It's amazing how freeing the low-VA diet is compared to the more orthorexic diets. Steak and potatoes, or hamburgers and fries are available in most places and socially accepted. 😋
Oh, and by the way, I really appreciate your program is the avoidance of A, but it's funny to me that you mentioned peanut butter. It's one of those things that is an avoid thing on the LYL program, primarily because it's also higher in copper. But damn I love some peanut butter now and then. And when people say 'it's just the avoidance of refined sugars and carbs, etc.', well, people 50 or 60 years ago, when the general population was thinner, were eating carbs and sugars.
That’s awesome you’re seeing so much improvement. The vitamin A thing is intriguing and perhaps needs more attention by the masses. On the other hand, I suspect it would be hard to isolate it as a variable. For example, Oreos have significant amounts of cocoa flavonoids which give them the dark color. Couldn’t that be a a factor in your improvements? If you get into Fitness, we could blame any future weight loss on that. The other concern I would have is increasing the odds of chronic health problems that could be avoided by a tighter diet. On the other hand, if you keep improving, I don’t know if it would be very significant in the next few years or so. In any case, best of luck and would be quite interested to hear more about the vitamin A thing. I’ve never noticed any Issues like you have and generally feel better eating color for full fruits and vegetables and worse eating processed sugar and oils. It’s not one to one but seems to be the correlation. I suspect some individual variability and sensitivity to vitamin A. But I’m quite open to it being significant.
Follow your intuition, and it sounds like your intuition is saying keep going for it. It sounds like you are really eating for heat…and taking away a toxin, which will also increase your metabolic heat. I wonder how well you would do if you ate all whole foods coming out of a massive energetic hole. I imagine not well. I have all your books. I never knew years later they would help save my life. I really lucked out and have a holistic MD who aligns with those timeless principles. She is also giving me things to do and take to help convert the food to energy as well. You will know when you are ready for more whole foods. Sounds so crazy and backwards but true. Energy is king. Net energy surplus is magical. Remove the metabolic suppressors and fuel the mitochondria. You are living this now in an even deeper way, more wisdom sprinkled on top. 🔥
Yeah, metabolism hasn't reacted negatively to the weight loss, which is that rare unicorn scenario that everyone wants to be able to reliably achieve. Body temp still normal. Still warm. Everything working properly (sex, digestion, immune system, etc.).
I've been on the LowA diet for the past 4 years. My first test with Dr. Smith at the end of 2020 had my blood serum A at 68. At the time, Dr. Smith said it was the highest he had seen. I just recently retested and I'm down to 26 now. I'll say the detox process has been challenging. he says it's a poison on the way in and a poison on the way out. I tend to think it's worse on the way out.
I'll likely be getting my first serum retinol test done in 2025, and I do think blood level tracking like Grant does is a valid way to track progress. Will be interesting to see where I'm at.
You've inspired me to try again. When I was strict low vit. A I lost some weight but interestingly lost all craving for junk food. I still ate chocolate and sugar but not much as I didn't crave it.
One indicator for me that there could be something really big going on with vitamin A restriction and weight loss is that I don't seem to gain back weight lost while restricting Vitamin A. That, of course, is everything. I'm curious if you had that experience or just quickly gained back the weight you lost right after just like you would any "normal" way of losing weight.
@mattstone8111 I think I gained the weight back once I wasn't as strict on restricting A. But you have inspired me to try again. How do you eat your egg whites? I find them unappetising. Especially without cheese!
The best way I've found so far is ordering egg white powder (not cheap, but worth it I think) and adding a little to dairy-free pancake batter, brownies, and stuff like that. Other than that my favorite is to hard boil them and eat them while they are still a little bit warm, discarding the yolk. I usually eat them that way with some greasy homefries in the morning.
