Intermittent Fasting Quotes

The basics of good nutrition can be summarized in these simple rules. Eat whole, unprocessed foods. Avoid sugar. Avoid refined grains. Eat a diet high in natural fats. Balance feeding with fasting. !

We are wired for feast and famine, not feast, feast, feast.

Hunger is a state of mind, not a state of stomach.

The price of fasting is zero.

A little starvation can really do more for the average sick man than can the best medicines and the best doctors. —Mark Twain

Interestingly, I’ve seen the highest success rates with husbands and wives who try fasting together: the mutual support is a big help and makes fasting far easier.

Coffee, even the decaffeinated version, appears to protect against type 2 diabetes. In a 2009 review, each additional daily cup of coffee lowered the risk of diabetes by 7 percent, even up to six cups per day.23

OBESITY IS NOT caused by an excess of calories, but instead by a body set weight that is too high because of a hormonal imbalance in the body.

Given the existence as uttered forth in the public works of Puncher and Wattmann of a personal God quaquaquaquaquaquaqua with white beard quaquaquaquaquaqua outside time without extension who from the heights of divine apathia divine athambia divine aphasia loves us dearly with some exceptions for reasons unknown but time will tell and suffers like the divine Miranda with those who for reasons unknown but time will tell are plunged into torment plunged into fire whose fire flames if that continues and who can doubt it will fire the firmament that is to say blast hell to heaven so blue still and calm so calm with a calm which even though intermittent is better than nothing but not so fast and considering what is more that as a result of the labors left unfinished

Fasting, by taking a completely different approach, is much easier to understand. It is so simple that it can be explained in two sentences: Eat nothing. Drink water, tea, coffee, or bone broth. That’s it.

BREAKFAST: THE MOST IMPORTANT MEAL TO SKIP?

The government is subsidizing, with our own tax dollars, the very foods that are making us obese. Obesity is effectively the result of government policy.

Let’s face the truth. Low-calorie diets have been tried again and again and again. They fail every single time.

practical experience with hundreds of patients shows that while they’re on an intermittent fasting regimen, they most often see their hunger diminish, not increase. They often

Intermittent fasting...the diet for people too lazy to cook a bunch of meals during the day!

THE LAST PIECE OF THE PUZZLE THERE ARE FIVE basic steps in weight loss: Reduce your consumption of added sugars. Reduced your consumption of refined grains. Moderate your protein intake. Increase your consumption of natural fats. Increase your consumption of fiber and vinegar.

Diet is Batman and exercise is Robin. Diet does 95 percent of the work and deserves all the attention; so, logically, it would be sensible to focus on diet. Exercise is still healthy and important—just not equally important. It has many benefits, but weight loss is not among them.

THERE ARE TWO prominent findings from all the dietary studies done over the years. First: all diets work. Second: all diets fail.

Our tongue wants what tastes good to it, not what is good for us.

1.Stop putting sugar in (low-carbohydrate diets, intermittent fasting). 2.Burn remaining sugar off (intermittent fasting).

Intermittent fasting... the diet for people too lazy to cook a bunch of meals during the day!

Intermittent fasting is incredibly useful in aiding fat loss, preventing cancer, building muscle, and increasing resilience. Done correctly, it’s one of the most painless high-impact ways to live longer.

Try to physically remove yourself from all food stimuli during a fast. Cooking a meal or even just seeing and smelling food while fasting is almost unbearably difficult. This is not simply a matter of weak willpower. Our cephalic phase responses are fully activated, and to feel those responses without actually eating is like trying to stop a piranha feeding frenzy. This, of course, is the same reason you should not shop for food when hungry, or keep snacks in the pantry.

Overeating regularly eventually leads to underliving.

If someone tells you calories don’t matter, they have no credibility. But if someone tells you calories are all that matters, they have even less.

This is the ancient secret. This is the cycle of life. Fasting follows feasting. Feasting follows fasting. Diets must be intermittent, not steady. Food is a celebration of life. Every single culture in the world celebrates with large feasts. That’s normal, and it’s good. However, religion has always reminded us that we must balance our feasting with periods of fasting—“atonement,” “repentance” or “cleansing.” These ideas are ancient and time-tested. Should you eat lots of food on your birthday? Absolutely. Should you eat lots of food at a wedding? Absolutely. These are times to celebrate and indulge. But there is also a time to fast. We cannot change this cycle of life. We cannot feast all the time. We cannot fast all the time. It won’t work. It doesn’t work.

