Keto Clarity: Your Definitive Guide to the Benefits of a Low-Carb, High-Fat Diet (2 page)

Have you ever wondered what to make of all the mixed messages about what constitutes a healthy diet? One week the news tells us of a study showing, for example, the tremendous health benefits that come from consuming coconuts and coconut-based foods, like coconut oil. But then a couple of months later, we’re inundated with breaking news headlines about a new study that shows coconut foods contain too much saturated fat and will thus clog your arteries and give you heart disease. It’s so much to take in; how in the world can the average person, busy with work and family, try to make sense of it all? Trust me, I’ve been there. I used to weigh over 400 pounds even though I thought I was doing all the right things nutritionally—they just didn’t work for me, no matter how hard I tried.

My name is Jimmy Moore, and I transformed my own weight and health by doing nearly the exact opposite of all the things I’d been told to do my entire life to be healthy.

The Government Is Wrong: Testifying on the 2010 Dietary Guidelines

On July 8, 2010, I was one of only fifty American citizens to present oral testimony in Washington, DC, about the proposed Dietary Guidelines for Americans, 2010. These guidelines are released every five years and represent the official policy of the United States government for healthy eating. They are inserted into every part of American society through food stamps, school lunch programs, and even food allowances for members and families of the US military.

Yes, it’s a big deal, and that is why I thought it was important enough for me to travel all the way to Washington, DC, on my own dime and share my point of view with the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee. Of the fifty people who testified before the committee at the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) on that hot summer day, only two of us were there as individuals—most of the rest were representing some special interest group (the soy lobby, the dairy lobby, the egg lobby, the salt lobby, and so on).

The vast majority of those who were testifying did so with extremely drab, boring, and monotone speeches about why their proposals should be taken under consideration blah, blah, blah in the official Dietary Guidelines. You could really tell their hearts weren’t in it; they were simply paid to be there and put on record what was in the best interests of their corporate clients. Authentic testimonies were few and far between that day.

After enduring this agony for a couple of hours, it was finally my turn to share my three-minute remarks as speaker #26. I wanted to get the attention of the panel members, who had been looking down and taking notes through most of the testimonies, only occasionally glancing up at the parade of lemmings that was being ushered in front of them. I nervously but confidently stepped up to the microphone to share an impassioned speech with them (without the aid of any prepared notes) about how my life had improved dramatically because I had refused to accept the ideas that they were promoting to the American people as the only way to attain optimal health. I spoke from the heart because I’ve lived what I was sharing with them and have witnessed the power of my message in the lives of so many who follow my work. I don’t remember much about the actual testimony I was giving because I was so caught up in the emotions of the moment. But one of my friends who was there said that when I began to speak, every single member of the Scientific Advisory Board and the government leaders looked up at me to listen intently to what I had to say.

Here are those remarks verbatim, according to the court reporter at the USDA:

Hi, my name is Jimmy Moore and I am from Spartanburg, South Carolina. I have a website called Livin’ La Vida Low-Carb. And in January of 2004, I started on a low-carb diet because after years of frustration trying to follow the Dietary Guidelines that you guys put out every five years, I was failing. It was not working for me. I was a 410-pound man, high cholesterol, high blood pressure. I was in really bad shape at the age of thirty-two, and it wasn’t until I was able to think outside the box and go beyond what my government was telling me was healthy that I was finally able to get my life back and my health back. And today I stand here not just on my behalf, but [on behalf] of the hundreds of thousands of people that read my blog [and] listen to my radio show. They are real people, and I wanted you to see a real person whose life has been changed by not doing the things that you told them to do, [by] eating more fat, eating less carbs, not worrying about cardiovascular exercise until I fall out. Those things didn’t work for me. And it wasn’t until I could find what did work for me that I finally realized, you know, the experts on this panel may not be the true experts in this whole thing.

We really need to get away from one set of guidelines for all Americans. I propose that you have multiple guidelines that people can choose from, multiple options, because we don’t all wear the same shoe size. I wear thirteens. Everybody wear thirteens in here? No. The same goes for our diet. We need to have a diet that will [cater] to the metabolic needs of the individual, whether they have obesity, whether they have diabetes. Those are the things that need to be considered. And if we do those things, then I think we are going to be better off.

Otherwise, we are going to be here five years from now with the same people testifying, everybody coming before you with the exact same lobbying for all these things. And what is going to change? I daresay obesity is going to be worse, diabetes is going to be worse, heart disease is going to be worse, and I am going to ask you, “Why?”

It was gratifying to hear from so many people who came up to me after my testimony to share their appreciation for what I had to say. That was what made it worth all the effort to be there. In fact, one security guard asked me if I had a business card so he could check out my blog to learn more about the work I was doing. He said that he could tell there was something about me and my story that was different from most of the others who testified. That was an awesome confirmation that choosing to speak from my heart and letting the words flow freely was the right choice. I’m so glad I did!

I have no grand illusions that what I said that day made any difference at all in what eventually became the 2010 Dietary Guidelines for Americans. But I am so happy that I testified and represented all of the people out there who have been harmed by what the USDA and Department of Health and Human Services have said is a healthy diet. I hope that by 2015, when we debate the next set of dietary guidelines that will become the basis for MyPlate (formerly the food pyramid), these governmental bureaucrats will have seen the writing on the wall about the effects of their devotion to heavily promoting grains and demonizing fat. We’re approaching a tipping point when it will become next to impossible for them to ignore the science. Hopefully this book will help move that process along a little quicker.

Think about it for a moment: if the USDA were a business and the state of public health reflected their profit margin, they would have gone bankrupt many years ago. In just the past few decades, the rates of obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and other chronic illnesses have gotten considerably worse. And do you know what’s most shocking about that? The spike in all of these ailments coincides almost perfectly with the implementation of the government’s Dietary Guidelines in 1980. Coincidence? I think not.

