Podcast 205: Eating Habits and Carbs

Martin Pytela, founder of Life Enthusiast and his co-host Scott Paton take on the topic of proper eating and metabolism this week on their alternative health podcast.

Scott describes a study that proves it takes 28 days to create a habit. A very interesting study – tune in to hear to tale.

We all have trouble finding the perfect diet for ourselves. Improper diet results in inflammation, leading to the production of insulin, which is then stores energy as fat where it doesn’t get used properly.

Cholesterol is another result of improper diet. It leads to cases of high blood pressure, heart attacks and arterial plaque. The body produces both “good” and “bad” cholesterol, and the two must be kept in balance for your maximum health to be achieved. Managing blood cholesterol levels can be very difficult and eating the right foods with exercise is only the beginning.

XtraPure Lecithin. It is a potent ally for your immune system, and a moisturizer and lubricant. The product itself is designed to enable efficient fat metabolism. This leads to remarkable weight loss. Lecithin is also what your brain uses to create the chemical stuff thought is made of. The more of it you have, the sharper your mind becomes.

Podcast 205: Eating Habits and Carbs

SCOTT: Welcome back, everybody! You are listening to the Life Enthusiast Podcast, restoring vitality to you and to the planet. I am your co-host, Scott Paton, along with the founder of the Life Enthusiast, Martin Pytela. Hey, Martin, how are you doing today?

MARTIN: I am doing great, Scott! You amaze me, you are able to say this intro pretty consistently without a hitch, never needing to say it again, you are such a natural for podcasting!

SCOTT: Well, I have practiced it 200 times, so I would hope I would have it down by now!

MARTIN: That is a good point to make! Stuff we do a lot, frequently, we can do even without thinking, we can just do it.

SCOTT: That is right! I think one of the important lessons of that is the fact that it does often take some time to create new habits. I don’t know if I have ever told you this, but there was an interesting experiment done by NASA, they took these people who want to be astronauts, and they turn them upside down, and they hung them upside down, they had to eat upside down, they slept upside down, and a very, very peculiar thing happened after 28 days. Of course, when you hang upside down, everything you see looks upside down. And their brain perception flipped so that even though they were hanging upside down, everything looked right side up after these 28 days.

MARTIN: Yeah, full reset! We have apps like that, we have a gyroscope in your iPhone, right?

SCOTT: Yep, and depending on how you hold it, it changes the view. That is what happened! After 28 days, this happened to everybody, so they did a second experiment, and at 14 days, they took them down, turned them right side up, and then on the 15th day, they put them back up. And at the 28th-day mark, it didn’t reset. So what they learned was that it had to be 28 days straight with no going back to the old way. A lot of people will say that if you want to change a habit or create a new habit, you have to do it for 28 days. And I always say: “I can do it for 28 days, just not 28 days straight. But this shows how important it is to do things over and over, consistently for a period of time, so it becomes the new default. And I think that is one of the important lessons when people are looking at their health. If you are determined, and you can do something for a month, every day, chances are you will create a habit that will then continue. But if you just do it half-heartedly for the month, you are most likely going to fall back to your old ways.

MARTIN: Yeah. This is a really interesting point you are making. There are studies done on people who are addicted to carbohydrates, their body burns carbs for energy. If your body is used to burning carbs for energy, you will have these afternoon or evening cravings, looking for some quick burn, some fast calories. But if you switch your diet to a low carbohydrate diet, and you will stick to it for over 20 days, you will teach your body to burn fat for energy!

SCOTT: So my question is about the sources of carbs. Bread – I got that one. Can you name a few more? Because I am thinking Coca-Cola, soft drinks, chocolate bars, but those are maybe simple carbs, so they should be out anyway, but I am just thinking what would be other ones that I might not think of as carbs?

MARTIN: Okay, so if you visualize a slice of bread, you can see it about the size of your palm, it is pretty much about that size, about that thickness. Close your palm into a fist, that makes about one potato, that also makes about a small bowl of rice, a small bowl of pasta maybe… all of these things have a glycaemic index 50 and above.

SCOTT: Oh yeah, pasta, I forgot about pasta! I remember this store manager of the store that I worked at when I was young, he was diabetic, and I knew him even before he was diagnosed. After he was diagnosed, he said: “Okay, I am diabetic, I have to change my diet.” So he starts changing his diet. And this was 30 years ago. And he got worse and worse and worse. So finally, he goes back to the doctor, and the doctor says: “Well, you have been eating oranges. There is so much sugar in those oranges, and that is making it worse.” And he goes: “Well, thanks for telling me before when I was trying to ask you what I could and could not eat. I thought orange is a fruit, it is natural, it will help.” And of course, it wasn’t helping, it is full of sugar. So that is why I wanted to bring this up because people can think fruit is okay, it is not bread or pasta, but it still has a lot of sugar in it. Also, you can have some bread for breakfast, mashed potatoes for lunch, and a bowl of rice for dinner, it is a lot of carbohydrates, and it is going to be a problem if you are diabetic, for example.