Because consistently high insulin levels are the root cause of all the diseases of metabolic syndrome, it’s especially important for those with metabolic syndrome to consider how foods stimulate the release of insulin.

Intermittent fasting was associated with more than a 40 percent reduction in heart disease risk in a study of 448 people published in the American Journal of Cardiology reporting that “most diseases, including cancer, diabetes and even neurodegenerative illnesses, are forestalled” by caloric reduction.

This is the ancient secret. This is the cycle of life. Fasting follows feasting. Feasting follows fasting. Diets must be intermittent, not steady. Food is a celebration of life. Every single culture in the world celebrates with large feasts. That’s normal, and it’s good. However, religion has always reminded us that we must balance our feasting with periods of fasting—“atonement,

The reality of your life always comes out in pathology,

Throughout most of human history, obesity has been rare. Individuals in traditional societies eating traditional diets seldom became obese, even in times of abundant food. As

There are an almost infinite number of ways that the body can dissipate excess energy instead of storing it as body fat.

If you feast, you must fast. That

Fasting is not so much a treatment for illness but a treatment for wellness. The

Fasting: Improves mental clarity and concentration Induces weight and body fat loss

IF YOU WANT to avoid weight gain, remove all added sugars from your diet. On

If you reduce your consumption of flour and refined grains, you will substantially improve your weight-loss potential. White

Obesity is a hormonal disorder of fat regulation. Insulin is the major hormone that drives weight gain, so the rational therapy is to lower insulin levels.

A fourteen-day fast delivers seven times the benefit of a two-day fast but is only marginally more difficult. Seven-

Indeed, some leading scientists, such as Dr. Thomas Seyfried, a professor of biology at Boston College, have proposed a yearly seven-day water-only fast for this very reason.

Intermittent fasting,” which traditionally means eating all of your food within a shortened period of the day (usually 6 to 8 hours),

Intermittent fasting enables you to put the amygdala and the whole reptilian part of your brain in its place,

study of a religious forty-day fast found that baseline growth hormone levels increased from 0.73 ng/mL to peak at 9.86 ng/mL. That is a 1250 percent increase in growth hormone, all done without drugs. And a 1992 study showed a fivefold increase in growth hormone in response to a

Simplistic arguments that “Carbs make you fat!” or “Calories make you fat!” or “Red meat makes you fat!” or “Sugar makes you fat!” do not fully capture the complexity of human obesity. The

Unfortunately, we spend obsessive amounts of time and energy trying to understand what we should be eating and devote virtually no time to when we should be eating. We are only seeing half the picture.

Fasting has no upper limit. In the 1970s, a twenty-seven-year-old Scottish man started fasting at a weight of 456 pounds. Over the next 382 days, he subsisted on only noncaloric fluids, a daily multivitamin, and various

Too often, our current model of obesity assumes that there is only one single true cause, and that all others are pretenders to the throne. Endless debates ensue. Too many calories cause obesity. No, too many carbohydrates. No, too much saturated fat. No, too much red meat. No, too much processed foods. No, too much high fat dairy. No, too much wheat. No, too much sugar. No, too much highly palatable foods. No, too much eating out. It goes on and on. They are all partially correct.

In a modern twist to the classic overeating experiments, Feltham decided that he would eat 5794 calories per day and document his weight gain. But the diet he chose was not a random 5794 calories. He followed a low-carbohydrate, high-fat diet of natural foods for twenty-one days. Feltham believed, based on clinical experience, that refined carbohydrates, not total calories, caused weight gain. The macronutrient breakdown of his diet was 10 percent carbohydrate, 53 percent fat and 37 percent protein. Standard calorie calculations predicted a weight gain of about 16 pounds (7.3 kilograms). Actual weight gain, however, was only about 2.8 pounds (1.3 kilograms). Even more interesting, he dropped more than 1 inch (2.5 centimeters) from his waist measurement. He gained weight, but it was lean mass.

