Naked Calories – Jayson Calton PhD, Mira Calton CN
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Naked Calories reveals the naked truth about what you are eating and how your lifestyle habits may unknowingly be sabotaging your health. The secret lies in micronutrients, vitamins and minerals that are being stripped from your diet and depleted by your lifestyle. On the Caltons’ six-year global research expedition they discovered that modern practices such as global food distribution, factory farming, and food processing are creating foods filled with Naked Calories–calories void of any real nutritional value. The dynamic authors break it down to a simple three-step plan and teach you how to source better foods, eliminate unhealthy habits, and make choosing the best supplement as easy as ABC. Naked Calories, this decade’s Fast Food Nation, will help millions of people gain a new depth of understanding about how to maintain health in the 21st century. The Caltons are among the world’s leading experts on the topics of weight management, lifestyle medicine and micronutrient deficiency. In 2005, they set sail on a 100-country, 7-continent, 6- year global expedition, exploring the dietary and lifestyle habits of people around the world. Their research has led them to conclude that micronutrient deficiency is the most widespread and dangerous health condition of the 21st century. As a couple they bring amazing energy, personal experience, passion and knowledge to an important subject people are just beginning to buzz about–the overwhelming health benefits of a micronutrient sufficient lifestyle.
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Eat the Yolks – Liz Wolfe NTP
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The Dark Side of Fat Loss – Sean Croxton
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If “Fat Loss” is so simple, then why is everyone still fat?
Recent studies show that 95% of dieters regain the weight they lost and more often than not end up heavier than when they started. What do the 5% who lose weight and keep it off know that the others don’t?
Find the answer in this book and a whole lot more including:
Chapter 1: Hold No Myths To Be True
In Chapter 1, you’ll learn about the incorrect “Calories in, Calories Out” paradigm, and why diet and exercise alone will NOT achieve your fat loss goals. You’ll learn how to completely avoid “battling the scale” and how the common mainstream solutions we attempt to use for fat loss not only defy reality & science, but also the laws of common sense.
Chapter 2: It’s All About The Hormones
In this chapter, you’ll learn the most important hormones for fat loss, and how they interact with each other and your body. By the time you’ve finished this chapter, you’ll have a strong understanding of how your hormones work, and how to manage them so that you can lose fat. You’ll also learn about the IGNORED master hormone and how to control it to keep your body a fat burning furnace, and not just plain old fat.
Chapter 3: Just Do What Healthy People Do
In this chapter, you’ll learn what true health REALLY is, and how to model your health after others who are truly healthy. By the end of this chapter, you’ll know how you can truly be free of the signs and symptoms of chronic, degenerative diseases while burning fat at the same time.
Chapter 4: Just Eat Real Food
In this chapter, you’ll learn what “real food” really is, and how to easily navigate through our confusing and often misleading modern food labeling system. You’ll learn the differences between grass fed, free range, conventional, organic, and natural food labels, and what they all mean. You’ll also learn about the wheel of life – and why you can NOT get healthy eating sick animals.
Chapter 5: The JERF30 Program
The JERF30 Program is a system of choosing real foods and listening to the signals your body gives you. Most diet programs think that everybody is the same. The JERF30 program does not make that assumption. Instead, you’ll learn how to listen to your body and know which foods are the healthiest and provide the biggest health benefits specifically for you. The 30 day Just Eat Real Food challenge provides you with a list of foods to choose from, as well as a system for translating your body’s messages into actionable information so that you can find the diet that is right for you.
Chapter 6: Reduce Stress
Is stress making you fat? In this chapter, you’ll learn the 5 sources of stress on the body, and how to mitigate them and how to lower stress in your life. The average American is incredibly stressed out, and this produces some pretty severe negative effects on your body – including increased fat storage, anxiety, and depression – all of which you will learn how to prevent in this chapter.
Chapter 7: Go To Bed
Is your lack of sleep killing you? Most Americans are dramatically sleep-deprived and just “live with it” – but did you know that just one night of missed sleep is sufficient to make you as insulin resistant as a diabetic? And, the center for disease control recently classified all-nighters as carcinogens? So lack of sleep will make you diabetic, cancerous, and inevitably, lead to an early death. In this chapter, you’ll learn how the advent of the light bulb has tricked your body into thinking it’s into a perpetual state of summer, and makes it constantly prepare for a winter famine by shifting your hormones to crave sugar and make your body store fat. By the end of this chapter, you’ll learn how to prevent this from happening and how to make sure your body is burning fat all year round.
