I keep getting asked for this -- how is it that thirteen years ago I did this with no drugs and went from a deteriorating glucose tolerance and obesity to completely-normal glucose control, no high blood pressure problems, no unwanted excess body mass and no need for medications of any sort -- and thirteen years later, its the same other than (obviously) being 13 years older.

This began because of Obamacare.  That was the last chance to address the medical monopolies without some sort of, for me personally, a catastrophic outcome.  Specifically I knew if I didn't get it under control the odds were extremely high that when the system collapsed, and it would as a result of Obamacare being done rather than addressing the monopolists and insane "health care" distortions I'd be fucked.  At best I'd be infirm and wishing I was dead, and there were good odds I'd actually be dead.

As it turned out the latter would have occurred with near-certainty had I not made those changes when I got Covid.  Had I been insulin compromised and fat the odds of me being dead rather than having a rough time of it are likely near 100%.  So there you go; the payoff of "not dead" came but that wasn't the only payoff -- my health and physical fitness is wildly better than it was even at 40 years of age and arguably better than in my late teens.  Certainly when it comes to exercise tolerance (e.g. capacity to run a 5k and the time in doing so) it is better now than it was then even though I'm more than 40 years older.

What I changed was what goes in my pie hole, or more-specifically, what doesn't go in my pie hole.  When I made the change the rules were this:

• Animal flesh including the fat (no trimming it) of any sort, including any sort of fowl (e.g. chicken, turkey, duck and Cornish hen), beef, pork and fish.  Yes, proto-animals (e.g. eggs) are animals.
  
  
• Full-fat cheeses.
  
  
• All cooking oils were 100% animal oils; butter counts as its from a cow and thus is an animal fat.  No exceptions.
  
  
• No white carbohydrates of any sort, ever, period.  No breads, pasta, rice, potatoes (including sweet potatoes) and similar.
  
  
• The only vegetables were green and if oils were used to cook them they had to be animal fats.  The one exception was olive oil as part of a salad dressing (e.g. oil and vinegar) but never for cooking.
  
  
• No added sugars, period.
  
  
• Spices, provided pure spices (no carbohydrate fillers, check the labels!) used liberally, including salt.  No salt restriction of any sort.
  
  
• Any consumption of alcohol counts toward total carbohydrate, no more than 50g/day total for all sources.

My pants fell off repeatedly.

The first month or so sucked.  Carbohydrates are crazily addictive and withdrawal is just that.  Yeah, not fun.  Tough it out and don't be a pussy.  It will break but it may take a month or two.  Do not keep any of the prohibited foods in the house; you can't eat what's not there.  If it has a seed oil or carbohydrate in it other than green vegetables into the trash it goes.  To have something to munch buy some fresh broccoli, a block of cheese you can cut some slices off or similar.

But what has changed now and what do I eat today?

Here's a typical day:

I usually wake up between 0600 and 0700; no alarm required.  I do set it on Tuesdays and Fridays so as to make sure I have sufficient time for espresso before SNJ, but otherwise generally do not as I don't need to.  I am not hungry when I wake up.  At all.

I get myself an espresso, sometimes a glass of water with an electrolyte tablet (which has a gram or so of carb by the label in it) check my email and if I have an interview to do then that gets done.  If its a nice day and I feel like it, I will go for a run after that.  This is usually 3x/week or more-or-less every other day, usually 3 miles, but its highly weather-dependent.  In the winter I do have a dreadmill but I hate the damn things and have it only because it beats no cardio workout at all for a couple of weeks at a time.

Typically around 10 or 11 AM I'm a bit hungry.  Not ravenously, but somewhat.  I'll make a cheese omelet; usually two eggs, if I have an open package of bacon I'll cook a couple of strips of that and use the grease as the oil for the eggs.  Frequently I'll either saute some chopped onions in the pan for flavor, or if I have some chili (no beans) in the fridge I'll put a bit of that in the pan while its heating for its oil and meat content.  That is usually consumed with another espresso and a glass of water -- sometimes carbonated, zero-cal/zero-sweetener (usually flavored generic such as from Kroger.)