There is no reason to be alarmed by benign, occasional, short-term hunger. Given base-level good health, you will not perish. You won’t collapse in a heap and need to be rescued by the cat. Your body is designed to go without food for longish periods, even if it has lost the skill through years of grazing, picking, and snacking. Research has found that modern humans tend to mistake a whole range of emotions for hunger.6 We eat when we’re bored, when we’re thirsty, when we’re around food (when aren’t we?), when we’re with company, or simply when the clock happens to tell us it’s time for food. Most of us eat, too, just because it feels good. This is known as hedonic hunger,

The dropout rates in time-restricted feeding trials certainly appear lower than in more prolonged forms of intermittent fasting, suggesting they’re more easily tolerable,4320 but do they work? When people stopped eating between 7:00 p.m. and 6:00 a.m. for two weeks, they lost about a pound each week compared to no time restriction. Note that no additional instructions or recommendations were given on the amount or type of food consumed. There were no gadgets, calorie counting, or record keeping. They were just told to limit their food intakes to the hours of 6:00 a.m. through 7:00 p.m.

These studies all came to the same startling conclusion: the low-carb diet was significantly better for weight loss than the low-fat diet. Even more stunning was that all the important risk factors for cardiovascular disease—including cholesterol, blood sugar level, and blood pressure—were also much improved on the low-carb diet.

What would happen if the body continued to expend 3000 calories daily while taking in only 1500? Soon fat stores would be burned, then protein stores would be burned, and then you would die. Nice. The smart course of action for the body is to immediately reduce caloric expenditure to 1500 calories per day to restore balance. Caloric

Most processed foods and ingredients are low in protein, high in carbs, high in fat, and engineered to increase palatability. They’re literally designed by scientists to make you overeat because you’re not getting enough protein for satiety, no micronutrients, and way too many over-stimulating sugars and other ingredients that make you lose your sanity.

If you want to live long, sleep more and eat less. ... Intermittent fasting was associated with more than a 40 percent reduction in heart disease risk in a study of 448 people published in the American Journal of Cardiology reporting that 'most diseases, including cancer, diabetes and even neurodegenerative illnesses, are forstalled' by caloric reduction.

Male or female, your waist should be less than half your height.

For longer fasts, it is a good idea to take a general multivitamin. The longest fast recorded lasted 382 days, and a simple multivitamin prevented any vitamin deficiencies.

There’s a simple answer to the question of what to eat at snack time. Nothing. Don’t eat snacks. Period. Simplify your life.

You can feel like you will starve to death if you do not eat within 21 seconds; not eat at all; and still be alive after 21 days.

Illicit drugs like heroin cause a particularly powerful surge of dopamine in the brain. Sugar does exactly the same thing.

Asking good "What IF?" questions allows you your mind to focus on what's possible, rather than the obstacles that lie in your way.

Feast and fast. It has been easy for me to maintain my weight loss and health since.

...my work: to destigmatize obesity and give everyone the tools to live the healthiest life possible.

Fasting gets more manageable over time as your body adapts to fueling itself with body fat rather than food.

Fasting induces autophagy—a cellular process that helps the body clear out old or damaged cell parts—

Eating breakfast breaks the fast. Skipping breakfast breaks the fat.

Google “Of Whooshes and Squishy Fat

Even the National Cholesterol Education Program admits, “The percentage of total fat in the diet, independent of caloric intake, has not been documented to be related to body weight.

A little starvation can really do more for the average sick man than can the best of medicines and the best doctors. I do not mean a restricted diet: I mean total abstinence from food.

I’ve read the theory that our bodies don’t recognize these artificially grown and developed items as “food.”  (Doritos, though delicious, are not picked from a Dorito bush.)  Because of that, our bodies are always in search of nutrients, which makes us hungrier.  We eat and eat, yet never feel satisfied.  So:  our portions are bigger, we eat out more, we reach for convenience foods, and our food supply has changed.  Our hunger hormones are on overdrive because we have tried (unsuccessfully) to restrict what we are eating and we are eating processed junk.

