TOP 10* GLOBAL HEALTH COACH (*PRIMAL HEALTH)

How I Found My Inner Wisdom

The way my story started out is probably very similar to your current one, but it has a happy ending, and yours can too.

In 2014, I was about 10 kg heavier than I am today. I was doing everything “right”; I was on a highly structured low-fat diet from a nutritionist, eating at least six times a day, and running 70 km a week.

I was constantly watching what I ate, and even though I ate so many times during the day, I was still hungry. And no matter how much I punished myself in the gym and on the road, the roll around my tummy wouldn’t budge. 

My life was a constant tug-of-war to try and burn the calories I was consuming and get the body I always wanted to be able to perform in the best way. I was tired, hungry, overweight, stressed, frustrated, and at my wit’s end.

When you’re at your breaking point, that’s usually when you have an epiphany. Mine came at the end of 2014 when I went to watch Dr. Stephen Phinney talk about nutrition.

From that moment on, I had to challenge my beliefs about healthy eating because his talk made me see that I was doing everything wrong, even though I thought I was doing all the right things!

The fact of the matter was that I was insulin-resistant. My body was storing all the excess sugar from the carbs I was eating as fat, and that’s why I couldn’t lose weight.

No amount of exercise was going to help if I didn’t change what I was eating. Prof. Noakes experienced this firsthand and even reversed his stance on eating a high-carb diet to fuel performance. He says, “If you have to exercise to regulate your weight, your diet is wrong!”

My fear of fat was huge because low-fat eating had been drummed into my brain, and I was addicted to all the carbs I had been consuming.

Nevertheless, I decided to conduct an experiment on myself after immersing myself in all the science I had heard at Dr. Stephen Phinney’s talk about the low-carb, healthy-fat lifestyle. So, a few days before Christmas 2014, I dropped all of the carbs I loved so much and focused on real foods and healthy fats. 

I had my blood lipid tests done to see what would change after the six-month experiment. The advice I received from my GP was not to do it because, according to him, my cholesterol was too high. When I told him I was following Prof. Noakes’ eating approach, he became even more dismissive. His reaction just made me more determined to give it a shot.

My results after six months were up surprised even me. Not only had I finally lost that stubborn tummy roll, but I could go for a 15 km run and not feel hungry for two or three hours afterward! I had so much energy, and my mental state was stable during the day.

I effortlessly dropped down to eating two meals a day without ever thinking about food, even though I exercised 20 hours a week. 

I had a new lease on life, and I had found the inner wisdom to know what to eat and what my body needed. Just look at the results below. My HDL almost doubled, and my triglycerides were down to a much better level.

How I Realized We Were Being Fed the Wrong Information

As a personal trainer and triathlon and endurance coach, I come into contact with about 400 people a month, just in my indoor cycle classes. Through these interactions, I realized that we were all being fed the same information – and it was wrong!

This information was coming from the top and trickling down. I was shocked to read the material that trainers were receiving.

The nutrition courses that I attended were all based on the belief that we had to continue feeding our bodies or our metabolisms would collapse. It was the same in my own triathlon coaching course and personal training course. 

The fitness institutes are all pushing the one-size-fits-all approach for clients: a low-fat, high-carb nutrition plan with at least three main meals a day and snacks in between. But where did this even come from when it clearly doesn’t work for many of us?

In the wise words of Dr. Jason Fung, “Nobody makes money when you skip meals.”

I recently attended a group fitness instructor’s module from a world-leading brand, and I was amazed at the number of young people complaining about being dizzy after 45 minutes of exercise and relying on jellybeans and protein shakes to increase their energy when it didn’t seem that they were working all that hard. 

One of the girls on the fitness course said to me, “They have no idea that they don’t need all of that sugar. These people, like the majority of the fitness industry, have been conned by the big food companies, soft drink companies, and marketing about needing to refuel before, during, or after a workout on “healthy” sugar-filled foods and drinks.” 

