Primal Fat Burner by Nora Gedgaudas

Praise for PRIMAL FAT BURNER

“This book tells the fascinating story of how our very humanity–our healthy bodies and exceptional brains–evolved from eating animal foods including their natural fats. The science supporting the lack of harm–and indeed the benefit–of dietary fat, including saturated fat, has grown by leaps and bounds in recent years. In this well-researched and wide-ranging book, Gedgaudas shows a mastery of that science–and then takes it a step further. Drawing upon her many years of personal, clinical experience with patients, she explains how to take these principles into practice, bridging the gap between science and usable information for daily nutrition. This is a unique and profound contribution to the field.” Author: Nina Teicholz, author of The Big Fat Surprise.

“Ready to live long, lustily, wisely and well?  Then it’s time to let Nora Gedgaudas teach you the “fats of life.”” Author: Kaayla T. Daniel PhD, The Naughty Nutritionist (R), and coauthor of Nourishing Broth

“With able, funny writing; dozens of recipes; digressive but interesting boxed sections within chapters; and a note to readers to seek ultimate advice from their doctors, Gedgaudas lays out a plan for adopting a ketogenic diet for improved health and wellness.” Source: Booklist

“Nora Gedgaudas makes the unique case for the central role of fat and outlines a way of eating to dramatically improve health. Ketogenic eating plans are an important tool to address the growing epidemic of autoimmune disease.” Author: Terry Wahls, M.D., author of The Wahls Protocol: A Radical New Way to Treat All Chronic Autoimmune Conditions Using Paleo Principles

“This [adopting a fat-based, ketogenic diet] is the single most important health intervention we can make as doctors… And as nations.” Author: Timothy Noakes, M.D., Emeritus professor in the Division of Exercise Science and Sports Medicine at the University of Cape Town, South Africa

“Nora Gedgaudas presents compelling information on the health benefits of dietary fat from an evolutionary perspective. She does an excellent job in debunking the myth that high-fat, low-carbohydrate diets are unhealthy, and that low-fat high carbohydrate diets are healthy. She provides valuable resources for those interested in transitioning from unhealthy high-carbohydrate diets to healthy fat-based diets.” Author: Thomas N. Seyfried, Ph.D., Professor of Biology, Boston College

“Gedgaudas deftly describes the link between what we eat and what we become. Millions of years of human evolution made us omnivores with well-muscled bodies and extraordinary minds that could not have developed without a diet rich in fat, including saturated fat! Read this book and you’ll understand why much maligned animal fat is so important to your health and why it is critical that it come from animals grazing on healthy land (and not confined to feedlots). I cannot recommend this book highly enough.” Author: Allan Savory, The Savory Institute

“This unique book provides a much-needed big picture, addresses the state of humankind, the errant direction we have all taken, the dark influence of global corporations and, most importantly, how we can regain our power and embrace a truly healthy, sustainable future. Nora makes the case to focus on what we all share:  a common biological design, and a need for a food economy that restores local, natural systems. In this way, we can take back what was once ours, and what is fundamentally our primal birthright.” Author: Helena Norberg-Hodge, author of Ancient Futures

“Primal Fat Burner has a wealth of new information and science showing us the power of a ketogenic diet in addressing many health issues including obesity, diabetes, heart disease, neurological diseases, and cancer. Nora writes with passion, enthusiasm, and a warm sense of humor as she takes you on a life-changing easy-to-implement journey to take control of your health by putting fat front and center! This is a book that should be read far and wide.” Author: Vicki Poulter, Director, Nourishing Australia, International Advisory board of Price-Pottenger Nutrition Foundation

“In terms of nutritional knowledge, Gedgaudas is about a decade ahead of 99% of U.S. physicians, who are taught virtually zilch about healthful eating in medical school. Counterintuitive though it sounds, increasing your fat intake will promote weight loss. The real nutritional villain is sugar (a fact kept hidden from us by the sugar industry!). The low carb-high fat diet in Primal Fat Burner actually protects people from obesity and heart disease. When it comes to making the overweight and chronically ill American healthy again, Primal Fat Burner is destined to be a real game changer.” Author: David Edelberg, MD, author of The Triple Whammy Cure

