Low Carb Fitness 180

My name is Nate. I’m not a doctor. I am a patient who had success only after failing 900 times using traditional medical advice. In fact, as the patient here who did this work and research over the last 3 years, I’d posit that no one person on the planet has the ability to come to the same conclusion I did who has an MD after their name. What has happened is that the combination of several disciplines working in tandem revealed the answer of the obesity epidemic in the US. And, only after I fell off that wagon over 6 years and see a mental health professional was the keystone put in to the final solution. In this story, which is a bit long – my style – I want to give you a full appreciation of my background. I never saw myself as a “typical fat person” because I was an athlete that dieted probably 75% of the days I’ve been alive since age 8, one way or the other. I have not only tried every diet, but I was a decent athlete as well. The saying, “you can’t outrun a bad diet” is very true – but WHY did I have a bad diet? The typical medical community tells you to eat less calories and eat whole grains and fruit and a plant-based diet. Trainers are typically talking to you about splits, routine, and discipline. People look at you and think of you as weak willed. You are shunned in the dating pool, overlooked for jobs, and no one in your life sets you up on a date.

What if my brain wasn’t working like most others? That became the Rosetta Stone to me. This story will resonate with many of you that just keep trying, and trying, and trying – THAT is who this is geared towards. There are many people who enjoy being fat and eating their faces off. Let them in peace. I go to sleep at night and dream in being a thin person, not a fat one. What happened to me? What is different with my brain? Well, it affects 20% of the population in this country, or about 70 million people. If you are over 50 pounds overweight, and have tried to lose weight a million times, I’d like to present this story for you to potentially get screened by a mental health professional for ADHD. I had lots of hyperfocus. No way I had ADHD! Well, yeah. So if you find this resonates with you, and you want to work with me – I’d love to work with you. This is not something I’m doing for money. This is a passion of mine. I believe I have put all of the pieces together which may directly affect how nutrition is taught in this country 10 years from now. How to get there is to get data and take all of this data and fire it into the paper I have written, source the hell out of it for a few weeks, and submit for publication. No names or faces will be used in anything, and while I’m not a clinician, my time in stats for many years gets the idea for a small study.

I lost 175 pounds over 3 years. But I had also many years ago lost 67 pounds in 76 days. Another time I lost 40 pounds in a month. Another time 25 pounds. And guess what? Most times, no matter how hard you try, the weight comes back, and the bitch brings her friends and decides to stick around awhile. Most recently I’m down 21 pounds in 2 months, but I haven’t really been trying this time as some things changed in my life which have helped me shed some pounds. I’ll get into that below.

When you don’t know what’s going on under the hood of obesity, you ASSUME people are just overeating all the time and sitting around on the couch and not moving. Overweight kids don’t get valentines. They get made fun of. People think they are too stupid to count calories, and think you are weak willed that just has a severe character flaw.

What they don’t see, particularly in my case, is someone who has tried to lose weight my entire life, even from the age of 8. I was a picky eater. I didn’t eat meats really except burgers and hot dogs. Hot dogs were another cheap meal – a pack of hot dogs and a bun then were pretty inexpensive, so we could have 2 hot dogs and part of a box of macaroni and cheese for dinner.

My parents fought over money, day in, and day out. All day. Every day. My mom insisted on nicer stuff. A better house. A better life for her children. College for her boys. She worked her ass off for us, going back to college to finish and getting an accounting degree. I spent a lot of evenings at her parents’ house, as my father worked the factory second shift. I remember them feeding me 2 hot dogs on bread. It’s about all I would eat, outside of pasta. I LOVED pasta!! And – my ultimate weakness in life, pizza!! We lived in a semi-detached house in Birdsboro, PA. Small town USA. With all of this fighting, I would get quiet. Often our coping mechanism then after these types of things were comfort foods. Cheese steaks, ice cream, chips, pizza. If you were having a down day, food would step in and make you feel better! But the reverse was also true. My family celebrated accomplishments with food. Great report card? Let’s head off to Ponderosa for “all you can eat”. Holiday? “Let’s splurge”.