Also, a few podcasts ago, I was telling you about my experiences with my colon hydrotherapist, cleaning out the colon. And she said I have lots of candida. And of course, we flushed a lot of the candida out, and since then, I have been eating very well, very little carbs, and I have had very little cravings for it. So I suspect that my candida now is a bit lower than it used to be because I used to have those cravings at eight o’clock, but I don’t really feel that craving anymore. And my son has started cooking in a very healthy way, so it is always some kind of protein and some vegetables, like broccoli, beans, asparagus, and a little bit of rice. It is way down in terms of carbohydrates, compared to the way I was eating before. And it has been about three weeks, so I am getting close to the fourth week, and I feel really great.

MARTIN: That is great! Also, you know what is interesting? We talked about biorhythms some time ago. There are these different cycles. The physical cycle runs on 21 days, emotional runs on 28, and intellectual runs on 33. So maybe, these reset points, these habit cycles, have something to do with these biological cycles! Maybe the physical body reset indeed is the 21 days, but thinking patterns, the mindset changes, need 33 days to reset. I would be surprised if it was coincidental. And then there is this other that comes to mind, and that is the metabolic type. I would love to have the research grants to find out which blood types or metabolic types are the ones that are diabetic more often, and what would help them. We talked about metabolic types before, one type is alkalized by fats and proteins, the other one is alkalized by fruits and veggies. And I would speculate that the people that end up diabetic are the ones that are supposed to be eating mainly protein and fat diet, but instead stick to the carb diet.

The American government heavily supports the production of staple foods that can be easily stored, which are wheat, corn, and soy. Those three are subsidized in huge ways. Corporate farming produces big quantities, and they are trying to make other uses for it. For instance, they are taking corn and turning it into ethanol to burn in cars, which is beyond ridiculous. The soy has now been turned into milk equivalents, soy milk, which has a deadly side effect, causing hormonal problems for both men and women. We all know high fructose corn syrup, which is even deadlier to your body, your metabolic system is not set up to deal with this artificially produced glucose-fructose combination. But let me tie it back together, back to our original point.

When you have excess sugar in your body, it creates inflammation. The insulin that your body has to produce is not there to just lower the blood sugar levels, its job is to store energy. When we used to go through cycles of feast and famine, when there was abundant energy in the body, the insulin was supposed to grab it and store it. And the storage system is called fat. So that is what your insulin is doing. If you have high blood sugar, insulin shows up and pulls the blood sugar level down by storing it in your fat cells, so we can access this stored energy later, but it is actually making you fat. That is why a lot of diabetics are obese, or a lot of obese people are diabetic. It sort of goes hand in hand.

SCOTT: Okay, so let me just see if I have got this straight: when we eat and consume excess calories, particularly excess calories that have no nutritional value, it creates inflammation. When the body gets inflamed, it makes more insulin…

MARTIN: …I need to stop you there, you got a little confused. The high levels of insulin is the cause of the inflammation. Just visualize this: There is too much fuel in the mix. We need to remove the fuel, and the method of removing it is burning. What does burning do? It causes damage! You are burning your hallways. The hallways are the circulatory system of your body. So now that we have this damage in there, we need to go and start fixing that. And the quick fix method is cholesterol. So your body is producing the cholesterol in reaction to the high level of insulin, which is like the flame that burns it off, which is there because of the high levels of calories, that you have ingested without thinking.

SCOTT: Okay. So that is the part I was missing, the body creates more cholesterol to repair the damage because we have got too much fuel burning, which causes the inflammation. And then, of course, we get high cholesterol, which brings us back to what we were talking about last week, which was high blood pressure, hardening of the arteries, heart attacks, and all those sorts of ‘good’ things.

MARTIN: So what is then the cause of all of the circulatory health problems? It is the diet! It is the inappropriate diet, it is the calorie-rich, nutrient-poor diet of people, who have access to more food than they are designed for.

SCOTT: Yeah, and access to food that has no nutritional value.

MARTIN: Yes, that is right. These empty calories are easily stored. Things like grains are a fantastic source of quick energy, but when you use it all the time, it becomes your enemy. The main point, that is relevant, is that these diets were created by people who worked physically, a farmer who is cutting the wheat, stacking it up and throwing it with a pitchfork on the back of a wagon, you know, these are the people who are putting out 5,000 or 6,000 calories a day, but there is no problem putting 5,000 into the body because they burn it off with physical work. They are using up that energy in muscles. But if you are just sitting down, and eating all these calories, the only reaction that the body has now is to say: “Okay, here is some excess energy, we don’t need it now, so let’s store it in our fat cells.”

Let’s get to this other side of things. So, number one – we need to eat fewer empty calories. It is the only way we can prevent cholesterol from forming. That’s it. We have been undereducated, we have done stupid things to our bodies, we eat more calories than we should have, and we eat the wrong foods, and then what we have to do is get on scrubbing this excess cholesterol out of the body. One of the ways that you can indeed remove a lot of these cholesterol deposits is with fiber.

SCOTT: Right, oat bran fiber was huge a few decades ago!