Dinner, my only other "real meal", is usually around 3 or 4.  More animal.  Depending on what it is (hamburgers, steak, pork chops, bacon-wrapped meatloaf, ribs, chili, fish of some sort, etc.) the time I start it varies widely.  In a few cases (e.g. if I'm smoking a whole pork shoulder or brisket) it went into the machine before I went to bed.  I'm not a nazi about BBQ sauces except that I refuse to buy any with seed oils in them.  There are several without; yes, they have some sugar in them (e.g. molasses) but choosing wisely keeps the seed oils out and I am relatively sparse in my portions.

I do not meal plan beyond the next two days, typically how long it takes for something frozen to thaw in the refer.  The exception is very large things like a whole pork shoulder or turkey for thanksgiving, where you have to figure out thaw times 3-5 days in advance.  There is typically something on the refer shelf for the next day or two but that's it.

If I desire a snack later on it follows the same rules.  If I'm home brussels sprouts with a slice of cut-up bacon for the cooking fat (and bacon itself) are one of my favorites to do in the cast-iron skillet; cut up and cook the bacon, cut the sprouts in half the put them in the skillet, add a quarter to half-cup of water and put a lid on it, steaming them in the boiling water, then when that's evaporated off add seasoning (e.g. Lawrey Seasoned Salt) and eat.  Pork rinds are one of the few indulgences that might have seed oils in them -- its hard to know and I do pay attention to my Garmin HRV that night if sampling a new brand because it will show up.  That overnight HRV is extremely sensitive and if you misbehave you will not get away with it.  It will absolutely call out the first beer, the second and beyond that you may as well get shitfaced in terms of the metabolic impact - its that bad.  Straight liquor is a bit less evil in that the carbs aren't there but if you do mixed drinks forget it -- same thing.  Booze in any form is conducive to eating things you shouldn't either in type or quantity -- always -- and the damage metabolically is multiplied if you do, so if you are actively trying to ditch excess weight just don't at all.

Can (and do) I sometimes break these rules today?  Yes.  I now have a normal glucose response where I did not before.  But if I go back to what I used to eat the damage will return, so I can't do it other than very occasionally and if yours is damaged now you can't do it at all for quite some time, likely many months to even a few years.

How do you know you've reversed the damage?  When you misbehave for a couple of days your metabolism will shift back and 3-5lbs will immediately reappear (along with feeling like crap.)  But -- within 48 hours of stopping that it will shift back immediately, you will piss out the excess water (which is what it was) and you will be back to your former mass.  If you lose ground and it takes a week or two to recover from it you are still metabolically compromised and thus the misbehavior was stupid rather than an indulgence that almost-certainly did you no real harm.

When you resolve metabolic dysfunction you are automatically "fasting" 18 hours of the day without attempting to.  My usual practice, entirely by when I'm hungry, is to eat something around 10 or 11 and again around 4.  That's 18 hours of the day "fasting" yet I made no attempt to do that; its just a function of eating when hungry, and not when you aren't.

It will take months to years to regain reasonable metabolic health. You didn't destroy it in a week and you won't fix it in a week either but the differences will be noticeable immediately and the improvement starts immediately as well.

It is absolutely true that to ditch body mass you must consume and absorb fewer calories than you expend.  There is no such thing as magic food or magic anything else and no, its not that your metabolism is "special."  You are free to lie to yourself but it is still a lie no matter how many times you repeat it.  One Cafe Latte at Starbucks is nearly 200 calories, 19 grams of carbs, statistically all of them sugar and if you drink just one per day you have consumed 13% of a non-exercising person's caloric requirement down your pie hole and at the same time suppressed the consumption of body fat for at least two hours assuming you eat nothing else during that time because carbohydrate is always consumed first.

You cannot outrun your mouth, fork or not.  A mile of walking or running consumes about 100 calories.  It requires two miles of walking or running to balance that Cafe Latte all by itself.  If you add a scone, honey bun or donut to that -- forget it.  It is trivially easy to stuff a half-marathon's worth of food in your mouth in the form of carbohydrates within minutes.