Chapter 8: Heal Your Gut
Did you know that Americans spend over $1,300,000 a day just to poop? And that 1/3rd to ½ of all adult Americans have one or more digestive challenges? In this chapter, you’ll learn what these digestive challenges are, and how to overcome them without compromising your everyday life. You’ll learn about parasites, leaky gut, gluten sensitivities, and other important digestive issues that you need to be aware of if you want to have a fully functioning digestive system. If your digestive system is dysfunctional – then weight loss is nearly impossible – so this chapter is an essential read in your fat loss journey.
Chapter 9: Reduce Your Toxic Load
Did you know that we use 9 personal care products daily that contain around 126 chemical ingredients, and that 1/3rd of these ingredients have been identified as causing cancer or other serious health problems? In this chapter, you’ll learn about obesegens – chemicals that interfere with the normal function of the hormonal system and have been shown by research to cause weight gain. These are the very same obesegens that you’re likely rubbing all over your body every day, inhaling from toxic cleaning products, and drinking in non-filtered water. This chapter will show you how to identify, remove, and replace common toxins in your immediate environment, so that you can lower your toxic load and lose fat more easily.
Chapter 10: Get Your Mind Right
All of the information in this book is great, but if you don’t have the mindset to take action, then you’re wasting your own time. In this chapter, you’ll learn the 6 keys to a successful lifestyle change, and how you can emulate others’ success in revamping their health and overall well being.
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Why We Get Fat – Gary Taubes
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Building upon his critical work in Good Calories, Bad Calories and presenting fresh evidence for his claim, Gary Taubes revisits the urgent question of what’s making us fat—and how we can change.
He reveals the bad nutritional science of the last century—none more damaging or misguided than the “calories-in, calories-out” model of why we get fat—and the good science that has been ignored. He also answers the most persistent questions: Why are some people thin and others fat? What roles do exercise and genetics play in our weight? What foods should we eat, and what foods should we avoid? Persuasive, straightforward, and practical, Why We Get Fat is an essential guide to nutrition and weight management.
Disclaimer: This page contains affiliate links that may provide monetary compensation to help support the Whole Guidance Vision of Creating a Happy and Healthy Planet should you make a purchase. We very much appreciate and thank you for your support.
“The light of the world will illuminate within you when you fast and purify yourself.”
— Mahatma Gandhi
Like most people I was taught that breakfast is the most important meal of the day and skipping it was a bad idea. Without breakfast you get tired later in the day, you cannot focus or think clearly, your hunger grows, and you will get health issues including weight gain, metabolic diseases, and malnutrition.
With this is in mind I grew up eating cereal with milk or toast with hot chocolate for breakfast and I did this every single morning for decades.
However, after learning about holistic, functional, and ancestral health practises and applying these to my life in order to overcome personal health challenges, my breakfast ritual has changed dramatically where I no longer eat breakfast till late in the day and some days I don’t eat at all.
CLICK HERE TO LEARN WHAT ARE THE MOST NUTRIENT DENSE REAL FOODS
This is called intermittent fasting (IF) where you fast for a certain period of time and then eat within a specific time window and what I’ll be exploring in this article.
A typical fast differs from IF as it lasts for a prolonged period of time, usually several days or a few weeks, without eating food and usually involves drinking only water during the fast, aka a water fast.
Why would you intentionally starve yourself? Well it is during times of fasting that your body can perform critical maintenance and repair functions that cannot be executed when in a fed or un-fasted state.
Benefits to Fasting
- Resets growth, appetite, stress, and sex hormones to healthy levels
- Switches your body to burn fat rather than sugar as fuel
- Increases human growth hormone production
- Reduces inflammation and oxidative stress
- Normalises HDL, LDL, and triglyceride levels
- Promotes healthier body composition
- Supports body’s innate ability to heal from sickness and disease
- Improves cognitive function including learning, memory, and focus
- Elevates energy (yes, more energy by not eating!)
- Less time cooking, cleaning, and more time working on your goals
Most of these benefits come from a process called autophagy. During autophagy each of your cells seek out all the junk, microbes, and other toxins within the cell and recycle them into new building blocks for the cell. Whatever is leftover or unusable gets excreted as waste.
If you eat frequently and don’t give your body enough time to switch on autophagy and recycle the trash then this junk and your risk of infection grows and grows and grows causing many health issues.
Imagine if you never took the trash out of your house or if the garbage truck never showed up for weeks. Not only would your house begin to fill up with rubbish leaving you no space to move, work, and play, but you’d also get flies, maggots, and bugs taking over your home, and of course don’t forget about the smell!
This is what’s happening when you eat all the time and don’t have a long enough period without food. It is when you fast for periods of at least 12 hours that your cells have time to switch on the autophagy process and clear out the trash, the toxins, and the harmful microorganisms.
Just as it’s easier for you to move and think in an organised house or office space, after autophagy your cells become more efficient and more effective at running metabolic processes giving you more energy and clarity of thought.
