"Eat bacon, don't jog and NEVER eat fruit"

from the Daily Mail

Eat bacon, don't jog and NEVER eat fruit: Health guru reveals the 10 surprising ways YOU can shed the pounds and get fit.  Grant Petersen is author of the best selling book Eat Bacon, Don't Jog.  He advocates a low-carb diet where most of the calories come from fat.  This puts the body in a state where it burns its own fat for fuel, he says.  Advises five-minuted bursts of intensive exercise rather than jogging.

By GRANT PETERSEN

PUBLISHED: 08:08 EST, 19 October 2015 | UPDATED: 12:24 EST, 19 October 2015

Forget salads--bacon, cheese and cream are the key to weight loss. 

Eating fat--rather than carbohydrates--is the key to slimming down, according to Grant Petersen, author of Eat Bacon, Don't Jog.

For years, Mr Petersen tried to lose weight in the conventional way - through eating a low fat diet and exercising for up to three hours a day.

While he says he wasn't fat by American standards, he wasn't losing weight and became frustrated. 

After researching different diets, he came to believe that rather than being a simple matter of calories eaten versus energy expelled, the hormone insulin affects weight loss.

When a person eats carbohydrates, they are broken down into glucose in the blood.

The pancreas secretes insulin, which clears away glucose from the blood into cells, so it can be used as energy.  But insulin causes calories to be stored as body fat, and prevents people using their own body fat as fuel, Mr Petersen argues.  Cutting out carbohydrates and eating all calories from fat lowers insulin levels, and therefore weight gain. 

Eating no more than 50g of carbohydrates a day - the equivalent of a slice of bread and a banana puts the body into a state known as 'ketosis', in which it burns its own fat for energy, he says.  It also prevents hunger, which mostly comes from craving sugar, he maintains.  Here, Mr Peterson explains why people should stop eating fruit, add oil to their morning coffee and exercise so intensely they are gasping for air...

1. Eat fish, meat, avocados and macadamia nuts.  

The good fats are those that have a healthy ratio of omega-6- to omega-3- fatty-acids. 

These include fats from:

A)  Cold-water fish 

B)  Avocados.  

Avocado contains monounsaturated fat, which has many health benefits.  Fat from salmon, sardines, herring, anchovies; shellfish like crab, shrimp, scallops, and oysters.  They are low on the food chain and die young so they don't have time to accumulate mercury the way big old predator fish like tuna and swordfish do. These are high in omega-3s, low in omega-6s.

Grass-fed animals.  They also have a good ratio of omega-3s to omega-6s, although not as overwhelmingly good as oily fish.  Fats from olives, avocados, and especially macadamia nuts. These fats aren't high in omega-3s, but they have better omega-6 to omega-3 ratios than do most fatty foods. The dominant type of fat in both olive oil and avocado oil is monounsaturated, which provides health benefits that make up for the unimpressive ratios for omega-3s to omega 6s.

2. For breakfast, drink coffee with fat

Put three or four tablespoons of butter, ghee, cream, and/or coconut oil in your morning tea or coffee. This is a perfect breakfast.

If you're just starting out on the low-carb way of life and still crave solid food in the morning, replace that muffin and coffee with two or three eggs and four or five slices of bacon along with your tea or coffee. 

As you get into ketosis, you'll find you're not so hungry when you wake up and won't need all that food until later in the day.  Once you get over not eating in the morning, a hot fatty drink like this will feel normal, even indulgent. 

3. Fruits are just 'juicy sugar orbs' 

Before agriculture, fruit was seasonal, small, sweet only when compared to meat and greens, and rare.  Now it's selectively bred to be huge, supersweet, and abundant; and no matter where you live, you can buy South American grapes in November. 

Fruit is abundant in the sugar fructose - which goes straight to the liver.

 Fruits are universally considered natural and healthy, but compared to their ancient relatives, today's fruits are pretty much just juicy sugar orbs that, from a health perspective, look good only when compared to grains and donuts.  Read this out loud: 'Fruit makes me fat.'  It's not just the quantity of sugar, but the kind.  Glucose, lactose, sucrose, and other sugars get metabolized (used as fuel) all over your body, but fruit sugar - fructose - goes straight to your liver.  Since your liver didn't evolve to handle huge doses of fructose, it turns it into triglycerides (dangerous fat) and sends it out into your blood, to your arteries, and onto your hips.

4. Try 'fasting' - while eating bacon.  

Whatever spiritual, bowel-cleansing, detoxifying, and generally suspect benefits the Eastern mystics and fasting fanatics may tout, the undeniable benefit of fasting is a lowering of blood sugar and a consequent lowering of blood insulin.  When you cut out all food (including carbs), your blood-insulin level will drop, you'll start to burn body fat, and you'll stop being hungry.  But starvation, even if only for a day, is a dreary and unnecessary way to get there.  Besides, when you starve one day, it's easy to eat too much the next day.  If you want to fast to reduce insulin, there are two ways that work just as well and don't make you miserable with cravings. The first is to clump all high-fat, low carb eating into any six-hour period; 8am to 2pm, 12 to 6pm, 6pm to 12pm, any you like - and then fast for the subsequent 18 hours.  The second option is to eat nothing but fat, whenever you like, for 24 hours. For an entire day, eat only cheese, homemade unsugared whipped cream, coconut oil, olive oil, butter, bacon, 2 to 4 ounces of fatty meat, or up to six eggs, depending on how big you are.