ALSO: It would be interesting to know when Vitamin A became so prevalent in the American diet. (For example, sweet potato fries were not “a thing” when I was a kid.) And, to answer your question: THIS IS AMAZING (Oreos, etc.) ❤❤❤ Keep pressing forward, Matt Stone. 😊
Don't get too excited about Oreos. They aren't very exciting anymore after about a week of eating them every day, haha. Bigger issues with Vitamin A changes in recent times are widespread food fortification (breakfast cereal with reduced fat milk being probably the biggest dietary source for my generation), the use of multivitamins, the use of sunscreen, acne medication, and beauty products with added vitamin A. Also baby formula with added Vitamin A palmitate. But there have been big dietary changes as well, especially among the health conscious. Eating bright colored fruits and vegetables in large quantity with year round availability is a new addition. Tomato consumption has skyrocketed (Europeans didn't start eating them until 1550). Eggs for breakfast became popular in the 1600's. And of course cheese and dairy is in absolutely everything. We are eating a lot LESS liver though, so that's a plus, haha.
Hey Matt, I am glad to hear you have been doing good & congrats on your 65 pound weight loss! I relate to you alot. Like you, I can turn my allergies/Sinus issues on if I consume Vitamin A. I also have also struggled with feeling very negative about having to restrict my diet with Vitamin A because there are so many foods that I love that contain VA. like you I have tried to see what I can get away with but something as small as getting a Latte made with milk from a coffeeshop and later I will start having a sore throat with phlegm and stuffy nose, it's crazy stuff. I would like to ask you how strict are you generally & what do you order from Mcdonald's? Do you worry about stuff like ketchup on a hamburger, seasonings on meats when you order from restaurants, skin on chicken or pork? Maybe you could experiment with cutting back on sugar or fats & see if you notice any difference from that since apparently fructose along with fat is a burden on the liver, but if what you are doing is working great and you are seeing results I would stay on course.
My go to at restaurants is chicken and pasta with only olive oil, rice, beans, and chicken, plain burger with fries, or steak with plain baked potato. I'm at a hotel at the moment, so it's dry toast with honey and peanut butter or oatmeal. Breakfast out would be egg whites with plain grits or oatmeal or some breakfast taters, dry toast with honey. Strawberry and grape jellies are extremely low in A. I'm kind of new at navigating restaurants. In the past I'd just eat perfectly at home and then eat whatever at restaurants without worrying about it too much. But I'm learning how to be an annoying customer, lol. It's hard being a former restaurant guy and HATING those allergic-to-everything bitches like me, haha. I"ve gone extremely low fat. It wasn't better, and I ate even more sugar and my teeth suffered from that. A mixed diet is much more palatable and I feel way better.
Great going, Matt. As I see it, if you change what you're doing now you're veering off course for no good reason whatsoever and you lose all scientific validity to any future claims/conclusions you might make because you'll have changed the variable of the whole 'experiment' mid-trial, as it were. Keep on keeping on and see how far this'll take you. Sometimes the best advice is if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Here's to the next 65ibs and a potential game changer to current nutritional dogma.
I'll cover that more in the future, but my 1st meal of the day is usually egg whites with either fried potatoes, toast or bagels, or a porridge like oatmeal or grits. Second meal of the day is the main meal and I'm most likely to have plain burger and fries, steak and potatoes, chicken breast and pasta, or chicken with rice, beans, and tortilla, or maybe like rice or noodles with teriyaki chicken. Dinner I've been having granola and almond milk (no vitamin A added) or cereal with no vitamin A added, sometimes oatmeal, sometimes leftovers from lunch. If I'm feeling like more protein I might have some canned chicken and crackers with that. I eat Oreos for dessert and some granola bars, I do eat peanut butter and nuts sometimes, I use almost exclusively olive oil at home but don't discern about oils when eating out. I drink fruity sweet drinks like kool-aid, gatorade, and hi-C, sometimes root beer or Sprite, sometimes grape juice or filtered apple juice. Some sweetened hot or iced tea but less of that lately.
It will be an interesting experiment if you do decide to continue with the approach of making low Vitamin A the *only* variable, and otherwise continuing to eat a normal diet with foods containing sulfur and copper.
Thanks, I'm quite happy about it. It's funny when people congratulate me though, as I think they assume I actually did something grueling to accomplish it. I lost it pretty much the exact same way I gained it... I ate food I felt like eating until I was full every time I got hungry, lol.
