I Ate Junk Food For 10 Days: Here's What Happened To My Body

Hello Health Champions. Today I'm going to talk about what happened when I ate the standard American diet for 10 days. So first of all I had to go shopping and this is what I brought home on the first run and let me tell you it's been a long long time since most of these items could be found in my house. And I must say that I was both a little excited and quite apprehensive because you know how you can look forward to something like a birthday party or a holiday and you're going to cram yourself full of junk even though you know that it's not a good idea. And a lot of people have asked me about when I made the video about a hundred eggs and when I ate a hundred tablespoons of butter in 10 days they're saying why would you experiment on your body like that? But I know enough about food and physiology that I know a hundred eggs or a hundred tablespoons of butter are not dangerous. However, with the standard American diet I was not so sure because we know that these are things we're not supposed to eat and I really didn't know what was going to happen. But I also trust in my body's intelligence and physiology that I know if I push it a little out of balance for a short time I know that it can adapt and bounce back. And it wasn't very long before I started feeling like not so great. And it started the very first day with a little buzzing like a strange feeling of unease in the body and shortly after that I also started getting plaque on my teeth that usually I don't have hardly at all. And then I found when I was eating I had the urge to keep eating. Even when I was reasonably full it's like I still wanted one more thing. And very soon I started having sweet cravings. Now I'm kind of a genetic sweet tooth but I control it by not eating sweets but with a very short time I had huge sweet cravings. I also noticed that I was very very hungry in the mornings and normally I just wake up I'm at ease and sometimes I eat and sometimes I wait till later in the day but now it's like a had to have something. And even though I still had a sense of physical fullness I was very very dissatisfied and hungry so it's this strange mix between fullness and emptiness. It's like a had to have something still. And throughout the days there was basically never a moment where I felt completely satisfied and content and at ease. And I also noticed some changes with my focus that I became more lethargic, a little bit of brain fog and also lack of focus more fatigue. And by some strange coincidence I noticed that all my clothes started shrinking just a few days into this diet. So I'm thinking I need to check my washing machine for the temperature settings. Maybe it's just washing things a lot warmer than usual. I don't know but what is this standard American diet? Well it's not that easy to figure out. So I did a bit of research and I looked at some surveys but you know what happens we take a survey? People lie. Because what they're asking basically is how much alcohol do you consume? How much sugar do you eat? And people know that this is something they're not supposed to consume. So asking those questions is basically the same as asking how bad of a person are you really? Another way of figuring it out is trying to see how much of something is sold. How much soda, how much sugar, how much butter is sold in a country and then dividing by the population. And now you get a good bit closer to the truth but you're not accounting for the fact that a lot of food is thrown away. So I'm not claiming these numbers are absolute exact but in the end here's where I came up with. So out of 100% total food consumed that for the average is 3782 calories. And according to the CDC that's 46% carbohydrates, 16% protein and 36% fat. And some of you have already figured out that only makes up 98% and that's because roughly 2% is consumed as alcohol. But here's the thing. A lot of people don't drink anything at all or extremely rarely and men drink a whole lot more than women. So since I'm a man, I wanted to do the numbers for a typical person like me. So alcohol actually becomes 7% this total becomes 93 and now we have to adjust these numbers down just a little bit. So these were the numbers I was aiming for. And in the end I consumed 3452 calories. 43% was carbohydrate, 13% was protein, 38% was fat. So I ended up at 94% total with 6% of calories from alcohol. So overall I got really, really close to the average male who consumes the standard American diet. But it gets a little worse because we have to account for 2 more factors. 58% of all calories consumed are what's called ultra processed. So these are things that have a long shelf life. They're usually packaged processed foods made from white sugar, hyphructose corn syrup, white flour and seed oils with a bunch of chemicals and preservatives. And I did eat enough garbage, enough muffins and cookies and beer to probably hit that 58%. So it's hard to tell exactly but I think I got that. The other factor though is that 22% of all calories to fit the standard American diet are supposed to be added sugar. So that's white sugar and hyphructose corn syrup. Now I felt like I probably ate as much sugar in 10 days as I have in the last year but I still only hit 11%. So I felt a little bit short there. But overall I think I was really, really close to eating the standard American diet. But here's a few examples of why I didn't get all the way up on the sugar. If you eat a sandwich for example and I made these like kind of like a pizza in the oven. So you start with bread and you put butter, tomato, ham and cheese on it. Then you check for these macros that we're looking for and you compare them to the standard American diet. Now you see that the fat is already much higher. As soon as you put a little butter and cheese on it, then it's already higher. The proteins a little higher but pretty close carbs are much lower. So we think of bread as being all carbs but if you put something on it, now you're not getting as much carbs as the average diet. And of course with these ingredients there's no sugar in there. And even something like