10 Key Points For Getting Healthier Despite American Culture Trying To Pull You In The Other Direction

By Brian Cates

If you’re like I was in June of 2023, and you’re tired of lugging around 150 pounds of excess body fat?

I’ve got some helpful suggestions for you based on my experiences over the past ten months:

1. Realize that almost everything the ‘experts’ you trusted told you about food and health was wrong—perhaps deliberately so.

What If Everything They’ve Been Telling You About Food Is… WRONG?

The ‘Standard American Diet’ [SAD] that our nutrition experts have been telling us was acceptable and not all that bad is absolutely the worst. The average American adult eats hundreds of pounds of a combination of processed sugars and unhealthy forms of salt, wheat, corn, and seed oils yearly.

This unhealthy diet has led to a literal national health crisis. Still, the government and official ‘health’ and ‘medical science’ agencies and experts continue to dispense truly awful advice to the public.

As just one brief example, just two years ago, Joe Biden hosted an event at the White House where a supposedly ‘new and improved’ Food Pyramid made its debut.

Author Daniel Trevor discusses this ‘improved’ and ‘updated’ Food Pyramid in his new book, “Unholy Trinity: How Carbs, Sugar & Oils Make Us Fat, Sick & Addicted…”:

Ultra-processed sugary cereals like Lucky Charms, Frosted Flakes, Trix, Apple Jacks, and many more were rated as being ‘healthier’ for kids than eggs, bacon, beef, and cheese. Trevor notes that real food was put at the very bottom of this new Food Pyramid rolled out by the Dean of the Tufts School of Nutrition.

So this is where the SAD is at currently: people are listening to credentialed ‘nutrition experts’ at major universities and government agencies who are authoritatively pronouncing to them that sugar-filled fake crap made from processed sugars like high fructose corn syrup, GMO-modified wheat, GMO-modified corn and also chock-full of toxic seed oils is “healthier” for them and their families than one-ingredient food like eggs, bacon, steak and cheese.

This is incredibly alarming. Diet and nutrition experts continue to put the official stamp of approval on the fake food that has caused a massive explosion of diabesity in this country since the early 1960s.

But the first step in escaping from this trap is realizing these experts can’t be trusted, rejecting the SAD, and committing to changing your daily diet.

2. Remove from your daily diet all processed foods containing sugar, corn, wheat, and especially ‘vegetable’ seed oils.

Eating processed foods full of these things is what puts you in a toxic and metabolically unhealthy condition. Because carbs are addictive, this will cause withdrawal pangs, it’s true, but they only last for 7-10 days for most people.

For some people who have been on the SAD for decades, this change can be tough at first. Much of American family and social life is centered around how, when, and what we eat daily.

Switching from the SAD to the far healthier ‘real food’ diet can be seen as ‘radical’ in some circles. All of a sudden, you’ll be unable to eat most of the food that is surrounding you in the American food culture. Some people may not understand why you make such a big deal out of not eating certain things and the extra effort you now put into seeking out real food to eat. That’s the next point.

3. Replace all processed fake food with REAL FOOD.

Nutrient-dense food—food as God designed it. If you eat “The Standard American Diet,” as I did for over 55 years, you have likely been nutritionally deficient for decades of your life. When you ditch all the fake food for real food, you will see a marked improvement in many areas.

We live in a culture in which we are not only surrounded by toxic fake food in incredible quantities but this unhealthy fake food is also being endlessly advertised and presented to us over television, in magazines, on the radio, at the movies, public events like sports games and music concerts, etc. Just recently, I watched the NCAA Men’s Basketball Championship Game between Purdue and UConn, a two-and-a-half-hour broadcast. During the game, there were more than 15 different fast food commercials, several being repeated. Also, there are commercials for sodas, candy bars, and snack products like Doritos.

We can be socializing and eating at gatherings with family members who are still addicted to the SAD, and this can create a host of issues. However, once you’ve seen and felt the benefits of ditching the SAD for a Real Food Diet, it will be easier to work your way past any issues that arise.

However, most of our ‘eating life’ is spent in our own homes, not outside of it, so exerting control of what food is allowed inside our homes is not that difficult. An issue can arise if one spouse or family member wants to ditch the SAD while the others in the house remain committed [and addicted!] to it.

Just remember: It’s YOUR health. Nobody else is responsible for it or in charge of what you put into your mouth. At least, that’s true once you’re an adult. If you’re still a kid, yes, you still have to eat your broccoli when your mother tells you to. 😬

4. Keep your daily carbohydrate intake to 30 grams or less.

After a period of time that varies from person to person, usually around 14-17 days, this low-carb diet will put you into ketosis, where your body begins using its stored fat for fuel rather than glucose broken down from carbs in the stomach daily.

Because you keep your carb level low daily, your body is forced to get its fuel by burning its stored fat. The longer you stay in ketosis, the more consistently your body will utilize body fat for energy every day. Over a period of months, this can lead to significant weight loss, as I discovered when I went from 345 pounds in June 2023 to my current weight of 284 pounds.