I found Grant's niacin experiment really interesting (as well as him depriving himself of vitamin A and not going blind), which definitely leads me to question how confident we can be a lot of settled facts in nutrition. My suggestion would be if you are convinced vitamin A is the culprit behind your ill-health to just keep at it until it no longer works. Long term for optimal health I still think Ray Peat had the right idea about keeping as high as metabolic as possible. I am wondering since you disagree with him on some things, if you still think that that's important too? Having a high metabolic rates seems to just ameliorate so many health problems and overall contributes to great health. Recently I've been diagnosed with ADHD which appears to be a big contributor to obesity. In one study something like 50% of adults observed with severe morbid obesity had ADHD. Which makes sense since ADHD is a problem of dopamine deficiency. At the same time the status and validity of ADHD is contested in the field of psychiatry. There is a lot of strong-arming by people like Russell Barkley who want to make it out to be as if there is no legitimacy whatsoever to the opposing side but as a contrarian I remain somewhat skeptical. Anyway, I have had sleep apnea for a long time. And it's only been a year since I have been treated for it. I knew back then but didn't know how much it was impacting my weight gain. Surprise, it probably it is behind 80-90% of the reason why I'm obese. The long term chronic stress of sleep deprivation made me severely depressed as well. Anyhow what's interesting is that sleep deprivation also exacerbates the symptoms of ADHD, and ADHD is just best understood as executive dysfunction. There's a good article out there from a Peaty perspective that ADHD itself could be due to being a low energy availability state (having a lower than average metabolic rate given your size). I say all this to tie it back to what Ray said about keeping a high metabolic rate being the important thing today, and that even something like sustained focus requires energy. Those are just ramblings, I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on this if you had anything to share? Thanks.
Yes, metabolic rate is absolutely of vital importance. I'm still all about keeping metabolic rate high as well. And physical fitness (although forcing physical fitness on someone with an already-reduced metabolic rate can be counterproductive).
Anything yellow, orange, red, or green pretty much. So basically most fruits and vegetables except for potatoes, onions, some grape juice, filtered apple juice etc. Also no dairy products at all (the hardest restriction besides tomatoes) no fortified foods, no egg yolks, no seafood, no organ meats (that was an easy one, haha). I also do better avoiding chicken and turkey skin and sticking with lean poultry. A better thing to ask is what I DO eat, lol. That list is much shorter, haha. Not bad though. At least most of the things I do like to eat are on my list (beef, chicken, potatoes, rice, bread, cookies, chocolate, sugary drinks).
Cool that you've lost weight Matt. Sustainability is key. I'd cut out the sweet drinks first. Try some body weight exercise. At 67 I'm up to 30 full body push ups. Get your kidney function tested. There are a lot of silent health issues that can creep up on you. Skinny doesn't always equate to health but stronger does. Remember those crazy RBTI days!!!
Yeah, I'm all about physical fitness. It's been very complementary to what I've been doing. My problem is I kept overdoing it in the past. It wasn't from a lack of trying. I'll share some more details soon. My big thing is tracking the rate at which I can gain elevation, as hiking up mountains is my thing. I'm also doing some lifting with that and loving it. Mostly heavy weight with low reps to maximize strength while minimizing fatigue so it doesn't interfere with my hiking, stair climbing, etc. :) I'm just getting health insurance for the first time in my life next year, and plan to do a few checkups and things.
Hey Rick! Every time I have checked my body temp it has been exactly 98.6F, but I don't take it very often. I can tell I'm good though. Not sure about calories. It varies a lot due to how much activity I'm getting and things like that. I probably average 3,000/day, but that could be off by 10% above or below. I may track a week of eating sometime just to see.
Just keep in mind that you can't feel stuff like atherosclerosis until its too late in a lot of cases.. I don't see big issues with some junk sugar, but hydrogenated vegetable oils in cookies etc. or oxidized refined oils from fries etc.? That I would avoid for sure.. Anyways hard to tell about your overall health when you don't do any blood work obviously.. In any case you have some addiction to that dopamine hit from eating junk foods that's obvious.. Me personally I like to avoid man made stuff that is designed so people overeat them. So when I eat simple stuff like banana I have that same response like you have eating oreos..
Yeah I've done plenty of bananas, believe me. And a million trials with no refined foods. But not many attempts to eat a whole foods diet with no vitamin A. I'm lucky that no one in my family has ever had a heart attack. But I know that doesn't make me immune. I'm getting health insurance for the first time in 2025 and will finally get a chance to get some bloodwork done and things like that.