Throughout her life, Jane had tried to believe in things—astrology, Catholicism, change, herself, intermittent fasting, love, life after love, mindfulness, Pilates, poetry, recycling, retinol, tarot. Her belief in Cass’s power felt urgent in an unfamiliar way. She willed Cass to understand that although she didn’t believe zucchini was any better than eggplant, or that ice water was reckless, she believed the power was real.

It's unrealistic to expect to not eat the types of foods you really enjoy, so when you restrict what you can eat too much, it often leads to binge eating and then giving up completely and ending back up at square one.

Some of the more common myths include: Fasting puts you in “starvation mode” Fasting makes you burn muscle Fasting causes low blood sugar Fasting results in overeating Fasting deprives the body of nutrients “It’s just crazy

The key here is food choice while fasting. If you eat a diet high in protein and healthy fat during times of nonfasting, your sex drive will likely increase. If your diet has a deficit of healthy protein and fats—or if it is, in fact, that Coke and Doritos diet we discussed before—you may still encounter issues in the bedroom. As I often say, intermittent fasting will benefit you regardless of how you eat—but there are limits to what it can do.

Caprylic acid comprises 5–6 percent of the fat found in coconut oil, so you’d have to eat more than a dozen tablespoons of coconut oil to get the amount of caprylic acid in just 1 tablespoon of Brain Octane Oil. It requires the most coconut oil to manufacture, but it is far more potent than XCT oil, generic MCT oil, or coconut oil, and most people can have a lot more of it without the digestive problems of generic MCT oil. A recent groundbreaking study looked at the effects of intermittent fasting with coconut oil versus the effects of intermittent fasting with two subtypes of MCTs, the ones found in XCT oil. When subjects fasted and then consumed coconut oil, their ketone levels remained static—the coconut oil did not raise their ketone levels at all compared to fasting. When they fasted and then consumed a combination of coconut oil and other MCTs, their ketone levels went up slightly. But they got by far the biggest boost in ketones after fasting and then consuming Brain Octane Oil.

we see that two types of stress (calorie restriction and exercise) cause you to turbocharge your cells with more mitochondria. But as they get older, most people don’t restrict calories, use intermittent fasting, or do much strength training. The result is less muscle mass and fewer mitochondria for most older people—but this is not inevitable. Slightly stressed cells and hungry muscles will lead to more mitochondria, lower insulin levels, more muscle mass, and overall better health for many years to come.

When I started fasting, I consciously and deliberately had to think of food as energy and nothing more, divorcing it from the more complicated places it had always stood for in my mind. I also had to tell myself—repeatedly—that I already had plenty of energy stored as fat, and that fasting would help me burn it.

Scientifically, however, there is some compelling evidence that working out in the fasted state is superior to working out in the fed state, despite what you may have been told by the experts up to now. For one thing, autophagy ramps up after exercise,8 which is one reason why exercising in the fasted state is so beneficial.

Another important aspect of Eat Stop Eat style fasts is that you do drink during your fasts.  During your fasts you may drink any calorie-free beverages you like. As an example, these are all drinks that would be permissible during your fast: Black Coffee Black tea Green tea Herbal tea Water Sparkling water Even diet soda pop

If you extract breast cancer cells from tissue, it’s quite simple to grow them in a lab. If you add glucose, epidermal growth factor (EGF), and insulin, they multiply rapidly. If you then take away the insulin, they die. Let me repeat that: breast cancer cells proliferate with high levels of insulin and die without it. What lowers insulin levels? Fasting.

From predator-prey models (the so-called Lotka-Volterra type of population dynamics), I knew that populations will experience Extremistan-style variability, hence predators will necessarily go through periods of feast and famine. That's us, humans-we had to have been designed to experience extreme hunger and extreme abundance. So our food intake had to have been fractal. Not a single one of those promoting the "three meals a day," "eat in moderation" idea has tested it empirically to see whether it is healthier than intermittent fasts followed by large feasts. But Near Eastern religions (Judaism, Islam, and Orthodox Christianity) knew it, of course-just as they knew the need for debt avoidance-and so they had fast days.