If you are metabolically dysfunctional you will be hungry in the morning.  If you feed yourself with carbohydrate in the morning as soon as that is consumed -- about two hours later -- the excess insulin in your blood will make you ravenously hungry again and you will eat whatever is available favoring more carbohydrate because you have excess insulin in your blood.  This cycle will repeat all day long.  You get fat because you've fucked up your leptin signaling system which in turn has damaged insulin sensitivity in the cells and thus destroyed the ordinary regulatory function that insulin has in your body.  Seed oils, by virtue of their resistance to being broken down by ordinary bacterial (biological) process, which is why they're used in the first place to make something shelf-stable, make it worse.

Drugs cannot reverse or control this.

The only way to stop it is to stop consuming that which is fucking up your system.

The seed oils will take months to even a couple of years to get out of your system because they, as a fat, become incorporated in the cellular structure.  All cells are replaced over time in your body and that's what has to happen to completely rid yourself of these.  In the tiny amounts you can and will obtain from eating actual green vegetables they are not harmful but in size they are, and there is no safe amount you can consume from modern use as cooking, taste-promoting and stabilizing oils in restaurants and packaged food products.  The only way to stop the damage is to stop eating them and allow your body to clear them over time.

If you use drugs to try to overcome these problems you continue to accumulate the damage while suppressing the symptoms via the drugs.  This is not only guaranteed to fail it is guaranteed to eventually seriously harm or even kill you and it is not the drugs that kills you it is what you're putting in your mouth that does so because rather than cutting that out you are using the drugs to attempt to hide the negative effect.  The damage still happens and you build tolerance to the drug because you are still accumulating the damage, thus you need more and more of the drug!  The now-common political trope of "$35 insulin" is one of of the most-obscene and abusive examples of this and everyone involved in it should be executed as they literally are damning you to a million dollars of medical expense and a miserable death rather than explain that you can either greatly decrease said spend or even avoid it entirely, plus ALL of the misery and other medical spending, by simply not eating pizza, seed oils and similar.

Further, and this you must clearly understand: YOUR DOCTOR, EVERY PHARMACEUTICAL AND OTHER MEDICALLY RELATED COMPANY AND ORGANIZATION -- ALL OF THEM -- WANT YOU TO SCREW YOURSELF AND IN FACT ADVOCATE THAT YOU DO SO.  Every one of them has a huge financial incentive to get you in a situation where you MUST spend huge amounts of money not only for the temporary relief of symptoms but by deliberately allowing the damage to continue you are GUARANTEED to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars OR MORE with them over the next decades.  THEY HAVE A LITERAL MILLION REASONS TO LIE AND THEY DO -- ALL OF THEM -- because absent those lies none of that money gets spent.  These people are greedy assholes who are perfectly happy to see you ruin your own health and die a miserable death so their paychecks keep coming and they encourage you to do so rather than make the ZERO COST changes that will immediately stop and in many cases reverse accumulation of that damage.

This, and only this, is why the US went from spending 4-5% of its economic output on medical care to 21%, a quadrupling as a percentage of the whole, over the last fifty or so years.  It is why the Federal Government has posted up $35 trillion in debt and the entire federal deficit, more than $2 trillion thus far with one month left to go, is in fact found in CMS -- Medicare and Medicaid.  This is intentional, it is malicious, the people doing it are both in the medical fields and government and it is done for one and only one reason -- profit without regard for the misery and financial destruction you will and do suffer as a result.

This is exactly what someone who is using opiates runs into and the exact same incentives that a drug pusher has to let and even encourage you to get hooked.  Opiates get you high but at the same time they suppress respiration.  Your body has a tolerance response to both but the dulling of the high is much more-profound than the suppression of respiration.  Eventually if you keep using it you die as a result of literally failing to breathe -- so junkies, when this starts to happen (its extremely uncomfortable - think about how uncomfortable it is if you try to not breathe for a couple of minutes!) use methamphetamine to counter that suppression.  This is not a solution in other than the very short term because the tolerance continues to build and eventually you give yourself a heart attack or you can't get the meth one day, your addiction compels you to use the opiate anyway and you die.  This is exactly what happened to Floyd, incidentally and the toxicology report proved it thus if you assert otherwise I bet you're equally lying to yourself about what you eat.