His physiognomy has massively improved on the low-toxin diet. All the 'bad' photos his haters use come from before, when he was still consuming liver and things.
G's vibe on livestreams is sort of like he's telling a spooky story. I don't mind it. He does tend to block anyone on X who questions him, however, which I don't like.
@ any idea why? I think for me it’s connected to starch. I tried McDougall’s starch solution and gained weight. 8-9 I think is when I started having a lot more instant mac n cheese
I think starch is strongly negatively correlated with obesity. Cheese, not so much. If vitamin A plays a central role, then we probably started to get fat after our livers got saturated with vitamin A. Then, all vitamin A consumed would have been sent to fat tissue to be safely stored since the liver was full. This is perfectly plausible, especially seeing that human adipose tissue was originally named "white fat," and now it's bright yellow from all the stored retinoids in modern human fat tissue!
@ Ah - and I’m guessing it never had the same impact as Low VA is having? (Cutting out dairy is the hardest part of low VA for me - Mainly the cheese and ice cream :-(. )
@@jenfreudenberg6062 Yeah it helped some, and removing dairy also reduces mucous production which helps with asthma for sure, but I have the exact same reaction to tomatoes, papayas, egg yolks, or vitamin A palmitate. Doesn't really matter the source for me.
In my opinion, the vitamin-a hypothesis is not valid. However what is valid is something that Bill Lands explains and you are aware of; changing your HUFA balance. His dietary plan is eat whatever you want, but make sure your omega-3 intake is higher than omega-6 and keep energy balance balanced as well. The omega-6 eicosanoids are very well known to cause not only asthma, but also metabolic-syndrome. The diet I follow is a starch-based diet with fish and fish-oil as my main source of fat. I really think the peak of your research was when you happened upon HUFA balance or omega-6 restriction.
I never got the least bit of relief or health benefit from that (with asthma or allergies), and the worst my asthma and allergies ever were happened after a month of only drinking grassfed raw milk.
@ Milk protein is a major allergen. I would guess that the amount of arachidonic-acid in one's tissues may take a long time to replace with EPA/DHA, but once replaced, the inflammation resolves along with the endocannabinoid tone.
BTW, Sweden has one of the world's highest intakes of both vitamin A AND omega 3 fatty acids. Asthma rate is over 20% there (2nd highest in the world).
@@mattstone8111 I would agree that retinol overload as in cod-liver-oil or liver is harmful, but casting blame on carotenoids as well, is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I'm sure you know that the body can make the perfect amount of retinol as needed from the carotenoid substrate. This is not the case with alpha-linolenic-acid and EPA because the desaturase enzyme is clogged up with the vast amount of linoleic-acid people eat. Just my thoughts. Would love to see a video explaining the vitamin-A hypothesis in full detail, something similar to how omega-6 eicosanoids lead to pathophysiology and have been well studied, with documented trends in consumption and accumulation within the tissues. Until then I'm remaining skeptical but am open to having my mind changed.
I've been familiar with the potential benefits of a low protein diet for a very, very long time. I've always kept my animal protein intake on the low side (2-4 ounces or so, twice per day). Less than that and I feel terrible. Much more than that and I tend to have more aches and pains in my body and feel like I'm running on higher adrenaline (from increased glucagon, presumably).
It's amazing how freeing the low-VA diet is compared to the more orthorexic diets. Steak and potatoes, or hamburgers and fries are available in most places and socially accepted. 😋
My opinion; keep pressing forward. (It seems like that is what you feel better about for now.) You are appreciated! Thank you for sharing this. :)
Oh, and by the way, I really appreciate your program is the avoidance of A, but it's funny to me that you mentioned peanut butter. It's one of those things that is an avoid thing on the LYL program, primarily because it's also higher in copper. But damn I love some peanut butter now and then. And when people say 'it's just the avoidance of refined sugars and carbs, etc.', well, people 50 or 60 years ago, when the general population was thinner, were eating carbs and sugars.
Yeah, I don't think people living in the high Rockies (the leanest people in the U.S. by far), have even heard of keto yet, lol.
That’s awesome you’re seeing so much improvement. The vitamin A thing is intriguing and perhaps needs more attention by the masses. On the other hand, I suspect it would be hard to isolate it as a variable. For example, Oreos have significant amounts of cocoa flavonoids which give them the dark color. Couldn’t that be a a factor in your improvements? If you get into Fitness, we could blame any future weight loss on that.