Remember—the more insulin you have circulating, the easier it is for you to store fat and the harder it is for you to access stored fat.  Your body becomes very efficient at stuffing all of your fat cells full of energy and isn’t accessing any of your stored fat for energy.  This leads to excessive hunger, because the foods you eat get stored away as fat so readily

Instead, we believe that the fault lies in ourselves. We feel we have failed. Some silently criticize us for not adhering to the diet. Others silently think we have no willpower and offer us meaningless platitudes. Sound familiar? The failing isn’t ours. The portion-control caloric-reduction diet is virtually guaranteed to fail. Eating less does not result in lasting weight loss.

However, if they become too high, taking a dose of medication will bring it back down. I consider the optimal blood sugar range while fasting to be 8.0 to 10.0 mmol/L, if you are taking medication. This range is higher than the nonfasting norm, but the mildly elevated levels are not harmful in the short term while we are attempting to improve the diabetes, and the primary goal while

The Parable of the Cow”: Two cows were discussing the latest nutritional research, which had been done on lions. One cow says to the other, “Did you hear that we’ve been wrong these last 200 years? The latest research shows that eating grass is bad for you and eating meat is good.” So the two cows began eating meat. Shortly afterward, they got sick and they died. One year later, two lions were discussing the latest nutritional research, which was done on cows. One lion said to the other that the latest research showed that eating meat kills you and eating grass is good. So, the two lions started eating grass, and they died. What’s the moral of the story? We are not mice. We are not rats. We are not chimpanzees or spider monkeys. We are human beings, and therefore we should consider only human studies.

To oversimplify for the sake of basic understanding, every time you eat or drink certain things, your body releases insulin in response (unless you are a type 1 diabetic).  Insulin’s job is to help your body regulate your blood glucose.  When you eat, your blood sugar is available to be either burned as energy or stored in the body as glycogen—think of it as quick energy for later that is easily accessible.

since the advent of the Dietary Guidelines for Americans in 1977, consumption data from the United States Department of Agriculture shows that Americans have been doing exactly what they have been told to. Americans have consumed less meat and dairy and replaced their animal fats with vegetable oils. They’ve eaten more grains, fruits, and vegetables. And what has happened? A tsunami of obesity the likes of which the world has never seen.

you’re over fifty or have dealt with serious health problems in the past, find a local ozone doctor and get IV treatments when they are affordable for you. At worst, your mitochondria will become better. At best, the ozone will knock out other unpleasant stuff growing in your body that you don’t even know about. •​If you have arthritis or sore joints that don’t get better, consider prolozone injections into the impacted joint to speed healing dramatically. •​If you’re having dental work done, look for a dentist who uses ozone gas to sterilize the teeth before treatments. This can help you avoid chronic inflammation and its corresponding aging. •​Up your NAD+ with supplements or IV treatments to boost mitochondrial function at any age. If you don’t want to try either of these, you can increase your NAD+ levels through cyclical ketosis, intermittent fasting, and/or calorie restriction.

the toxicity in much Western food lies in the processing, rather than in the food itself. The carbohydrates in Western diets are heavily skewed toward refined grains, and are thus highly obesogenic. Eggplant, kale, spinach, carrots, broccoli, peas, Brussels sprouts, tomatoes, asparagus, bell peppers, zucchini, cauliflower, avocados, lettuce, beets, cucumbers, watercress, cabbage, among others, are all extremely healthy carbohydrate-containing foods.

If too little glucose is available in your blood, which is what happens when you follow a low - carbohydrate diet, then your liver hoards glucose so that your brain, which needs glucose to function, doesn't starve. While your body will start to break down fat to use as fuel, your brain can't run that way for long, and it will send out the Bat-Signal for more calories. That's the reason why when you skip a meal or go too long between meals, you find yourself running to the nearest donut or bag of chips.

Functional magnetic resonance imaging studies show that areas of the brain controlling emotion and cognition light up in response to food stimuli. Areas of the prefrontal cortex involved with restraint show decreased activity. In other words, it is harder for people who have lost weight to resist food. 15 This has nothing whatsoever to do with a lack of willpower or any kind of moral failure. It’s a normal hormonal fact of life. We feel hungry, cold, tired and depressed. These are all real, measurable physical effects of calorie restriction.