Wherever we look, we’re being fed the wrong information, and it’s all driven by greed and profits. Knowing what I knew and how my life had improved from turning standard nutrition on its head, I couldn’t sit back and let my clients believe the wrong stuff. I had to figure out a way to get the message across without stepping on any toes.

Here is an example of what I was dealing with.

As quoted from the article: “Carbohydrate is a key fuel source for exercise, especially during prolonged continuous or high-intensity exercise.

This may be true if you’re not insulin-resistant, but from talking to all the people I train, it seems the majority of us fit into the insulin-resistant category. If you cannot lose your tummy, or your “insulin roll” as Prof. Noakes calls it, no matter how hard you exercise, then you fall into that category too. Not only will you struggle with your weight, but eating a high-carb diet for a prolonged period can have serious adverse implications for your health.

This paper written by Dr. Stephen Phinney and Prof. Noakes sums up the reasons why you can’t outrun a bad diet.

How I Began to Speak Out

Last year, after my first triathlon season, I was struck by the number of overweight people racing. I overheard a husband telling his wife that he needed to eat a certain number of carbs for his body weight – otherwise, he wouldn’t run as fast. I was horrified. 

He was very overweight and eating a huge bowl of pasta. From my own results, I knew this food was not doing him any favors, and I was tempted to go up to him and tell him so. By losing 10 kg, I was running my best, recovering better, getting fewer injuries, and enjoying life more. So many people were missing out on this quality of life.

I wanted to get my message out there, so I approached my mentor Peter Defty to co-author an article on the beliefs of challenging conventional wisdom for endurance athletes, and it was published in the USA Triathlon Coaching newsletter, with a hugely positive response.

How I Started to Introduce Nutrition into My Spinning Classes

An amazing talk by Prof. Tim Noakes on challenging beliefs has always stayed with me. I was so passionate about this topic that I even read the book with the same title three times. As a coach, I have a role to guide my clients and get them to ask questions so that they can challenge their own beliefs.

Along with the thoughts I often shared on health (hydration, digestion, gut health, and the myths about why we get fat), in the two-minute interval breaks of my spinning classes, I also started to share my story. 

Eating two meals a day and being able to train 20 hours a week was met with great intrigue. I challenged my students to match what I ate for breakfast – just an omelet filled with bacon/salmon, spinach, cabbage, zucchini, capsicum, feta, and tomato. And while they were at it, I told them to avoid the sugar in their coffee, as well as bread, potatoes, rice, and pasta, and to see what happened.

The Proof is in the “Low-carb Pudding”

The following week, Gemma (not her real name) came to class raving about how great she was feeling. Five weeks later, Gemma showed me a before and after photo of herself; her body shape had changed.

Not only that, but her mental clarity had also improved. According to her, those simple changes were the best thing she had ever done for her health.

Another member of my class was John (also not his real name). He worked out at the gym five times a week but still seemed to put on weight. He asked me how I stayed so lean, so I told him. “Really?” he questioned. “How do you eat eggs without toast?”

I gave him my number and asked him to ring me that afternoon to let me know how he was doing. 

He phoned me at 3 pm telling me that he hadn’t eaten since his healthy breakfast at 8am and that he wanted to meet to find out more.

Just eight weeks later, John was still smashing himself at the gym but had now added smashed avocado to his day instead of toast or pasta. He has lost 9.2 kg and was feeling great. Even better was that his constant hunger had disappeared, although he was only eating a maximum of three meals a day.

He had challenged the advice he had received from the fitness industry and had forged his own way forward to better health and performance. That sounds like a happy ending to me!