Primal Fat Burner

INTRODUCTION

In my first book, Primal Body, Primal Mind, I described how the primal lifestyle can lead to optimal health and longevity. In the seven years since its first publication, that book has reached more people than I could have ever imagined, many of whom have applied its principles and who have written me to say that their health and well-being improved significantly after changing what they eat. Many people asked that I put together a more structured eating plan along with additional information, recipes, and resources for primal eating. Primal Fat Burner does just that. But the book you are about to read isn’t necessarily a weight loss book.

Fat—including saturated fat—is nowhere near the bad guy we used to think it was. Eating fat can make you thin. Primal Fat Burner helps you harness the best dietary practices of our ancestors with the most current scientific understanding of nutrition. With this knowledge you can use quality dietary fat and the rich abundance of critical nutrients contained within it to create total health and well-being.

I am not simply here to tell you that “fat isn’t as bad as you might have heard,” or “fats are okay, just as long as you keep them to a minimum,” or “fats are okay just as long as you stick to strictly unsaturated fats.” I am here to supply you with a mountain of compelling evidence that fats from animals that eat a natural diet not only are essential to your health but have served more than any other dietary adaptation to literally make us human.

In Primal Fat Burner, based on the latest science and research, I explain why eating foods rich in dietary fat (while avoiding the consumption of sugars and starch and moderating protein intake) is the best and most natural nutritional approach for your complete health and well-being. This book emphasizes (in part) a low-carbohydrate approach to eating. There is far more to the plan, but you will find that the fewer utilizable carbs you consume and the less insulin your body needs to produce, the better your long-term health will likely be.

Primal Fat Burner focuses on the single biggest factor in your health and longevity: the primal fat-burning diet, a modification of what is commonly known as a ketogenic diet. This approach to food is radically different from our current nutritional status quo—but in many ways it is the oldest form of nutrition in human history. A fat-based ketogenic diet has powered humans and our pre-human hominid ancestors through almost all of our three million years of evolution, and it is a critical tool that has the power to reduce weight, strengthen resilience, and reverse many of the chronic diseases of today.

As a clinical nutritionist and ancestral nutrition expert, I consult and lecture with health seekers around the globe. Countless times I’ve seen clients and audience members meet the word ketogenic with equal doses of fascination, trepidation, and misunderstanding: “Isn’t that Atkins? Starvation? A medical treatment? For hard-core health nuts?” Having devoted my life to understanding the evolution of our metabolic functioning, I can assure you that a well-balanced ketogenic approach to eating is none of those things. Nor is it especially controversial. Surprise: the fat-burning ketogenic diet is actually our norm, and it is fundamental to our human design as breathing. It simply means using the energy from fats found in real foods, in the form nature intended them, as your primary source of fuel. When this is explained, what was once mysterious starts to become commonsense.

Over the fifteen or so years that I have followed a primal fat-burning protocol myself, I’ve worked with and counseled a remarkably diverse client population. At one end of the spectrum are those battling significant weight issues or serious ailments, from type 2 diabetes to early onset dementia. Often, the pain of the solutions they’ve been offered by medicine and mainstream nutrition exceeds the pain of the problem, so they come to primal fat burning in order to take things into their own hands. In the middle of the spectrum are women and men approaching middle age, or sometimes advanced age, who look healthy but who have discovered that they have underlying, unhealthy, and elevated blood sugar levels and other troubling blood test markers. They have been following seemingly balanced, carb-friendly ways of eating that have been invisibly ravaging their physiology—even though they still fit into their jeans.

