The Bear’S Words of Wisdom

2 The Bear’s Words of Wisdom Owsley "The Bear" Stanley ii Contents 1 Diet and Exercise 1 2 Low Carber Forum Posts 7 3 Interview with an Alchemist (1998) 285 4 Q&A with igibike on RawPaleoDietForum.com 291 5 The Bear’s Discussion with Rob From ZeroCarbPath 295 5.1 Advice .............................. 296 5.2 Diet ............................... 297 5.3 The basics ............................ 299 5.4 The “Meat is Toxic” Myth ................... 301 5.5 The “Good” Carb Myth ..................... 303 5.6 The “Fiber is Healthy” Myth .................. 303 5.7 On Diet Social Evolution-Acculturation ............ 305 5.8 On Anthropology ........................ 306 5.9 Bear’s Stats ........................... 307 5.10 Bear’s Meat Tips ........................ 308 5.11 Reflections on Long Term Vegetarianism ............ 309 6 The Bear’s Response to Jimmy Moore Wanting an Interview 311 iii iv CONTENTS Chapter 1 Diet and Exercise Source: http://thebear.org/essays1.html#anchor496162 One of the problems of modern living is the way in which we have departed from the things we did as we evolved. Diet is one of those things, and I be- lieve that diet and the lack of the right exercise are the main reasons for the widespead prevalence of obesity, diabetes and heart disease. I have always liked meat the best of all foods, and as a child I never wanted to eat my vegetables, other than the usual starchy things like bread and potatoes. As I grew out of my teens my weight suddenly shot up from 125 pounds to 186 in about six months. I was out on my own and trying to eat on the cheap, which naturally resulted in a rather carbohydrate-rich diet. (I once tried vegetarianism for about 6 months, but I felt like my body was dying, so I abandoned that trip). I was absolutely freaked at the sight of my stomach lying on the bed next to me. I went on restricted calories and lost weight down to about 150, but it was very difficult to get below that. When I became interested in ballet, and started to take classes, I found the extra weight a liability, but was unable to lose and still eat enough to have the energy for the strenuous exertions of ballet. I think that there are very few types of athletic activities with the demands of ballet training. One day I picked up a magazine, since defunct, called Collier’s, and there was an article about a way to control one’s weight through diet, and the diet was one high in fat and low in carbs. The article was a review of a book titled Eat Fat and Grow Slim by an English physician, Dr. Richard Macarness. I 1 2 CHAPTER 1. DIET AND EXERCISE was able to locate a copy of the book and found the theory sounded right, as I had always felt that veggies, which are almost entirely carbohydrates, weren’t really food, at least not in the sense that meat was. As a kid I had the idea that we ate veggies because meat was expensive and rationed (which it was during the war). Eat Fat and Grow Slim had as its basis the writings of an arctic explorer and anthropologist Vilhalmur Stefansson. Macarness was also familiar with the traditional cure for diabetes, which was to place the patient on a diet with virtually no carbohydrates. If there are no carbs in the diet, the body doesn’t need the ability to make insulin, so the disease was no bother (other than the discomfort of the dietary discipline). Since we did not evolve eating carbs in the modern constant-intake fashion, our pancreas is subject to failure from over work, and perhaps it is sometimes destroyed by our own immune system due to the damage the constant flow of insulin does to the blood vessels. Remember the immune system is there to find and destroy the source of damage to our body. Diabetics, once the pancreas quits, suffer severe and rapid damage to their bodies from the high levels that injected insulin produces. Macarness also referred to a diet known as the Blanding diet used traditionally for the reduction in weight of very obese people. I went out and bought Stef’s book and read it with growing excitement. The year was 1958. The book by Stefansson was in its third edition in 1961, the date on the copy I now have, and this may have been the end of the publishing run, for I have not seen any copies later than this. The title is The Fat of the Land. An earlier version of the tale is called Not by Bread Alone. The Macmillan company has gone though a lot of changes since the time of the publication, and now no one at the firm seems to know anything about the book. Recently I have heard that there is a doctor in Hollywood who is putting entertainment people on this basic meat diet and getting phenomenal results in rapid weight reduction. The nice thing about this diet is that the human body does not seem to be able to store fat that is eaten in the food, so the fat you eat must be burned up. On the other hand, the body is totally unable to directly burn carbohydrates for energy, but must first convert them to fatty acids. (Guess where most of this fatty acid winds up!) This information seems to have gotten lost in the translation, as many peo- 3 ple think that carbs are energy food. Nothing could be further from the truth, but since insulin is highly simulating, the insulin rush feels like energy to the person who has just taken in some sugar. Actually the insulin stimulates all the fat storage cells in your body as well as your brain and the little buggers start to work overtime to remove the excess glucose from the blood as quickly as they can. It is one of the ironies of life that glucose, required by the brain in small, but constant amounts, should be deadly poisonous at a higher level! (Diabetic coma). The female hormones seem cause a strong craving for carbs, as the female body isn’t fertile without a layer of fat. This makes this diet very hard for women to follow. Traditionally the women are the gatherers of fruits and (starchy) roots, while the men are the hunters. This is shown today in the dif- ferent ways men and women go about buying things. The gals shop which is a trip through the entire store or mall in search of things to buy. They may not actually buy (gather) anything. The guys on the other hand know what they are after, and then seek it out (hunts it down) and buys it, usually then taking it home right away. The meat diet in its purest form is similar to the diet of the stone age Es- kimo, and contains no vegetables at all. That this is a healthy diet is not in dispute as the Eskimo, most of whom no longer are living the traditional life, never showed any signs of deficiencies. I have eaten this way for 39 years, perhaps not all those years as strictly as I should have, but my body is very much like it was when I was 30, about 2 inches thicker in the waist, but I don’t have the kind of body that others my age have. One of the things which we as hunters/carnivores have as a very real lifestyle requirement, is a high degree of physical activity. As hunters we had to be fit to chase and overcome our prey. Today many people do not continue a good exercise routine past teenage years. Almost all kids are almost excessively active, it is the natural thing to do, you must learn to be lazy, and I assure you the societal pressures are there to do just that. I was very active as a kid, and then when at 23 I started on with ballet, I found that the exercise was the only thing that kept my head clear. I later was into running and continued dance in various forms (good Ol’ Grateful Dead!). Eventually I realized that it wasn’t enough, that there had to be a more strenuous, challenging sort of physical activity in 4 CHAPTER 1. DIET AND EXERCISE the mix, as I was losing strength and didn’t like the way I looked. I was 55. I don’t think that the weight training was as hard to do at the beginning as the ballet was, but so much time had passed that I could be mistaken. Anyway the weights were HARD work at first, (and boy, were my joints and muscles sore!) but the results were fantastic. After the first few months had passed I felt great, better than I had in years. I had all sorts of people tell me things like: you can’t grow muscles after 40” (a doctor said this!). Don’t push yourself too hard, you’re not a kid anymore. Then there were the guys who for some inde- cipherable reason were convinced that you couldn’t possibly grow any muscles if you didn’t eat a lot of carbs (they were fat, of course – well muscled, but fat). When I started to grow more muscles than I had ever in my life had, and pretty quickly at that, the voices were silent. I cannot understand why a muscle, which is almost purely protein, should need carbohydrates to grow, and in fact it doesn’t.

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