Everlean Culture

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As most exercise physiologists and doctors will tell us, exercise is important. And I agree… but only in the context of the awful health conditions brought on by a poor diet. These health conditions include obesity, heart disease, insulin resistance, metabolic disorders, bone loss, muscle damage, and to a certain extent, chemical and hormonal imbalances. Exercise, therefore, is the medication by which we treat degenerative conditions that shouldn’t exist in the first place.

The Standard Western Diet, which contains high amounts of grain-based carbohydrates and sugar, promotes these degenerative conditions (often referred to mistakenly as age-related diseases). The higher content of phytates in grain-based foods can block magnesium, calcium, zinc, and iron absorption, minerals essential to the defense against degenerative diseases. The lectins in grains can force glucose into fat cells and inhibit fat release. Gluten in grains can (especially in those with celiac disease) leach bone mineral, thus increasing the risk for osteopenia, a precursor to osteoporis. And sugar, according to Dr. Nancy Appleton, can change protein structure and interfere with protein absorption, thus impeding normal muscle metabolism.

Unless we seek big muscles for vanity or bodybuilding purpose, or unless we are competitive athletes using exercise for physical preparation, then we are merely using exercise for the reason for which it is generally billed: to get healthy. But the unspoken reality is that we use exercise to treat (or prevent) obesity and degenerative conditions caused by a poor diet, one which contains refined sugar and excess grain-based carbohydrates.

Consider, as a brief example, the traditional Okanawans, who eat a diet comprised of nutrient-rich vegetables and limited in grains and sugar. They are generally healthy, free of diseases, and lean. Although their total calorie intake is low, I truly believe that their intake of nutrient-rich and nourishing food and their limted consumption of grain-based carbohydrates go far in controlling insulin and thus preventing excessive hunger. This population also never sees the inside of a gym and is entirely unfamiliar with high-intensity-interval training (HIIT). Yet the Okanawans remain lean and healthy. They are casually active by normal daily activities such as gardening and walking. They certainly don’t hire personal trainers!

Formal exercise improves physical work capacity and offers functional advantages. But don’t rely on it for primordial health and permanent weight loss.

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The Partitioning Diet (PD) is not a calorie-reduction diet, and it has two simple rules:

1. Remove all grains from your diet
2. Avoid sugar

You can eat anything else… all the meats, all the vegetables, all the fruits, and all the nuts. Flavor your food with salt, pepper and all the herbs and spices you want. Just eat a grain-free, real-food diet. It sounds easy, because it is — weight loss is only successful when dietary habit is easy and sustainable.

You must understand that removing sugar from your diet is simply not enough. Almost all grains and grain-based foods convert into sugar once you eat them, thus elevating blood sugar and stimulating the production of insulin. And insulin, in turn, dumps blood sugar into the cells of the body, particularly fat cells. This process disrupts energy levels, stimulates excess fat deposit, and blocks fatty acid inside fat cells. This metabolic compromise can continue even in a state of calorie deficit (e.g. a reduced-calorie diet). This is the reason you should remove grains and sugar from your diet before even worrying about counting calories.

Before being concerned with how much you eat, you need first to train your body to shuttle consumed calories into organ and muscle cells for nourishment, and to release fat from its storage. This is the first step to regaining metabolic health, which results in the proper regulation of body weight. Normal, healthy body weight is NOT achieved through exercise, a low-calorie diet, or medication.

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There are things in life we take as gospel, like one which tells us that overweight is caused by physical inactivity. Health professionals preach this for decades. So the culture blames the overweight and the obese for what’s considered a shameful condition: laziness. This mentality puts guilt on those already suffering a weight problem, but equally damaging is that it breeds hateful discrimination against those suffering a condition that might have nothing to do with laziness.

The popular notion is that inactivity causes weight gain, but the science shows that they are only correlated, that there’s no proof of cause-effect. In other words, we don’t know for sure if inactivity causes overweight, or even if overweight causes inactivity. There are many overweight people who are active, just as there are many normal-weight people who are inactive.

The other day I went to a car-wash (I was too lazy to wash my own car on this particular weekend!). This was a large-scale, all-hand-wash operation that moves dozens of cars through every hour, with swarms of busy employees with rags in hands and constantly in motion, bending and reaching and squatting. If there is a job that keeps you moving, this is it — 8-hour shifts of constant bending, reaching, and squatting.

What was particularly interesting in observation was that more than 2/3 of the car-wash staff was overweight. Here was a small population that was active all day long, yet their weight contradicts the conventional claim that physical inactivity causes overweight. And since overweight is associated with poverty, and people with lower-wage income tend to earn a living in manual labor  jobs, then a different mechanism might be the cause of overweight, and not physical inactivity.

The discussion of body weight regulation (e.g. weight loss, management), therefore, ought to center on dietary control rather than exercise and physical activity.

Definitely NOT what you’d find at your typical car-wash place.