If you want to optimize your health too (mental, physical, and emotional), consider taking the below steps:

  1. Pull out some of your “skinny” clothes and visualize how amazing it would feel to fit back into them.
  2. If you are always starving, even though you’re eating every three to four hours, try the below for a week and see what happens:
  3. For your first meal of the day, eat a 2-egg omelet with a handful of mixed vegetables – capsicum, zucchini, cabbage – cooked in butter with some protein (NO TOAST, no added sugar, no fruit juice).
  4. For lunch, have a salad with avocado, salmon/chicken/lamb/beef, salad greens, etc. drizzled with olive oil.
  5. For dinner, eat what you would normally have but avoid potatoes, rice, and pasta, and give the wine a break just for the week.

About the Author

Andre Obradovic

Andre Obradovic is an ICF Leadership PPC Level Coach, A Primal Health Coach, a Certified Low Carb Healthy Fat Coach, & a Certified Personal Trainer. Andre is also a Founding member of the Dr. Phil Maffetone MAF certified Coach. He is an Ambassador for the Noakes Foundation, and a regular subject matter expert lecturer for the Nutrition Network (a part of the Noakes Foundation) Andre has completed 16 x 70.3 Ironmans and in 2017 he competed in the 70.3 Ironman World Championships. He has completed 18 Marathons and over 30 Half Marathons. Andre currently focuses his athletic competition on Track and Field with the occasional Marathon.

The Old Days

Before we started believing the false science about fat and cholesterol, we were lean and did not develop many of the diseases that afflict a significant proportion of the world today. Prior to the 1970s, our grandparents and even some of our parents cooked with lard, butter, or duck fat.

In those days, obesity and diabetes rates were very low. Today, supermarket is full of low-fat products that come with Heart Foundation Ticks. Many of these so-called healthy foods are full of sugar, additives, genetically modified grains/flour, and toxic vegetable oil products.

The thing is that low-fat foods taste awful unless lots of sugar is added. The common misconception that when you eat fat, you get fat is just plain wrong. Why?

In the ‘60s and early ‘70s, cardiovascular disease (CVD) was becoming more prevalent in the USA. CVD was seen as the no. 1 health problem in the U.S. Well-intentioned scientists had an invalid hypothesis that there was a link between dietary cholesterol intake and CVD.

New dietary guidelines – the biggest public health trial in history

In response to this incorrect science, the government released new dietary guidelines – low-fat, high-carbohydrate food was the order of the day in the newly developed food pyramid. People stopped eating healthy fats and started using highly processed vegetable oils.

These oils have an adverse effect on our bodies right down to the cellular level, and therefore disrupt every system within our body. People were also encouraged to eat high-carbohydrate foods.

Andre’s Tips

Watch this short 5-minute video. How many overweight or obese people do you see in this video from the 1970s?

When we eat highly processed, nutrient-void carbohydrates, they can cause dramatic surges of glucose into the bloodstream.

These constant surges of too much glucose from highly processed food being released into the bloodstream cause many problems for the organs that are trying to control our blood sugar regulation – namely, the pancreas, liver, and adrenal glands. These organs eventually become exhausted and further impact other systems within the body.

Blood Sugar Dysfunction is Killing Us

As glucose levels soar, excessive amounts of insulin are needed to bring the body back into homeostasis. However, insulin is a storage hormone.

Yes, that’s right – it is a FAT storage hormone. Most people think its job is to lower blood sugar, but this is not true. Its main job is to transport glucose to the cells for energy and then store any excess in the muscles and liver.

When we constantly have too much glucose and therefore too much insulin in our blood, eventually, the liver and muscles become full, and the insulin then carries the glucose to the adipose tissue to be stored as triglycerides. This is the cause of us putting on weight, especially visceral fat around the tummy.

It is therefore the consumption of medium and high levels of carbohydrate foods, along with poor-quality hydrogenated vegetable oils, that have caused us to become fat, not the consumption of healthy animal fats.

Unfortunately, we have all been sold the biggest health lie in the history of the world, and this has created a global epidemic of chronic disease… and massive wealth for a small number of massive global processed food corporations that are complicit in helping people to an early grave.