There’s a saying that insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. And that’s precisely what has happened to national nutritional policy in the United States in recent years. The government ignores studies that don’t fit within a preconceived template of a low-fat, low-salt, calorie-restricted, high-carb, plant-based diet. But this one-size-fits-all approach to eating does not work for the large segment of the population that is dealing with obesity and other metabolic chronic health issues. In fact, the statistics prove that this message has been an utter and dismal failure for America, and it’s time for the USDA and Department of Health and Human Services to realize the error of their ways.

My Story: Veteran of Every Fad Diet and Still 400 Pounds

I’m sure glad I found my way off of the roller coaster ride of nutritional guidelines and poor health a decade ago. In January 2004, when I was thirty-two, my weight had gotten up to 410 pounds. I grew up in a family that was always dealing with weight issues. My mom was on every low-fat diet program that was ever invented, and we always had rice cakes and skim milk in our kitchen. She finally became so frustrated by her inability to lose weight that she elected to have gastric bypass surgery in December 2003. I remember thinking at the time that if my next attempt to lose weight wasn’t successful, I would likely follow in her footsteps. Thankfully it never came to that.

Decades of poor eating habits, little exercise, and a general sense of apathy about trying to live healthy had all caught up to me, but I thought that my weight was just the genetic hand that I had been dealt and there was absolutely no hope for ever overcoming it. It’s a truly helpless, trapped feeling to believe that you will always be fat and unhealthy and there’s nothing you can do about it. And that’s exactly the way I had felt for most of my life.

Don’t get me wrong, though; I had still tried all of the diet trends, including drinking Slim Fast, taking Dexatrim pills, and eating rabbit food all day long—but none of them seemed to help. In 1999 I tried an ultra low-fat (almost no-fat) diet because we have always been taught that eating fat makes you fat. I did surprisingly well on it and lost 170 pounds in just nine months. But there was one major problem: I was constantly hungry, which made me feel irritable, tired, and like I was going out of my mind! My wife, Christine, will tell you I was “hangry”—so hungry that it made me angrier than the Incredible Hulk! And my stomach was so bloated and big, I felt like I was a lot
worse
off than I was before my weight loss. One day Christine asked me if I would go to McDonald’s and get her an Extra Value Meal, and I asked her if I could have a Big Mac meal “just this one time.” Well, anyone who has ever been fat knows exactly what happened next.

That was the end of my low-fat diet. I gained back all of the weight I had lost and then some, until I made my way over the 400-pound mark for the first time in my life towards the end of 2003. Christine was becoming increasingly worried about my health, and for good reason. Although I didn’t have any major health problems at the time, I was on prescription medications for high cholesterol, high blood pressure, and breathing issues. Even before that, in 1999, when I watched my brother Kevin deal with the ramifications of a series of heart attacks that nearly killed him, I knew I needed to find a way to become healthy that would be effective, safe, and sustainable over the long term. But getting to the point of desiring sincere change took a series of events that began in the fall of 2003.

At the time, I was a substitute teacher filling in for a middle-school English class. As I began writing instructions on the chalkboard for the lesson that day, I heard a voice yell out from the back of the room, “Man, Mr. Moore is really fffffffaat!” There were about two seconds of dead silence and then the loudest, most raucous roar of laughter you’ve ever heard. Ever so slowly I turned in the direction of the boy who said it and nervously joined in the laughter—mostly to keep from crying!

That was the first spark that led me to seriously look for a way to get my weight and health under control for good. Other signs that I desperately needed to do something about my obesity soon followed. There were countless reminders in my daily life that change needed to come quickly: constantly ripping the back side of my pants getting in and out of my car, having trouble getting up off the couch without assistance, not being able to go to the movies or fly on an airplane because I couldn’t fit into the seats, and, most disturbingly, the judgmental looks on the faces of the people I encountered. It was all waking me to the reality that I had gone too far in allowing myself to reach this point.

One prominent and lasting memory is from the annual Fall Festival at my church. There was a rock-climbing wall there, and I was watching kids and adults alike scramble up and down that thing like they were Spider-Man. Of course, I thought to myself that it looked pretty easy and anyone could do it. So I stood in line to try my hand at scaling the wall for myself. After strapping on all the safety lines and gear to begin my climb, I stepped up to that wall and reached high for something to grab on to. When I attempted to step on one of the lower rock ledges, I had trouble lifting myself up because of my weight, and my foot slipped almost immediately. I tried again, and this time my foot slipped off and turned sideways, causing some minor pain in my ankle. I looked around at the crowd of people who were watching my every move and embarrassingly had to forfeit my attempt to climb the wall. That event remains an indelible experience in my mind, and at the time it was a blazing sign that something drastic had to change in the very near future. But what could I do that would be any better than all my futile attempts to lose weight in the past?

Just thinking about going on yet another diet made me sick to my stomach. It’s considered common knowledge that to lose weight, you have to cut your calories, reduce the amount of dietary fat you consume, and exercise more, committing yourself to spending hours on the treadmill every week. So the default weight loss plan that so many of us fall into is a low-fat, low-calorie diet with regular trips to the gym several times a week.

But I vividly recalled the intense hunger and frustration that I experienced when doing that in 1999, and I realized there had to be a better way. It was fortuitous that my mother-in-law decided to get me a diet book for Christmas that year. Does any other son-in-law get weight loss books from their wife’s mom as a holiday gift? I sure did! And in retrospect, I’m so glad and grateful for that year’s Christmas present, which changed the course of my life forever. Thanks, Libby!