At the far other end of the spectrum is a different crowd: people who are consciously eating what they consider to be a “paleo” diet (yes, I said “consider to be”—more on that later) but who have not gotten the results they are seeking; primal eaters who have drifted slowly from their low-carbohydrate goals and need help (or a swift kick in the pants) to reboot their program and to focus and dial in on their efforts; and elite or endurance athletes who are harnessing the energy from dietary fats to powerfully boost their performance.

If you’ve picked up this book piqued by the idea of becoming a primal fat burner, chances are you fall somewhere on this arc. You might have long struggled with diets that don’t work, or despaired at ever achieving a lean physique. Like me, you might have a deeply personal experience with depression, anxiety, or low energy. Or maybe you are watching others in your family suffer from health issues you know to be genetic, and you want to do anything you can to avoid those diseases yourself. Women and men of all ages simply want to feel better, live longer, and look and feel younger, with a clearer mind and most certainly a leaner and more resilient body that they inhabit proudly. They want to enjoy every day of their lives—whether young, middle-aged, or older—and they resist what is sold to us as the “inevitable” modern-day aging scenario of prescription drugs in their bathroom cabinet. They refuse to sign up for one of the so-called diseases of civilization—diabesity, depression, dementia and brain degeneration, heart disease, cancer. If this is “civilized,” they are saying, they’d rather be primal!

FOR THE LOVE OF FAT

Fat has recently become the darling of the health world. In numerous peer-reviewed studies scientists are exonerating fat for health crimes it didn’t commit. For fifty years, fat was vilified by an aggressive anti-fat campaign, which shunted it out of its rightful place on our plate to make way for excesses of carbohydrates.

While I am glad that fat has finally won some redemption, its acceptance has been a little begrudging and timid. Most experts are all open arms when it comes to fat-rich, plant-based foods. And they’re pretty friendly with fish. They suggest modest little drizzles of this and splashes of this and that—and a quarter of an avocado, if you please.

As for me, please pass the lard. I wrote Primal Fat Burner to the beat of a much louder drum and with the intention of blazing a bolder path. This book is based on the fundamental scientific understanding that all fats, especially fats from healthy animal sources and unrefined tropical oils, are paramount to the functioning of our physiology and to our robust health. These formerly maligned fats must be wholeheartedly reclaimed as vital to our health. Animal-sourced fats provide sustaining energy and absolutely critical fat-soluble nutrients. Without them, we would not have become who we are as humans.

In Primal Fat Burner I will take you on a journey of discovery. I will show you how humans’ ability to “run on fat” defined how our remarkable body and brain functioning evolved—and why the modern shift to “running on sugars” has been one of the most egregious missteps in human history. I will share why the natural fats found in wholesome real foods, in particular the fats from animals that eat a diet of grasses and other natural forage, are a match for your genetic makeup and help you achieve a stable weight and robust health—and how the lack of these things can dangerously erode your well-being. And I’ll explain why naturally fat-rich foods, used correctly, are the foundation of an optimal way of eating that (with some minor tweaks in individual implementation) is relevant to everyone.

Then I take you further. I will give you tools that can help you become a lean and energized fat burner yourself.

In Parts One, Two, and Three, I share everything you need to know about how a fat-burning metabolic state functions and why it is your natural state. You’ll discover that the cells of your body, in particular the cells of your heart and brain, thrive on fat. And you’ll learn that not all calories are created equal. I explain how using ketones, the energy units of fat, instead of glucose, the energy from carbohydrates in the form of starches and sugars, gives you a life-changing (and potentially lifesaving) metabolic advantage. This advantage not only affects your entire quality of life but can be measured quantitatively on your blood work panels.

The real goal of Primal Fat Burner is to show you how to ignite your fat-burning metabolism—think of metabolism as the mechanism of converting food to fuel—by using a well-balanced and high-quality ketogenic diet. When you switch on your fat-burning metabolism and allow it to stay on continuously by maintaining this way of eating every day, the results can be tremendous. You create the conditions to achieve a healthy and stable weight, even if you are very overweight. That’s because, once your body adapts to relying primarily on ketones and free fatty acids for energy, it starts using your fat reserves for fuel, instead of storing them on your belly, love handles, hips, and thighs. Your brain runs sharper and better, too—an effect that can stay with you for life. Imbalances in blood sugar and insulin as well as inflammation can be resolved, with the effect of stabilizing, reducing, or even eliminating chronic pain and disease.