MARTIN: Right? It is oat bran, rice bran, whatever. I mean, rice bran is excellent. We use a lot of the rice bran in our superfoods, it is a fantastic product that you can be adding to your nutritional picture. But it shouldn’t be toasted oats, mixed with sugar and milk, with a spoonful of brown sugar on top. What I just described is basically a bowl of breakfast cereal, like Cheerios. That is not the way.

SCOTT: So again, getting away from the quick fix, when you go down the cereal aisle, there is all this stuff you can get, that is full of sugar, and of course they say: “We put lots of rice bran and oat bran in here, and it is healthy, heart-healthy!” And then of course you look at the label, and there is like a pound of sugar in there, and a pound of other stuff that isn’t really healthy.

MARTIN: Right. That is the problem. Anything that has the words “ready,” or “instant,” or “quick,” those kinds of words should be alarms, not attractions. And yet, we have been made to think that fast is good, and quick is good, and instant is even better.

SCOTT: Yeah, that is the McDonald’s culture we live in.

MARTIN: Right. I would call it the ‘fast food’ or ‘instant gratification’ culture, or ‘I don’t have time for this’ culture. Well, if you don’t have time for decent nutrition, prepare yourself for a lot of time in a wheelchair later. Or else, if you are lucky, you are going to just die of a massive heart attack at 45.

SCOTT: Yeah, when people have a heart attack, they usually just have one. The final one.

MARTIN: But this is the craziest thing, Scott! Oftentimes, the first indication of a heart problem is a huge heart attack. Many famous people have checked out at the prime of their life through a heart event, that nobody could have foreseen. Well, yes, you could have seen that coming! I don’t know if you remember Tim Russert, he was one of the NBC commentators, a very much loved and liked guy, a really good guy. And guess what? He was on statin drugs! He was in the care of a doctor, he was lowering his cholesterol through the drugs, and he was a bit overweight, and then boom! A single event happened, and there was no way to save the guy. And here is the sad thing, he was a guy who could afford the best care possible!

SCOTT: Yeah, that is right!

MARTIN: I mean, this guy was paid millions of dollars, and he could have had the best advice, he could have had top-class care, and I imagine he did have it, too. So what does it tell you? The best allopathic medicine that money can buy can’t deal with something like this. Why? Because of their perspective. Their worldview is completely wrong. It is ignorant of causes. So what do we do? We eat fiber, and we also emulsify fats. There is this lovely, simple thing called  Lecithin, which is the universal emulsifier. In order to move something that is fat-soluble in a water transport system, you first must emulsify it. A typical emulsifier that you’d be familiar with is dish soap! In order to get fat off of the baking pan, you use the dish soap, and you watch the action. As soon as you add the soap in there, it connects with the fat molecules, and the water transports it away! That is what goes on in your body. Things that are fat-soluble can only be transported by emulsification. If you don’t have an emulsifier, it just stays stuck. So if you want to deal with cholesterol, and your transport system is water-based, both your blood and your lymph are water-based, you must have the emulsifier.

SCOTT: There it is! Where do we get one?

MARTIN: Well, it is naturally a part of oils, it is in eggs, it is in all seeds, and it can be separated. We have been selling lecithin that is made from soy, and don’t panic about the word soy, is separated from the soy oil, it does not carry any of that bad stuff that you can associate with soy, with that phytoestrogenic effect we talked about, that can turn men into women, and cause all sorts of hormonal issues. There are all different kinds of lecithin available, you can check our website and choose one, they are all a decent quality product. The stuff we sell, I promise you, is a good call. We only want the best for our bodies. Our brain is mainly made from fats, fat is one of the building blocks that is used in the creation of the brain tissue, but also in the covering of the nerves, called the myelin sheath. That is also fat stuff. So having plenty of lecithin in the body improves many, many things, including the structure of the entire nervous system. There are many advantages to supplementing with lecithin.

SCOTT: So, Martin, if somebody wanted to know where they could go to get some lecithin, as well as other supplements we talked about today, what should they do?

MARTIN: Well, as always, visit www.life-enthusiast.com, there is a handy-dandy search box right at the top of the webpage. So type in the word you are interested in, and in a few seconds, you can see results! If you are stuck or feel overwhelmed, you can call me at (866) 543 3388, I always answer the phone, and I am ready to give you guidance.

SCOTT: Wonderful! Thank you, Martin! And thanks for joining us, everybody. You have been listening to the Life Enthusiast Podcast with Scott Paton and Martin Pytela! We look forward to reading your comments, so make sure you head over to the Life Enthusiast website and leave us a message! There is lots of great information there, including lots of articles on lecithin, and lowering blood pressure, and all those good things. And one of the things that we often say is: educate yourself, learn about this stuff, and look after yourself. We are there to help you and support you on your journey.

MARTIN: Yes, we are! Alright, so this was the Life Enthusiast Podcast, restoring vitality to you and to the planet. Thank you for listening!

Note: the information provided are not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always consult with your medical professional(s) if you are dealing with a specific medical issue.

Author: Martin Pytela