The other concern I would have is increasing the odds of chronic health problems that could be avoided by a tighter diet. On the other hand, if you keep improving, I don’t know if it would be very significant in the next few years or so.
In any case, best of luck and would be quite interested to hear more about the vitamin A thing. I’ve never noticed any Issues like you have and generally feel better eating color for full fruits and vegetables and worse eating processed sugar and oils. It’s not one to one but seems to be the correlation. I suspect some individual variability and sensitivity to vitamin A. But I’m quite open to it being significant.
Follow your intuition, and it sounds like your intuition is saying keep going for it. It sounds like you are really eating for heat…and taking away a toxin, which will also increase your metabolic heat. I wonder how well you would do if you ate all whole foods coming out of a massive energetic hole. I imagine not well. I have all your books. I never knew years later they would help save my life. I really lucked out and have a holistic MD who aligns with those timeless principles. She is also giving me things to do and take to help convert the food to energy as well. You will know when you are ready for more whole foods. Sounds so crazy and backwards but true. Energy is king. Net energy surplus is magical. Remove the metabolic suppressors and fuel the mitochondria. You are living this now in an even deeper way, more wisdom sprinkled on top. 🔥
Yeah, metabolism hasn't reacted negatively to the weight loss, which is that rare unicorn scenario that everyone wants to be able to reliably achieve. Body temp still normal. Still warm. Everything working properly (sex, digestion, immune system, etc.).
@@mattstone8111that’s awesome. Maybe you “released weight” in a higher metabolic state, which is opposite of most people. Keep going.
I've been on the LowA diet for the past 4 years. My first test with Dr. Smith at the end of 2020 had my blood serum A at 68. At the time, Dr. Smith said it was the highest he had seen. I just recently retested and I'm down to 26 now. I'll say the detox process has been challenging. he says it's a poison on the way in and a poison on the way out. I tend to think it's worse on the way out.
I'll likely be getting my first serum retinol test done in 2025, and I do think blood level tracking like Grant does is a valid way to track progress. Will be interesting to see where I'm at.
You've inspired me to try again. When I was strict low vit. A I lost some weight but interestingly lost all craving for junk food. I still ate chocolate and sugar but not much as I didn't crave it.
One indicator for me that there could be something really big going on with vitamin A restriction and weight loss is that I don't seem to gain back weight lost while restricting Vitamin A. That, of course, is everything. I'm curious if you had that experience or just quickly gained back the weight you lost right after just like you would any "normal" way of losing weight.
@mattstone8111 I think I gained the weight back once I wasn't as strict on restricting A. But you have inspired me to try again. How do you eat your egg whites? I find them unappetising. Especially without cheese!
The best way I've found so far is ordering egg white powder (not cheap, but worth it I think) and adding a little to dairy-free pancake batter, brownies, and stuff like that. Other than that my favorite is to hard boil them and eat them while they are still a little bit warm, discarding the yolk. I usually eat them that way with some greasy homefries in the morning.
ALSO: It would be interesting to know when Vitamin A became so prevalent in the American diet. (For example, sweet potato fries were not “a thing” when I was a kid.)
And, to answer your question: THIS IS AMAZING (Oreos, etc.) ❤❤❤
Keep pressing forward, Matt Stone. 😊
Don't get too excited about Oreos. They aren't very exciting anymore after about a week of eating them every day, haha.
Bigger issues with Vitamin A changes in recent times are widespread food fortification (breakfast cereal with reduced fat milk being probably the biggest dietary source for my generation), the use of multivitamins, the use of sunscreen, acne medication, and beauty products with added vitamin A. Also baby formula with added Vitamin A palmitate.
But there have been big dietary changes as well, especially among the health conscious. Eating bright colored fruits and vegetables in large quantity with year round availability is a new addition. Tomato consumption has skyrocketed (Europeans didn't start eating them until 1550). Eggs for breakfast became popular in the 1600's.
And of course cheese and dairy is in absolutely everything.
We are eating a lot LESS liver though, so that's a plus, haha.
Hey Matt, I am glad to hear you have been doing good & congrats on your 65 pound weight loss!