I’m not talking about caloric restriction, which extends longevity in animals and may well do the same in humans. People who follow a serious caloric restriction diet, eating as little as a thousand calories per day, are always hungry. I’m talking about being intermittently hungry by forcing your body to burn its fat reserves once or twice a week. The exhaust from this, ketones, will not only keep your brain going during those periods of fasting and hunger but will actually improve cognition, grow the connections between neurons, and stave off neurodegeneration.

that drinking diet soda was associated with a 43 percent increase in risk of vascular events (strokes and heart attacks). The 2008 Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities Study (ARIC)10 found a 34 percent increased incidence of metabolic syndrome in diet soda users, which is consistent with data from the 2007 Framingham Heart Study,11 which showed a 50 percent higher incidence of metabolic syndrome. In 2014, Dr. Ankur Vyas from the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics 12 presented a study following 59,614 women over 8.7 years in the Women’s Health Initiative Observational Study. The study found a 30 percent increase risk of cardiovascular events (heart attacks and

Myth #3: Fasting Causes Low Blood Sugar Sometimes people worry that blood sugar will fall very low during fasting and they will become shaky and sweaty. Luckily, this does not actually happen. Blood sugar level is tightly monitored by the body, and there are multiple mechanisms to keep it in the proper range. During fasting, our body begins by breaking down glycogen (remember, that’s the glucose in short-term storage) in the liver to provide glucose. This happens every night as you sleep to keep blood sugars normal as you fast overnight. FASTING ALL-STARS AMY BERGER People who engage in fasting for religious or spiritual purposes often report feelings of extreme clear-headedness and physical and emotional well-being. Some even feel a sense of euphoria. They usually attribute this to achieving some kind of spiritual enlightenment, but the truth is much more down-to-earth and scientific than that: it’s the ketones! Ketones are a “superfood” for the brain. When the body and brain are fueled primarily by fatty acids and ketones, respectively, the “brain fog,” mood swings, and emotional instability that are caused by wild fluctuations in blood sugar become a thing of the past and clear thinking is the new normal. If you fast for longer than twenty-four to thirty-six hours, glycogen stores become depleted. The liver now can manufacture new glucose in a process called gluconeogenesis, using the glycerol that’s a by-product of the breakdown of fat. This means that we do not need to eat glucose for our blood glucose levels to remain normal. A related myth is that brain cells can only use glucose for energy. This is incorrect. Human brains, unique amongst animals, can also use ketone bodies—particles that are produced when fat is metabolized—as a fuel source. This allows us to function optimally even when food is not readily available. Ketones provide the majority of the energy we need. Consider the consequences if glucose were absolutely necessary for brain function. After twenty-four hours without food, glucose stored in our bodies in the form of glycogen is depleted. At that point, we’d become blubbering idiots as our brains shut down. In the Paleolithic era, our intellect was our only advantage against wild animals with their sharp claws, sharp fangs, and bulging muscles. Without it, humans would have become extinct long ago. When glucose is not available, the body begins to burn fat and produce ketone bodies, which are able to cross the blood-brain barrier to feed the brain cells. Up to 75 percent of the brain’s energy requirements can be met by ketones. Of course, that means that glucose still provides 25 percent of the brain’s energy requirements. So does this mean that we have to eat for our brains to function?

So why are we unable to acknowledge the truth? Dr. Fung’s answer is simple: we doctors lie to ourselves. If type 2 diabetes is a curable disease but all our patients are getting worse on the treatments we prescribe, then we must be bad doctors. And since we did not study for so long at such great cost to become bad doctors, this failure cannot be our fault. Instead, we must believe we are doing the best for our patients, who must unfortunately be suffering from a chronically progressive and incurable disease. It is not a deliberate lie, Dr. Fung concludes, but one of cognitive dissonance—the inability to accept a blatant truth because accepting it would be too emotionally devastating.