a pastry. I got some cheese Danish rolls from Costco. And here the fat is much higher. The protein is really low but even carbs are lower and sugar are lower. Even though we think of a pastry as a sugar bomb, we're not getting up to the average diet in terms of sugar and carbohydrates. So to get closer to the marks for the standard American diet, we have to eat things that are low fat, low protein and basically all sugar. So something like orange juice, very low in fat and protein, 92% from carbs and 76% is sugar out of the calories. This still counts as zero added sugar. And this is one of the huge myths that even though this is the exact same sugar as in white table sugar, it's basically sucrose and fructose and glucose in various combinations just like table sugar, it doesn't count because it's naturally occurring in the food. And therefore in terms of your sugar allowance, this doesn't count at all toward the 22% we're adding. To really start making some headway toward that 22%, we have to get resorted to things like Coca-Cola. 0% fats, 0% protein, 100% of calories from carbs, but now of course also 100% is added sugar which starts counting toward that 22%. Another thing that some people actually think is healthy like low fat yogurt would also count and help you build up your sugar numbers. So proteins pretty close, fats pretty low carbs, 76% but also sugar is 37% the added sugar in low fat yogurt is 37% of calories. So that's why I didn't get up to that 22% because I couldn't drink any soda and I refused to do low fat dairy. I did eat a lot of cookies and muffins but like I said that mostly is going to increase your fats and that's not what you're looking for to meet these markers. And I want to mention about the guidelines, the official guidelines that have been published a number of times since the 1980s on how we're supposed to eat and they are a good bit better than the standard American diet because they're not promoting 58% ultra processed foods and they limit the sugar intake to 10%, which is about what I managed with my hyper sugar diet. And I used to think that these guidelines, you know, I don't approve of them at all but I didn't think that they were responsible. I'm thinking, you know, in terms of this obesity epidemic and the type 2 diabetes, they're really, really not helping, but I didn't go as far as to lay the blame on the guidelines. But after trying to eat like this and realizing how much sugar, what an incredible amount of sugar, you can get from things like juice without exceeding the standard sugar intake, I'm going to go as far as to say that I believe the guidelines are in a very large degree responsible for the obesity and the type 2 diabetes epidemic that we're seeing. And it's starting to turn just a little bit around, but for about 50 years, we have been promoting fat guilt. That fat is the bad guy, and that's the only thing, the primary thing that you need to cut back on. And when you try to avoid the fat and you're only supposed to be guilty about eating fats, anything low fat is promoted as guilt-free. Now they're pushing you toward things that have more sugar because fat is very satisfying. If you can't have that, you've got to get something else that's satisfying. And to most people, that's going to be things that have more sugar and more processed food. So I believe the guidelines have played into the processed food industry and this horrendous situation that we're facing. Now what about my results on the inside? What happened based on blood work? So we're going to look at a couple of things here. We look at insulin resistance. We can talk about liver health. We're going to mention a few other markers and then I'll tell you what happened to my weight. But first, let me point out that I am genetically very insulin-sensitive. I've been exercising all my life. I've never been overweight, never been insulin-resistant. And it takes typically decades to really, totally break down your metabolic health. You can do it faster if you totally abuse it. But for the most part, it's going to take years or decades to break it down. So 10 days is not a time period where you totally going to wreck your metabolic health. So I did not expect really to see much of anything and yet we did find a few things. So in terms of insulin resistance, my glucose went from 88 to 95. And that's not very significant because glucose does change all the time. It fluctuates. So it just depends on what time of day and your mood and so forth. But even so, I have really never been over 90 on my fasting glucose. So it does seem to be like a change there. My A1c was 5.4 and it went to 5.5. And let me tell you, this 5.4 is already probably the highest that I've seen because I wasn't exactly a saint over the holidays. So I'd already gained some weight and I had eaten some things that I really hadn't reversed yet when I started this diet. So it wasn't exactly at my usual baseline. But even so, in just 10 days, my A1c went up by a 10th. My insulin was 4.8 and I'm usually in between 2 and 3 and yet it went to 5.7. The ideal optimal range is 2 to 5 and this is the first time I've ever been above that optimal range of 5. My triglycerides are usually between 45 and 60 and when I started, they were at 45 and at the end they were 101 and I have never ever seen a number like that. So these are markers of insulin resistance because glucose and triglycerides are the primary fuel. And when the cells start resisting fuel because we're packing in too much, then glucose and triglycerides are the two first to start going up and triglycerides even more so because glucose is so tightly controlled by insulin. And hand in hand with triglycerides, we also have V LDL, very low density liqueur proteins. I'm usually single digits and I think I've seen 11 as my highest ever and now I went to 17, so more than double. And one more marker is HOMA IR, HOMOostatic Model Assessment of Insulin Resistance. And you take that by multiplying glucose and insulin and dividing by a constant and normally you're supposed to get 1. I'm typically like 0.6.7. I started at 1 and now was the first time I have ever been over 1, at 1.3. And