SWITCH ON A WELL-ADAPTED, FAT-BURNING STATE AND YOU LAY THE GROUNDWORK FOR:

• Easier weight loss, without excessive hunger or cravings, and long-lasting energy

• Reduced blood sugar issues, lower hemoglobin A1C and other metabolic markers associated with metabolic diseases such as obesity and diabetes

• An anti-inflammatory effect and a dampening of excess free radical activity (which causes harmful tissue damage and is a driver of disease and aging)

• Anti-aging effects, with improved cellular regeneration and repair mechanisms and healthier, younger-looking skin

• Improved sleep

• Improved immune function

• Reduced blood pressure

• Stabilized neurological functioning in the brain, which makes you less susceptible to migraines, panic attacks, mood swings, and seizures, and reduces your risk of neurodegenerative diseases . . . and more

And all these benefits come from making a basic but consistent modification to your diet, eating moderate protein from clean, sustainable, and nutrient-enhancing sources, ample fibrous vegetables and greens, and as much fat as you need to satiate your hunger. By the end of Part One, you’ll come to an empowering understanding: you can decide whether to be a fat burner or sugar burner, simply by eating certain real, whole foods and avoiding others. This makes you the agent of your own well-being and longevity.

Then, in Part Four, I hand you the road map you need to make the metabolic switch yourself. To make it simple and achievable, I’ve outlined a 21-day plan that gives you step-by-step guidance. It includes sixty simple recipes for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks; guidance on how to prepare, cook with, and store all kinds of healthy fats; and balanced weekly meal plans. It also lays out how to prepare yourself physically and how to avoid common pitfalls during the transition period.

Shifting to an effective and well-adapted fat-burning metabolism takes between three and six weeks for most people. Once initiated, this fat-burning metabolic state becomes a fairly effortless new norm. I’ll also walk you through exactly what to do if fatigue or discomfort arises during this transition time.

When you are successfully using the energy of fat for fuel, you are in what I call a state of effective ketogenic adaptation (EKA). In this book, we’ll be following a unique approach that combines a state of EKA with high-level nutrition derived from quality food sources and support against stress and toxicity. This is primal fat burning.

The effects of primal fat burning are:

Energizing. You benefit from enduring energy that takes you easily from one meal to the next without snacks or cravings.

Protective. Your mitochondria—the cellular powerhouses that supply energy and guard against aging, among other important functions—are protected. The health of your heart and brain is safeguarded, and those organs’ efficiency and function are greatly enhanced.1

Regulating. Your blood sugar and insulin levels are given the conditions to normalize and function more efficiently, as nature intended.2 Excess weight that has been resistant to diets can be regulated, as trapped fat stores get mobilized for energy.3

Stabilizing. Brain function and moods normalize and stabilize when the brain is fed with fat.4 Emotional struggles around food, such as cravings and even certain eating disorders, can subside or be eliminated.

Anti-aging. Human longevity markers improve (including thyroid efficiency), and overall disease risks related to inflammatory markers, cholesterol (which tends to elevate with inflammation), and more are naturally lowered.5

Completely safe. A fat-based ketogenic diet based on the Primal Fat Burner Plan is safe for almost everyone—with some possible exceptions, which I will explain in detail. With guidance from a physician, it can also be modified for specific needs, such as pregnancy or nursing, type 1 diabetics, the increased growth rates of children and teens, and the demands of high-intensity athletics.