Andre’s Key Point

Blood sugar regulation is a hardwired system in our bodies. Our bodies have the innate intelligence to regulate all their systems. However, today, the intelligence of the body has been largely impeded by stress.

This stress is not just the normal stress you would think about, but rather the significant stress our bodies are put under by having to react to hourly dips and high of blood sugar levels.

Our Fear of Fat is Based on False Science

Our fear of the very thing that we are led to believe makes us FAT and gives us heart disease is actually the one thing that, if we include it in our diet, can help improve our health.

The best macronutrient for the heart is FAT – our hearts need FAT to operate in an optimized state. Inflammation is the true cause of heart disease. So what causes inflammation? You guessed it: high-carb diets, high insulin levels, processed foods, stress, smoking, and alcohol.

Low cholesterol is not healthy. Low cholesterol is linked with depression, aggression, Alzheimer’s, and suicidal thoughts, to name only a few negatives. Cholesterol is required to make brain cells. You need cholesterol for memory and cognitive function.

Yes, the pharmaceutical industry that makes $30 billion a year is now even pushing for children to take cholesterol-lowering drugs when they are as young as 5 years. T

hey are driving to change the health policies of safe levels of cholesterol. If that isn’t like putting the fox in the chicken coop, I don’t know what is.

Summary

Well-meaning researchers wanted to cure the population of heart disease, but they jumped in too fast and sought fame, and they started passionate experiments with ingrained hypotheses.

When the results did not align, they discarded those results and only used the data that supported their beliefs. They then gained positions on the most influential boards and government panels to influence dietary guidelines.

They jumped the gun. The notion that fat makes you fat and eating cholesterol raises your cholesterol are ingrained in our beliefs and seem logical and true. Nothing could be further from the truth. It is this simple concept of “fat makes you fat and eating cholesterol raises your cholesterol” that actually requires a lot of science and understanding to de-bunk, and therein lies the problem.

To prove a simple theory wrong, you have to have a great understanding to truly believe what is counterintuitive. I and many others call this “challenging a belief.”

Andre’s Tip

Sugar of all types is a drug that strips us of our innate intelligence and our dynamic balance to manage our bodies and health. Remember, most low-fat foods are full of sugar.

Let’s challenge beliefs more, as sometimes, we will find that our beliefs are wrong – like that eating healthy fats makes you fat.

If this has piqued your interest, head over to my resources page – subscribe to my newsletter and you’ll be able to access plenty more useful content and hints directly from my members-only resource page.

Andre’s Tip

Clinical trial research shows that people who reduce total carbs are the ones who see the benefit in terms of weight loss, blood glucose control, and lipid markers.

If you really want to get one of the best books on this topic, Nina Teicholz, who reviewed my blog post, provided me with the note below to make more people aware of her book, which I have now read three times and is an international best-seller.

The Big Fat Surprise explains the politics, personalities, and history of how we came to believe that dietary fat is bad for our health. The Big Fat Surprise was also the first mainstream publication to make the full argument for why saturated fats – the kind found in dairy, meat, and eggs – are not bad for our health.

The Economist named it the best science book of 2014 and called it a “nutrition thriller.” The BMJ praised the book in an extensive review, and the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition said, “All scientists…and every nutrition science professional…should read this book.”

Download a pdf version of “Why Do We Get FAT?” (239 kB)


About the Author

Andre Obradovic

Andre Obradovic is an ICF Leadership PPC Level Coach, A Primal Health Coach, a Certified Low Carb Healthy Fat Coach, & a Certified Personal Trainer. Andre is also a Founding member of the Dr. Phil Maffetone MAF certified Coach. He is an Ambassador for the Noakes Foundation, and a regular subject matter expert lecturer for the Nutrition Network (a part of the Noakes Foundation) Andre has completed 16 x 70.3 Ironmans and in 2017 he competed in the 70.3 Ironman World Championships. He has completed 18 Marathons and over 30 Half Marathons. Andre currently focuses his athletic competition on Track and Field with the occasional Marathon.

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