Am I saying you should go on a strict water fast for days on end to get even more energy and health benefits? No, as there is a tipping point to where your cells will begin to become malnourished and your body switches to a state of hibernation and stasis. A prolonged water fast is definitely an option to consider though, if you are dealing with a chronic health condition.
A general guideline is the more metabolically deranged you are or to use the more acceptable term, if you have metabolic syndrome, the longer the fast should be. For example a water fast of 3-14 days under medical supervision would suit people with obesity, high blood pressure, high triglycerides, high blood sugar, or high amounts of small LDL cholesterol particles.
A smarter and more sustainable way to fast for anyone looking to improve and maintain health and performance markers is to experiment with intermittent fasting, with set periods of fasting and feeding and being able to change these feeding windows to suit your individual goals. You get all the benefits of going on a prolonged water fast, without having to do an actual water fast.
Before I give my recommended IF protocols there are certain groups of people that should not do any kind of fasting:
- Children
- Pregnant/breastfeeding women
- People with cortisol dysregulation (chronic stress)
- Severely underweight individuals
If you fall into one of these categories undergoing an IF protocol has the potential to cause more stress to your body than it can handle.
Types of Intermittent Fasting
Here is a list of intermittent fasting protocols you can play with in order of difficulty (the difficulty of any change in diet comes down to your personal perception of the diet and the changes that you need to make, so as with anything in life your mileage may vary).
12:12 (Fast window 12 hours, Feed window 12 hours)
This is a daily fast lasting 12 hours leaving the other 12 hours to eat. During the fast you can have water (optionally with lemon juice or apple cider vinegar), black coffee, and teas without nothing added.
This is the most natural and easiest to stick to out of all the IF protocols.
I recommend finishing your last meal by 8p at the latest and not eating till 8a in the morning. For example, if you finished your last meal at 6p, you wouldn’t eat your first meal until around 6a the next day.
16:8 (Fast window 16 hours, Feed window 8 hours)
Similar to 12:12, but with a 16 hour daily fast with an eight hour eating window. During the fast you can have water (optionally with lemon juice or apple cider vinegar), black coffee, and teas with nothing added.
Personally I find 16:8 to be the simplest way to eat and is my go-to IF protocol for getting quick results in terms of changing body composition and reducing the waistline.
Again I recommend finishing your last meal by 8p at the latest and not eating until 12p. For example, if you finished your last meat at 6p you wouldn’t eat your first meal until around 10a.
The Fast Diet / The 5:2 Diet (Feed window 5 days, Fast window 2 days)
With the Fast Diet you eat normally for five days of the week and then fast for two days. The two fasting days can be in a row or split up during the week.
During the two fasting days you are allowed to eat up to 500-600 calories anytime during the day.
Eat-STOP-Eat (Feed window 5/6 days, Fast window 1 or 2 days)
Another weekly IF protocol involving eating normally for five or six days and fasting for one or two days a week. During the fast you can have water, black coffee, and teas with nothing added.
The Warrior Diet (Fast both morning and afternoon, Feast evening)
This diet involves eating like some of our ancestors where you fast during the day and feast on your ‘hunt’ during the evening.
During the day as well as black coffee and teas with nothing added, you can have a high quality whey protein shake, but only post high intensity resistance or sprint training. Also berries and non-starchy vegetables are okay to eat during your fast.
In the evening is when you eat one large meal to satisfy your hunger.
Alternate Day (Fast window every other day)
Eat normally one day; eat nothing the next.
During the fasting day you can have water, black coffee, and teas with nothing added.
Note Well
It should not have to be said, but I’ll say it anyway – with all of these IF protocols food quality is the key to success. Eat real food and make those calories you eat as nutrient dense as possible.
Also with any dietary protocol remember you don’t have to be strict. You must experiment with each and find what works for you and make it your own or move on to something else.
For example I’ve settled on using the Warrior diet as a template. My IF protocol is my own type of Warrior diet where I have two cups of coffee and cream/ghee with a little whey powder in the morning, drink a lot of water (one with ACV) throughout the day, and then have one big meal in the evening full of vegetables and some meat or fish.
For more information about how to use fasting to heal I highly recommend the book The Complete Guide to Fasting by Dr Jason Fung and Jimmy Moore.
Two other books that incorporate IF into a holistic healthy lifestyle are The Wild Diet by Abel James and The Bulletproof Diet by Dave Asprey.
Summary
Yes breakfast is still the most important meal of the day… to skip! It is the timing, when you break your fast, that makes breakfast the most important meal of the day.
Breakfast doesn’t have to be at the beginning of the day. Remember breakfast means to break a fast or simply the first meal of the day. You can skip breakfast or fast for the entire day – this is called intermittent fasting.
By implementing an intermittent fasting protocol you will improve your health and gain extra time in your day to get after your dreams.