The Primal Fat Burner Plan has a varied and satisfying menu. You’ll eat grass-fed, fat-rich meat and wild-caught seafood; greens and other fibrous vegetables and sprouts; nuts and a few seeds; probiotic-rich, fermented foods; and homemade bone broth. You’ll find that the plan described in this book is also:

Achievable. It’s refreshingly straightforward and simple to execute.

Enjoyable and efficient. The tasty, satiating food is easy to make for yourself and your family.

Familiar. It’s a return to wholesome, traditional foods you may already know and love.

Affordable. You’ll consume fewer packaged, pre-made foods and snacks. You’ll wisely use quality ingredients, including cheaper cuts of high-quality meat (and bones), and indulge in fewer pricey splurge foods and nutritionally empty treats.

Liberating. By shifting from primarily sugar as fuel (which is addicting and damaging) to mainly slow-burning fat, you are freed of urgent cravings and the sudden, intense need to eat (which come from a dependency on carbs). You’ll discover a new relationship with farmers and other sources of health-giving food. Most important, your relationship to food and eating will become clearer, healthier, and more resilient. It is a far saner, happier way to be.

Some of the information that follows might seem radical at first. Stay with me: you will see that this approach to caring for your health is in fact quite rational. Primal Fat Burner is based on a deep understanding of our ancestral origins. It is a foundational way of eating with an unshakable basis in evolutionary science. Its primary principle is this: If your body could choose its fuel, it would choose fat.

Though we have been conditioned to believe that we are designed to use glucose as our primary fuel, this is not exactly correct. The human glucose metabolism evolved to deliver short-term energy. Used in sustained or excessive ways, as occurs when you eat a carbohydrate-laden diet (and also one that contains too much protein), sugars damage cells. Over a lifetime, excessive glucose and other dietary sugars damage our health irreparably, causing obesity, neurodegeneration, and many chronic diseases. It also helps to create a cellular environment that’s a little too friendly to cancer.

Let’s cut to the chase on one important subject: to maintain a fat-burning metabolism, you need to greatly minimize starches and sugars, every day. In our twenty-first-century society, with our obsession with instant gratification, this can sound shockingly rigorous. Yes, it requires a choice and a change. But that choice becomes self-reinforcing as you feel more energy, more clarity, and greater self-empowerment by the day as you throw off a dependency that was not doing you any favors. And when you choose to do this, your blood test results improve as well. If the thought of going low-carb strikes dread in your heart (and taste buds), know that anticipation is much worse than reality. You’ll discover that the satiating qualities of good fats in each meal have an extraordinary power to quiet cravings for sugars.

In fact, if you asked your body, it would tell you that it prefers ketones far more than glucose, because the fuel ketones deliver is steady and reliable—no spikes and crashes. Your body would tell you that it needs an abundance of quality fat to get critical micronutrients that its cells require for proper functioning. Oh, and it would tell you that eating fat does not make you fat—if done wisely, that is, with carbohydrates minimized. Two decades of clinical experience have shown me that a properly fed body can usually and almost effortlessly drop extra weight.

In the chapters to come, you’ll find that there is a unique aspect to the primal fat-burning approach that makes it distinct from variations of paleo or primal nutritional advice you may already know. Eating the foods that our ancestors relied on as the most consistent available sources is just the starting point. The Primal Fat Burner Plan also assesses these original foods according to human longevity science to measure how optimally they fit our needs in the uniquely challenging world we live in today. For instance, we know that the high amounts of protein that our ancestors tolerated—perhaps thanks to their robust genome—are not suitable for us today. Despite what you may have read in some paleo guidebooks, there is no physiological justification for filling your supermarket cart with stacks of Styrofoam-encased, factory-farmed meat or piling your plate high with animal protein at every meal—an act that is both dubious healthwise and clearly unethical. You’ll hear this a few times in this book: the Primal Fat Burner Plan is not a high-protein diet.