Of course, once you hit your goal weight and all the excess body fat is gone, you can stop limiting your carbs to under 30 grams a day and go higher.

This is because once you are at a lean body weight, you won’t have all that much body fat left compared to when you started. Not only do you NOT need to be in ketosis every day to lose any more weight, but it would actually be UNHEALTHY for you to continue to burn up your stored body fat. The goal was to get rid of the **excess** unhealthy body fat, not to stay in ketosis for the rest of your life, and turn yourself into an emaciated version of yourself.

Of course, once you hit your target weight, please don’t EVER go back to eating the SAD. While you have far more leeway now that you’ve lost all the excess body fat, that shouldn’t be taken as a license to go right back to the old SAD that got you saddled with all that unhealthy bulk in the first place.

5. Reduce the number of times you eat per day from 3-6 times to only 1 or 2 times.

Once you break your carb addiction, fasting is much easier. That’s because carbs are not only addicting but also make you hungrier. The more carbs you eat, the more carbs you want.

The other two macronutrients, protein and fat, are far different from carbs and have a markedly different impact on the body when ingested. They are satiating. You eat them, and you feel full and contented for hours.

You can test this for yourself. Eat a high-carb meal with almost no protein or fat in it, and see how long it takes you to get hunger pangs. Then eat a high-protein/high-fat/low-carb meal and compare how long it takes you to get hungry again.

This is why when you’ve been eating the high-carb/low-protein/low-fat SAD diet for years, you feel intense hunger pangs if you go just 4-5 hours without eating. Your body will be crying out for more carbs.

So, the high carb content of the SAD literally conditions people to want to eat five or six times a day: three large meals with snacking in between; a big breakfast, then the 10 a.m. snack, followed by a big lunch and a 3 p.m. snack, which leads to the big dinner and then a late-night snack before bed around 9 p.m.

In our present American food culture, you’ve been taught and conditioned to vastly overfeed yourself. Once you stop doing that, you will immediately realize that fasting for 16-20 hours/day improves your health. Your digestive system is not constantly under assault from fake toxic food any longer, it can rest and heal itself.

Under the SAD program of eating many times a day, with each feeding session often involving high-carb fake food, you’ve been spiking your blood glucose levels multiple times, perhaps as many as five to six times a day. And it’s when your insulin levels are elevated, your body is taking all those excess carbs and storing them as body fat.

Decades of doing that develop a serious metabolic condition called ‘insulin resistance,’ which is the root cause of a plethora of chronic illnesses and diseases currently afflicting the American population.

When you switch to eating just 1 or 2 real food meals/day, this will allow your body to begin healing itself and stabilize its insulin level. It will take time to reverse all the damage caused by insulin resistance and get back to being insulin-sensitive, but the time and effort invested are totally worth it.

6. Engage in light to moderate exercise while in a fasted state.

On a low-carb diet, your body no longer finds enough carbs in the stomach daily to fuel itself, and so it will be forced to begin burning the stored body fat for fuel. Light to moderate exercise in the fasted state accelerates and intensifies your body’s burning of stored fat for fuel. You don’t have to turn into a gym rat or a workout warrior—just 20-30 minutes 3 or 4 times a week.

I lost over sixty pounds over eight months by doing nothing but walking and light water exercises in a swimming pool. I also fasted from 6 p.m. to 2 p.m. the following day, a period of 20 hours. Just before ending my fast at 2 p.m., around noon, I would begin exercising, walking, going to the pool, and exercising while in the fasted state.

In the past two months, I’ve added a light weight workout with dumbbells to the routine, and am seeing good results from it.

There are plenty of scientific studies demonstrating how exercising while fasting boosts a person’s results. Study participants lost more body fat and had greater cardiovascular results, as well as gaining more muscle. Working out after eating doesn’t seem to have the same heightened impact, so you definitely should try doing light exercise before breaking your fast.

In fact, it was one of Hollywood’s best-kept secrets for years: how the top personal trainers to the stars whipped their clients into top shape for film roles. The trainers essentially put the clients on an intermittent fasting schedule of 16-20 hours of fasting followed by an 8-4 hour feeding window, in which the clients would eat 2-4 high-protein, high-fat, low-carb meals.

But the biggest ‘trick’ to the routine to whip the movie/TV stars into shape was this one: the trainers would have them do intense physical workouts just before breaking their fast. They make sure to exercise the clients while they are in the fasted state.

In the case of actor Hugh Jackman discussed here, his trainer had him on a 16:8 intermittent fasting schedule and was leading Jackman through the workouts in hours 13-16 of the fast. Once Jackman was done with the workouts, he would break his fast by gorging himself with protein for several hours.

As you can see, this kind of program can achieve dramatic results.

[Note that this guy is a movie star being paid millions of dollars, and he had a top trainer personally taking him through the intense workout routines and monitoring his diet—which included eating a staggering 5,000 daily calories, most of it protein—while he was doing this in preparation for this role.]

Exercising in a fasted state produces big results, whether you are preparing for a movie role or want to lose those thirty excess pounds for the summer.