5. Dark bitter vegetables are best.  

Dark, leafy vegetables tend to have more nutrients and taste more bitter than lighter vegetables that grow in heads, like cabbages and iceberg lettuce.  Broad, exposed leaves like kale, endive, collards, chard, spinach, watercress, dandelion greens, and mustard greens reach for the sun and lay out flat like a 1950s sunbather.

That exposure helps them develop phytonutrients and antioxidants that protect them from pests. The phytonutrients give them their familiar, bitter taste that most kids hate but adults have learned to tolerate—no doubt in part because they feel virtuous eating them.

6. Never eat an egg white omelette or potatoes.  

The yolk is the best part of the egg. It's 50 percent of the egg's protein and all of its fat. Most people think the cholesterol in the yolk will clog your arteries, but it won't.  Yolks get a bad rap because they contain cholesterol, but there is no relationship between cholesterol in the egg yolk and the cholesterol clogging your arteries.  High bad-cholesterol numbers are driven by carbohydrates and omega-6 oils, not the healthy fats in egg yolks.  Bereft of most nutrients except potassium, potatoes are way too starchy for human health.  If you're serious about health, regard all potatoes - even those presented like healthy, whole gems -like fast-food French fries.

7. Coconut is god.

Coconut oil . . . contains medium-chain triglycerides (MCTs).  These fats are good because they are metabolized differently than other fats. They're easier to burn as energy, and when you do that you make ketones, an efficient fuel for body, heart, and brain functions.

Coconuts are a great source of medium-chain triglycerides (MCTs), which are 'fat royalty' as they are readily burned as energy.  Coconut is right up there with salmon in the 'not magic, but damn close to it' category, partly because it's so low in carbs for a nonleafy plant, but mainly because it's such a great source of medium-chain triglycerides (MCTs).   Coconut oil is 66 percent MCTs. MCTs are fat royalty because they aren't stored in the body the way other fats are.  They're readily burned as energy and, in the burning, produce more ketones (cell fuel alternative to glucose) than any other kind of fat. 

Greek yoghurt contains less carbohydrates as the sugary whey has been drained away.  MCTs are being used in treatments for obesity, cancer, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and other neurological diseases that typically rely on a steady supply of glucose.  MCTs aren't easy to come by, and coconut products, especially coconut oil, have far more of it than any other food.  

8. Eat Greek yogurt. 

 Greek yogurt is regular yogurt that's been drained of some of its juicy whey to make it thicker.  The milk sugar (lactose) is in the whey, so as it loses whey, it loses carbs.  But among Greek yogurts, there's a wide range in carb contents, so read the labels and get the one with the fewest per cup.  Between 5 grams and 9 grams is good; over 15 grams is too much. Always go for plain— anything added means more carbs.  You'll notice that craters in the tub of yoghurt fill with liquid whey. Dump it out. The whey is sour and has lactose (milk sugar) - double whammy there - so get rid of it and the yoghurt will be milder for it.  Full-fat yogurt tastes better, is richer than low-fat and nonfat yoghurts, and on a super low-carb program, it'll fill you up without making you fat from the extra calories.  If you're used to fruit-flavoured, still buy it plain, but add a few berries and/or a little xylitol or stevia.

9. You CAN drink alcohol.

If you were concerned about calories, you'd have to give up the empty ones from alcohol, but on a low-carb diet that doesn't count calories, as long as your total carbs are low enough, it doesn't matter where they come from.  The goal is to limit carbs to whatever quantity your body can tolerate while still burning fat for fuel, and maintaining a state of ketosis often enough to lose weight and be healthy—and that depends on your insulin sensitivity. 

If you get fat easily, you may have to limit yourself to 20 grams of carbohydrates per day; if you don't, you can probably eat 50 grams of carbs per day.  This is good news for booze fans. Spirits are the lowest in carbs, beer is the highest, and always skip the mixers if they're sweetened.

Essentially zero carbs:

Whiskey, gin, rum, tequila, Scotch, vodka — as long as they're unsweetened and not mixed with sugared soda.

10. Don't jog. 

Short, intense exercise that makes your muscles burn and makes you gasp for more air to supply the burning muscles with oxygen.  It has to be hard. If you can talk or watch TV or maintain the effort level for more than five minutes, it's too easy.  If you want maximum return on your exercising minutes - so you can make it as short as possible -you need to work as hard as you can.

This idea is antithetical to the 'exercise is fun' notion that drives the exercise industry, but let me be clear about this.   Skiing, hiking, riding a bike, and surfing are fun, but the exercise is incidental to the fun.  Fun is great, but it's an inefficient way to get fit. I'm not saying don't do it - that stuff can be the best part of your life.  I'm just saying that when the goal is improved cardiovascularity [strengthening the heart and blood vessels], stronger muscles, and injury resistance, then short, superintense exercise works much better and much faster than play or recreation.  Maximally efficient exercise is barely bearable, and not even close to fun.  

Extracted from Eat Bacon, Don't Jog by Grant Petersen (Workman, £9.99). Copyright ©2014.