Although the connection is not as definitive as it is with apnea, restless legs syndrome appears to correlate with obesity.14 There’s also some evidence that restless legs syndrome may be brought on by mild neurological inflammation and nervous system disruption by toxins, heavy metals, environmental mold, and eating foods to which one is allergic. If you have restless legs, there’s an easy way to tell if toxins from your diet are causing it: run a fasting experiment. Fast for a day, and go to sleep. If your restless legs are magically cured, it’s likely that something in your diet is causing them. I used to have restless legs intermittently and discovered that by removing foods I was sensitive to, such as those high in histamine, lectins, and particularly mold toxins, my restless legs went away. Fasting will tell you if your

So, if one were to restrict dietary fats, then one must increase dietary carbohydrates and vice versa. In the developed world, these carbohydrates all tend to be highly refined. Low Fat = High Carbohydrate This dilemma created significant cognitive dissonance. Refined carbohydrates could not simultaneously be both good (because they are low in fat) and bad (because they are fattening). The solution adopted by most nutrition experts was to suggest that carbohydrates were no longer fattening. Instead, calories were fattening. Without evidence or historical precedent, it was arbitrarily decided that excess calories caused weight gain, not specific foods. Fat, as the dietary villain, was now deemed fattening—a previously unknown concept. The Calories-In/Calories-Out model began to displace the prevailing “fattening carbohydrates” model.

At 10:50 A.M., the radio flared into life. It was Mick’s voice. He sounded weak and distant. “Bear. This is Mick. Do you copy?” The message then crackled with intermittent static. All I could make out was something about oxygen. I knew it was bad news. “Mick, say that again. What about your oxygen, over?” There was a short pause. “I’ve run out. I haven’t got any.” The words hung in the quiet of the tent at camp two. Through eyes squeezed shut, all I could think was that my best friend would soon be dying some six thousand feet above me--and I was powerless to help. “Keep talking to me, Mick. Don’t stop,” I said firmly. “Who is with you?” I knew if Mick stopped talking and didn’t find help, he would never survive. First he would lose the strength to stand, and with it the ability to stave off the cold. Immobile, hypothermic, and oxygen-starved, he would soon lose consciousness. Death would inevitably follow. “Alan’s here.” He paused. “He’s got no oxygen either. It’s…it’s not good, Bear.” I knew that we had to contact Neil, and fast. Their survival depended on there being someone else above them. Mick came back on the net: “Bear, I reckon Alan only has ten minutes to live. I don’t know what to do.” I tried to get him back on the radio but no reply came.

There is a particular kind of pain, elation, loneliness, and terror involved in this kind of madness. When you’re high it’s tremendous. The ideas and feelings are fast and frequent like shooting stars, and you follow them until you find better and brighter ones. Shyness goes, the right words and gestures are suddenly there, the power to captivate others a felt certainty. There are interests found in uninteresting people. Sensuality is pervasive and the desire to seduce and be seduced irresistible. Feelings of ease, intensity, power, well-being, financial omnipotence, and euphoria pervade one’s marrow. But, somewhere, this changes. The fast ideas are far too fast, and there are far too many; overwhelming confusion replaces clarity. Memory goes. Humor and absorption on friends’faces are replaced by fear and concern. Everything previously moving with the grain is now against—you are irritable, angry, frightened, uncontrollable, and enmeshed totally in the blackest caves of the mind. You never knew those caves were there. It will never end, for madness carves its own reality. It goes on and on, and finally there are only others’ recollections of your behavior—your bizarre, frenetic, aimless behaviors—for mania has at least some grace in partially obliterating memories. What then, after the medications, psychiatrist, despair, depression, and overdose? All those incredible feelings to sort through. Who is being too polite to say what? Who knows what? What did I do? Why? And most hauntingly, when will it happen again? Then, too, are the bitter reminders—medicine to take, resent, forget, take, resent, and forget, but always to take. Credit cards revoked, bounced checks to cover, explanations due at work, apologies to make, intermittent memories (what did I do?), friendships gone or drained, a ruined marriage. And always, when will it happen again? Which of my feelings are real? Which of the me’s is me? The wild, impulsive, chaotic, energetic, and crazy one? Or the shy, withdrawn, desperate, suicidal, doomed, and tired one? Probably a bit of both, hopefully much that is neither. Virginia Woolf, in her dives and climbs, said it all: “How far do our feelings take their colour from the dive underground? I mean, what is the reality of any feeling?

Because, we’re evolutionarily programmed to over eat if possible. 

Weight gain and consequently fat gain increase because we never force our bodies to tap into our reserve stores of energy for fuel.