7. Realize that a lot of the health problems and chronic illnesses/diseases you’ve been wrestling with are diet-related; they are not really genetic.

Many of them are reversible. The key is to deliberately plan to fill your body with the proper amounts of macronutrients daily [protein/fat/carbs] and keep your vitamin/mineral levels high.

One of the things many Americans addicted to SAD are being told to keep them trapped is that their chronic illnesses and infirmities are ‘genetic,’ which means they are lifelong and can’t be cured, and the best that can be hoped for is managing the symptoms with Big Pharma drugs.

But as many Americans are ditching the SAD to begin eating what I’ve taken to calling The Real Food Diet, they are discovering what they have been told by medical and health experts is not true. They’ve found many of the chronic issues and ailments they’ve been managing with expensive drugs for decades actually ARE reversible.

What has anyone got to lose by trying this? Ditching the SAD for just a month or two or three, switching to The Real Food Diet, and seeing what results they can obtain for themselves? If a person doesn’t see any real difference, what have they really lost? They can go back to their old manner of eating.

But I’ve seen plenty of people talking about the great results they got from ditching a daily diet full of fake processed foods for real food. I’ve experienced it myself.

If it’s true that most of the chronic illnesses and diseases that Americans are struggling with today are not really genetic but diet-related, then Americans deciding to change their diets will alleviate this current health crisis.

8. Get the healthy amount of all needed vitamins and minerals daily, either from food or food + supplementation.

As I mentioned earlier, if you’ve been eating the SAD all your life, you are very likely riddled with all kinds of nutritional deficiencies that are causing you a host of health issues. Our bodies need an adequate amount of nutrients daily to be healthy and function at optimum levels.

Note in point eight up there I said ‘the healthy amount’ of these nutrients, **not** the current ‘RDA.’

Fully recognize that the Food and Drug Administration’s ‘Recommended Daily Allowance’ of vitamins/minerals is a freaking joke. I think many people have figured that out by now. Still, I want to be sure to mention this.

The RDA is set to give a person the **barest minimum** of each vitamin/mineral so they don’t get obviously sick and diseased. To achieve optimal health, you need far above the level of the official RDA.

9. Make absolutely sure any vitamins and mineral supplements you take ARE NOT SYNTHETIC, being made in a lab.

If you supplement beyond the vitamins & minerals in your food, ensure you are getting the real deal, organic vitamins and mineral supplements, and not synthetic stuff formed by a chemist in a lab.

Many big corporations are making vitamin/mineral supplements super-cheap synthetically. In a lab. So without knowing it or caring about it, millions of Americans are taking fake vitamin/mineral supplements every day.

Now, they’ll claim to you these synthetic vitamins/minerals are ‘just as good’ as those derived from natural/organic sources. But remember, we live in a deceptive culture where nutrition experts tell kids Lucky Charms cereal is healthier for them than bacon and eggs.

There’s also been a big narrative push over the past few years to convince the American public that fake lab-grown ‘meat’ is just as good as real meat and that fake synthetic butter is a ‘healthier’ alternative to real butter.

It should be remembered these big food corporations were the same ones that sold the public on the fiction that margarine and Crisco made from toxic seed oils were ‘healthier’ for cooking food with than real butter, tallow and lard.

I think the extra effort and expense to ensure any vitamin/mineral supplements you take are coming from natural organic sources is worth it.

10. Get out into the sunlight daily and ground yourself by walking or standing barefoot on the grass, dirt, or sand.

Just as we’re not made to eat 5-6 times a day, we’re also not designed to stay inside four walls all the time in fake light, cut off from the Earth.

Some people laugh at this idea, but grounding is very real; the Earth and the Sun emit electromagnetic fields that human beings are designed to experience. And for most of our lives, many of us have been living sedentary lives shut away from both the Sun and contact with the Earth. This is an incredibly unhealthy way to live, and yet it has become the norm for millions of Americans.

The effects of grounding ourselves on the Earth have been scientifically established, especially when it comes to dealing with inflammation issues.

Scientific studies and anecdotal observations I’ve heard from several people prove the benefits of getting out into the early morning sunlight and grounding ourselves to improve sleep at night.

Despite the scientific evidence of the positive benefits of sunlight and grounding, people are still being scared by Fake News fearmongering into staying out of the Sun.

“You’ll get sunburned and skin cancer!” people are told. Well, true, many people are susceptible to burning in the Sun if they eat an unhealthy diet. Recently, however, more and more people are discovering through experience that they no longer burn in the sun because they’ve stopped cooking or eating food with seed oils.

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All of these things have worked and continue to work for me.

The only thing I’ll change from this list is that when I hit my target weight of 200 pounds, I won’t need to be in ketosis anymore. I will be able to eat more than 20-30 grams of carbs every day and maintain a healthy weight.

Hope this helps someone out there and inspires them to make some changes.

I’ve run on the “just workout more and eat less” treadmill for 30+ years. I know what doesn’t work, and I’m learning what does.

God bless everybody.