with the liver, there are two primary enzymes we look at, they're called AST and ALT and enzymes are supposed to be inside of cells. So if we find them in the blood, it's because the cell broke and the enzymes spilled out. So that's normal. We have a little bit of a cell turnover, so we expect to find a certain level, but anytime that level goes up, it means that there is more cell breakage. There's an accelerated cell breakage. So these numbers indicate cell damage, they could be liver disease. And I started before at 23 and I finished at 31, my ALT went from 20 to 25. So these are not huge changes, but let me tell you that the before numbers, even after the holidays were inside the optimal range, whereas after both of these numbers are above the optimal range and starting to move out toward the lab range, which of course we don't really ever want to get to the lab range. We want to control these factors long before we get there. Another marker is LDH, lactate dehydrogenase or lactic acid dehydrogenase. That's also an enzyme, just like the liver enzymes, it's supposed to be inside cells. If it goes up, that means more cells are breaking. So again, cell damage and it could also be liver disease or lung disease because we use lactic acid when we don't have enough oxygen. So if we have a lot of fat to burn, we burn less carbohydrate, less glucose and then LDH goes down. But if we're switching to more carbohydrate because we don't have enough oxygen, now LDH goes up. And my number before was 192, which is a near perfect number. And afterwards, I had 335, which is not only above the lab range, but it is what they call alarmingly high. It gets like a pink color on the report instead of just a red. So this was one that was very concerning to me. And it's kind of scary what can happen in just 10 days of eating garbage. But I'm going to take really good care of myself and I'm going to make sure I follow up on this and reverse that. Another marker is homocysteine, which is a strong marker for inflammation. And before mine was at 8.6 and 10 days later, it was at 10.4. So about a 20% increase in just 10 days. Now what happened to my weight? So let me put this in perspective that when I competed and had a lot of muscle, I weighed in around 200 pounds. And then I kind of settled down around 190 for many years. And since I started low carb, I've been very, very stable at 185. And then like I mentioned, I was no saint over the holidays. And I actually went all the way up to 193, which is the heaviest I've been in probably 30 years. However, 10 days of eating standard American diet put me at 203 pounds. And I've been kind of embarrassed. And maybe you've gotten a few comments even in videos that I put on a little bit of a belly, which is something that I've never had. So if you've seen that in the previous video, then now you know why? And I'm going to take the next four weeks to be really, really strict. And maybe I'll get back and do a report on that. In kilograms, this is going to be 87.6 going up to 92.2. But I want to mention something about how some of these things work. That it's not primarily about calories. It's about carbohydrates, insulin, and hunger. So how does that all tie together? Because a lot of people they know that if you eat carbohydrates, then that will trigger insulin. That's become fairly common knowledge by now. And then if you watch my videos, you also know that insulin promotes storage. It is our storage hormone. But insulin is not some evil thing. It's not a mistake. It's trying to help you survive. So basically also insulin is a signaling message. It's an encouragement. It tells us that when there is a feast, when there is plenty of food around, now is the time to take advantage of this. So when we have a feast and we eat more and we trigger insulin, that insulin puts it in storage and that is also a signal for us to eat more. It's a time to feed. It's a time to put on weight so that we can survive the winter. So therefore, insulin also promotes hunger because it knows that if it can make us hungry, even though we just ate, then we have a greater chance of putting on some extra weight and surviving the winter. So insulin is part of the signaling that takes advantage of this abundance and it creates hunger. And when insulin is high, it promotes the storage and it tells us to go find more food instead of using the fat that we already have stored. But what most people don't realize about hunger is that hunger is temporary. It's a habit. You teach your body the circumstances where the body suggests that you eat some more. So there's a certain times of day. If you eat frequently, then you're going to get hungry frequently. But if you encounter a famine, then the body is not evil where it's going to keep you miserable and hungry all the time. If you have a famine or a fast for a few days, then the hunger comes and goes. So this is why we actually get more hungry when we eat more carbohydrates and we drive that insulin up. Now, if you want to dig a little deeper and really understand those markers that I talked about, I created a blood workhorse and it's all about understanding how the different markers relate what they mean and what the early signs are. See, that's the key. That if you understand what they mean early on, now you can catch the anemia and the thyroid health and the insulin resistance before it becomes a big problem. So that can help you prevent type 2 diabetes or reverse it. It can also help you understand why you have that stubborn weight. Why don't you respond to weight loss efforts like a lot of other people? We'll also talk about the real risk factors for heart disease rather than just the number of total cholesterol, which is almost completely insignificant. And then once you're armed with this knowledge and a baseline, now you can really start taking charge and moving your health in the direction you want. If you enjoyed this video, you're going to love that one. And if you truly want to master health by understanding how the body really works, make sure you subscribe, hit that bell and turn on all the notifications so you never miss a life-saving video.