I relate to you alot. Like you, I can turn my allergies/Sinus issues on if I consume Vitamin A. I also have also struggled with feeling very negative about having to restrict my diet with Vitamin A because there are so many foods that I love that contain VA. like you I have tried to see what I can get away with but something as small as getting a Latte made with milk from a coffeeshop and later I will start having a sore throat with phlegm and stuffy nose, it's crazy stuff.
I would like to ask you how strict are you generally & what do you order from Mcdonald's? Do you worry about stuff like ketchup on a hamburger, seasonings on meats when you order from restaurants, skin on chicken or pork?
Maybe you could experiment with cutting back on sugar or fats & see if you notice any difference from that since apparently fructose along with fat is a burden on the liver, but if what you are doing is working great and you are seeing results I would stay on course.
My go to at restaurants is chicken and pasta with only olive oil, rice, beans, and chicken, plain burger with fries, or steak with plain baked potato. I'm at a hotel at the moment, so it's dry toast with honey and peanut butter or oatmeal. Breakfast out would be egg whites with plain grits or oatmeal or some breakfast taters, dry toast with honey. Strawberry and grape jellies are extremely low in A.
I'm kind of new at navigating restaurants. In the past I'd just eat perfectly at home and then eat whatever at restaurants without worrying about it too much. But I'm learning how to be an annoying customer, lol. It's hard being a former restaurant guy and HATING those allergic-to-everything bitches like me, haha.
I"ve gone extremely low fat. It wasn't better, and I ate even more sugar and my teeth suffered from that. A mixed diet is much more palatable and I feel way better.
Great going, Matt. As I see it, if you change what you're doing now you're veering off course for no good reason whatsoever and you lose all scientific validity to any future claims/conclusions you might make because you'll have changed the variable of the whole 'experiment' mid-trial, as it were. Keep on keeping on and see how far this'll take you. Sometimes the best advice is if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Here's to the next 65ibs and a potential game changer to current nutritional dogma.
Awesome to have you bsck talking about this stuff. Would be interested in more details about what you eat wnd avoid in your low vit a programme.
I'll cover that more in the future, but my 1st meal of the day is usually egg whites with either fried potatoes, toast or bagels, or a porridge like oatmeal or grits.
Second meal of the day is the main meal and I'm most likely to have plain burger and fries, steak and potatoes, chicken breast and pasta, or chicken with rice, beans, and tortilla, or maybe like rice or noodles with teriyaki chicken.
Dinner I've been having granola and almond milk (no vitamin A added) or cereal with no vitamin A added, sometimes oatmeal, sometimes leftovers from lunch. If I'm feeling like more protein I might have some canned chicken and crackers with that.
I eat Oreos for dessert and some granola bars, I do eat peanut butter and nuts sometimes, I use almost exclusively olive oil at home but don't discern about oils when eating out. I drink fruity sweet drinks like kool-aid, gatorade, and hi-C, sometimes root beer or Sprite, sometimes grape juice or filtered apple juice. Some sweetened hot or iced tea but less of that lately.
@@mattstone8111 that doesn’t sound overly unhealthy. Let’s call it the Oreo diet. Probably better than what a lot of people eat.
It will be an interesting experiment if you do decide to continue with the approach of making low Vitamin A the *only* variable, and otherwise continuing to eat a normal diet with foods containing sulfur and copper.
Congratulations on losing the 65 pounds, by the way!
Thanks, I'm quite happy about it. It's funny when people congratulate me though, as I think they assume I actually did something grueling to accomplish it. I lost it pretty much the exact same way I gained it... I ate food I felt like eating until I was full every time I got hungry, lol.
That's the best way to lose it, lol. Painlessly and unintentionally! 😄
I found Grant's niacin experiment really interesting (as well as him depriving himself of vitamin A and not going blind), which definitely leads me to question how confident we can be a lot of settled facts in nutrition. My suggestion would be if you are convinced vitamin A is the culprit behind your ill-health to just keep at it until it no longer works.