These days our bodies also need significantly more detoxification support to face the onslaught of pollution and stressors coming at us from every direction. That’s why phytonutrient-rich, fibrous vegetables and greens are much more critical for us than they were for our predecessors. The toxic stressors we encounter every day are dangerous new selective pressures that compromise our human genome in ways our ancestors did not have to deal with. The alarming and unprecedented pollution pervasive in our air, water, soil, and food, and the constant presence of electromagnetic frequency pollution and radiation, motivate my quest to go beyond paleo. I will help you optimize your nutrition and keep your wits about you as you shop. The growing epidemic of autoimmune issues triggered by food sensitivities and environmental contaminants is something a foodie or cook might want to ignore but a true scientist cannot. Today we understand more than ever that the environment inside our cells, created by what we deliberately and unwittingly ingest and absorb, profoundly influences whether inherited tendencies toward illness are expressed or stay safely dormant. Bringing this consciousness to our plate is an important part of the Primal Fat Burner Plan; in fact, it may be as vital as the amount of fat and protein on your plate.

To protect and defend your health, the Primal Fat Burner Plan is built on a firm commitment to using only the most unprocessed, uncontaminated food sources. We need food that goes beyond being merely “natural” or coming from a health food store. We need food that actually comes from prime growing and raising conditions—the way nature intended food to be. That’s why the plan is built on a foundation of humanely, healthfully, and sustainably pasture-raised animal products. It will help you find the best local produce you can. Only this way can you supply your body with the nutrients it needs to combat toxins and stress. The good news is that there is a way to do this affordably and wisely. Our great-grandparents did it, and so can we.

In the pages to come, these two aspects—ancestral roots and modern science—combine to create an optimized nutritional approach to your health and well-being that will give you back the power over your own health. Fair warning: this book will have you questioning authority and what you’ve come to know as “normal.” It might have you questioning everyone who ever told you to finish your cereal, take two aspirin and call back in the morning, and avoid that evil, “artery-clogging” animal fat at all costs and replace it with margarine and canola oil instead. Let this be a motivating force: To help you switch on your fat-burning metabolism, free yourself from an unhealthful dependence on starches and sugars, and forge a more healthful alliance with nutritious, unadulterated fats. Serena Williams didn’t get good at tennis by playing golf all day, any more than Tiger Woods mastered the game of golf by bowling. You cannot become good at burning fat by burning sugar all the time. To burn fat at a world-class level, you need to become a Primal Fat Burner and train your body to choose fat, not sugar, as your primary source of everyday fuel.

I’ve seen all kinds of people succeed in using the power of a fat-burning metabolism to transform their lifestyle and reclaim their good health, from the mother motivated to stay healthy for her children and dodge diseases that have taken her own parents to the septuagenarian who is able to put down his blood pressure and prostate medication and walk free of long-standing pain. The foundation to health that fat burning provides is universal. Of course, there may be some adjustments needed in order to target any uniquely personal vulnerabilities. But fat burning provides the firm ground on which to do that next level of work.

It really does all start with what you eat—and what you choose not to eat. When you restore your primal birthright of robust physical and mental health and a life unhindered by preventable pain and disease, it is astounding how energized you feel to make and sustain change—and I mean that at every level. By the end of Primal Fat Burner, you will discover that it’s really not as complicated as you might have thought.

WHAT DOES A PRIMAL FAT BURNER EAT?

In this way of eating, you will be enjoying roasted meats and poultry; creamy Thai coconut soup; colorful vegetables and greens that can be raw, steamed, sautéed, broiled, or cultured; seasoned ribs; pan-seared chicken livers with pastured bacon; ground beef salad; coconut-wrapped burritos; and succulent fish tacos; Thai salad with spicy dressing; lamb chops; steamed zucchini noodles with rich meat sauce; delicious and tangy cultured vegetables; burgers (with an extra-primal twist); coconut chicken salad; crispy pork belly; stuffed grape leaves; curries; and many other mouthwatering dishes.

IS PRIMAL FAT BURNING RIGHT FOR YOU?

Given our common human design and our bodies’ pre