  You guys be sure to check out his website and show him some love.

Peace!

-Matt

*Names have been changed and pictures removed 

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Photos By: Franky242 , Michael Illuchine,

USDA, and Keko64