Long term for optimal health I still think Ray Peat had the right idea about keeping as high as metabolic as possible. I am wondering since you disagree with him on some things, if you still think that that's important too? Having a high metabolic rates seems to just ameliorate so many health problems and overall contributes to great health. Recently I've been diagnosed with ADHD which appears to be a big contributor to obesity. In one study something like 50% of adults observed with severe morbid obesity had ADHD. Which makes sense since ADHD is a problem of dopamine deficiency. At the same time the status and validity of ADHD is contested in the field of psychiatry. There is a lot of strong-arming by people like Russell Barkley who want to make it out to be as if there is no legitimacy whatsoever to the opposing side but as a contrarian I remain somewhat skeptical. Anyway, I have had sleep apnea for a long time. And it's only been a year since I have been treated for it. I knew back then but didn't know how much it was impacting my weight gain. Surprise, it probably it is behind 80-90% of the reason why I'm obese. The long term chronic stress of sleep deprivation made me severely depressed as well. Anyhow what's interesting is that sleep deprivation also exacerbates the symptoms of ADHD, and ADHD is just best understood as executive dysfunction. There's a good article out there from a Peaty perspective that ADHD itself could be due to being a low energy availability state (having a lower than average metabolic rate given your size). I say all this to tie it back to what Ray said about keeping a high metabolic rate being the important thing today, and that even something like sustained focus requires energy. Those are just ramblings, I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on this if you had anything to share? Thanks.
Yes, metabolic rate is absolutely of vital importance. I'm still all about keeping metabolic rate high as well. And physical fitness (although forcing physical fitness on someone with an already-reduced metabolic rate can be counterproductive).
Hi. What foods besides tomatoes are you avoiding due to their vitamin A?
Anything yellow, orange, red, or green pretty much. So basically most fruits and vegetables except for potatoes, onions, some grape juice, filtered apple juice etc. Also no dairy products at all (the hardest restriction besides tomatoes) no fortified foods, no egg yolks, no seafood, no organ meats (that was an easy one, haha).
I also do better avoiding chicken and turkey skin and sticking with lean poultry.
A better thing to ask is what I DO eat, lol. That list is much shorter, haha. Not bad though. At least most of the things I do like to eat are on my list (beef, chicken, potatoes, rice, bread, cookies, chocolate, sugary drinks).
EAT THE FOOD! ❤️
The masses want sugar and fries (and alcohol) - keep doing what you’re doing! ❤❤❤
Cool that you've lost weight Matt. Sustainability is key. I'd cut out the sweet drinks first. Try some body weight exercise. At 67 I'm up to 30 full body push ups. Get your kidney function tested. There are a lot of silent health issues that can creep up on you. Skinny doesn't always equate to health but stronger does. Remember those crazy RBTI days!!!
Yeah, I'm all about physical fitness. It's been very complementary to what I've been doing. My problem is I kept overdoing it in the past. It wasn't from a lack of trying. I'll share some more details soon. My big thing is tracking the rate at which I can gain elevation, as hiking up mountains is my thing. I'm also doing some lifting with that and loving it. Mostly heavy weight with low reps to maximize strength while minimizing fatigue so it doesn't interfere with my hiking, stair climbing, etc. :)
I'm just getting health insurance for the first time in my life next year, and plan to do a few checkups and things.
@@mattstone8111 Cool. I use heavier weights with less reps. Put a 20 lb sack of weights on my back for push ups. Can do three reps of 8!
How many calories would you guess that you take in every day? Also, how are your body temps, if you still keep track of that?
Hey Rick! Every time I have checked my body temp it has been exactly 98.6F, but I don't take it very often. I can tell I'm good though. Not sure about calories. It varies a lot due to how much activity I'm getting and things like that. I probably average 3,000/day, but that could be off by 10% above or below. I may track a week of eating sometime just to see.
Just keep in mind that you can't feel stuff like atherosclerosis until its too late in a lot of cases.. I don't see big issues with some junk sugar, but hydrogenated vegetable oils in cookies etc. or oxidized refined oils from fries etc.? That I would avoid for sure.. Anyways hard to tell about your overall health when you don't do any blood work obviously.. In any case you have some addiction to that dopamine hit from eating junk foods that's obvious.. Me personally I like to avoid man made stuff that is designed so people overeat them. So when I eat simple stuff like banana I have that same response like you have eating oreos..
Yeah I've done plenty of bananas, believe me. And a million trials with no refined foods. But not many attempts to eat a whole foods diet with no vitamin A.
I'm lucky that no one in my family has ever had a heart attack. But I know that doesn't make me immune. I'm getting health insurance for the first time in 2025 and will finally get a chance to get some bloodwork done and things like that.
G Smith's vibe/physiognomy is one of the worst of all time
His physiognomy has massively improved on the low-toxin diet. All the 'bad' photos his haters use come from before, when he was still consuming liver and things.
@@jamesmckean3221 nope
G's vibe on livestreams is sort of like he's telling a spooky story. I don't mind it. He does tend to block anyone on X who questions him, however, which I don't like.
@ he’s mean. Not healthy
That's your opinion. Your comment is also mean, so your liver may just be toxic.
What causes kids to get fat? I started to gain weight when I was 8-9 years old
@@Dyrnwyn Same here. Then I lost it all at 12-13. Didn't gain significant weight again until early 30's.
@ any idea why? I think for me it’s connected to starch. I tried McDougall’s starch solution and gained weight. 8-9 I think is when I started having a lot more instant mac n cheese
I think starch is strongly negatively correlated with obesity. Cheese, not so much. If vitamin A plays a central role, then we probably started to get fat after our livers got saturated with vitamin A. Then, all vitamin A consumed would have been sent to fat tissue to be safely stored since the liver was full. This is perfectly plausible, especially seeing that human adipose tissue was originally named "white fat," and now it's bright yellow from all the stored retinoids in modern human fat tissue!
@ as far as colour goes, cream is white but has significant vitamin a, right?
Yes, it's white but separate the butterfat from it and you'll see the butterfat is yellow from the retinol content.
Have you ever cut out dairy completely before this? I wonder if that’s had a big impact on your allergies… 🤔
Yes. Many times.
@ Ah - and I’m guessing it never had the same impact as Low VA is having? (Cutting out dairy is the hardest part of low VA for me - Mainly the cheese and ice cream :-(. )
@@jenfreudenberg6062 Yeah it helped some, and removing dairy also reduces mucous production which helps with asthma for sure, but I have the exact same reaction to tomatoes, papayas, egg yolks, or vitamin A palmitate. Doesn't really matter the source for me.
In my opinion, the vitamin-a hypothesis is not valid. However what is valid is something that Bill Lands explains and you are aware of; changing your HUFA balance. His dietary plan is eat whatever you want, but make sure your omega-3 intake is higher than omega-6 and keep energy balance balanced as well.
The omega-6 eicosanoids are very well known to cause not only asthma, but also metabolic-syndrome.
The diet I follow is a starch-based diet with fish and fish-oil as my main source of fat.
I really think the peak of your research was when you happened upon HUFA balance or omega-6 restriction.
I never got the least bit of relief or health benefit from that (with asthma or allergies), and the worst my asthma and allergies ever were happened after a month of only drinking grassfed raw milk.
@ Milk protein is a major allergen. I would guess that the amount of arachidonic-acid in one's tissues may take a long time to replace with EPA/DHA, but once replaced, the inflammation resolves along with the endocannabinoid tone.
BTW, Sweden has one of the world's highest intakes of both vitamin A AND omega 3 fatty acids. Asthma rate is over 20% there (2nd highest in the world).
@@mattstone8111 I would agree that retinol overload as in cod-liver-oil or liver is harmful, but casting blame on carotenoids as well, is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I'm sure you know that the body can make the perfect amount of retinol as needed from the carotenoid substrate. This is not the case with alpha-linolenic-acid and EPA because the desaturase enzyme is clogged up with the vast amount of linoleic-acid people eat.
Just my thoughts. Would love to see a video explaining the vitamin-A hypothesis in full detail, something similar to how omega-6 eicosanoids lead to pathophysiology and have been well studied, with documented trends in consumption and accumulation within the tissues. Until then I'm remaining skeptical but am open to having my mind changed.
Dude, it sounds like mold toxicity… especially since you lived in Florida.
th-cam.com/video/RM2RrR3Is50/w-d-xo.htmlsi=_GHCZ_sGGIlrzmF_
I've been familiar with the potential benefits of a low protein diet for a very, very long time. I've always kept my animal protein intake on the low side (2-4 ounces or so, twice per day). Less than that and I feel terrible. Much more than that and I tend to have more aches and pains in my body and feel like I'm running on higher adrenaline (from increased glucagon, presumably).