What this did to me as a child was to put me in a narrow band of my emotions, and if this would get too high – or too low – I was conditioned to reach for food as a coping mechanism. I was also not diagnosed with ADHD until 48, and the effects of that on my life in this context have been profound. With ADHD, you think of people going “squirrel”. I have a ton of interests, but I also have a hyperfocus ability that few can match. This, combined with “severe OCD” I was diagnosed with, became a super power for learning. I’ll talk more about this below and the implications mental health may have on your fitness. But the ADHD means I physically do not produce the same amount of dopamine and norepinephrine as “normal” people. ADHD affects roughly 20% of the population, so this isn’t exactly something rare or to have a stigma over. But what it did was have me constantly seeking out dopamine hits. All the time. Furthermore, my OCD isn’t crazy town, or needing to organize cans facing the same way – rather, I had hyper obsessed about actions in the past that I was ashamed of, embarrassed about, or regretted. Additionally, the OCD had me with anxiety about planning for the future. I would see a problem with the stock market, and I would feel the searing pain of being unemployed for 15 months during the dotcom bust, down to my last half case of peas and ramens. That pain would then have me spend years going down the finance rabbit hole so I could protect my family. This had me buying 2 years worth of food and a second home in the mountains for us to bug out to, and rent out when I’m not there.

Accomplishments

As you see – I chased dopamine. Well, my ADHD and OCD was a super power for learning. The caveat, was, it must be things that interest me. Knowing what I know now about ADHD, it was clear my dad had ADHD, but no OCD. He called himself “jack of all trades, master of none”. My ADHD has a lot of hyperfocus, but I’m interested in so many things, that for me, I felt this flew under the radar a lot. I knew there was something off with me – in that it was very difficult to even have conversations with people without alcohol. Not only was my OCD running full speed, all the time reliving things and thinking about the future, but my ADHD would have me go squirrel on things unless I was dialed in. Music was a way of helping me focus. I felt that I am far more successful than most people that have ADHD, but there was a piece of the puzzle missing, which I will get to in a few.

Some of my resume includes:

• Math Olympiad award
• Spelling bee champ for 3 straight years
• Math Counts math competition
• Playing in the World Open of chess at 15
• Taking my first college class BASIC programming at 11 years old at Reading Area Community College
• Winning a spanish scholarship in HS
• Winning the Maud Glover Folsom Foundation scholarship (1 out of 8 out of 25,000 applicants)
• 1/3rd tuition scholarship to York College
• Grants given to me by the college for being a student athlete
• Student senate in college
• Voted most musical in HS (played orchestras through grad school)
• Undergrad in IT
• Master’s in cyber security
• Master’s of business administration
• Lost 175 pounds (and wrote 150 health blogs fully cited which has enough content for 3 books)
• Own short term and long term rentals successfully
• Investor in stock market and precious metals that were very successful
• 12 IT certifications
• Top employee awards for CSC, EDS, and SRI
• DoD award for Outstanding job – never given to contractors. Also got a challenge coin for this. I built an OS from scratch, then deployed it and tons of apps I created silent installs for to a military installation with 13,000 machines. Designed it with massive levels of complexity and helped lead the Army in cyber defense efforts with SYSMAN – being at the onset of the program and helping to also shape 802.1x port security for the installation.
• I have several books written that aren’t published. When I retire, I plan to edit them and publish
• Chief Information Officer for a billion dollar company

The above doesn’t mean I’m smarter than you. It means I’m curious about the world. I like to understand how things work – which is why I got into systems engineering. It also demonstrates that when I have deep interest in things, I really, really go down the rabbit hole with the ADHD/OCD. Like 2-3 hours a day learning about something. Every day. For years. I put this here to demonstrate that what happened to me below was part accident, part awakening. And, only through my setback was I really able to put all of the pieces together.

175 pound weight loss

At one point in my life, I had ballooned up to 372 pounds. It was by far the worst ever. I was achy. I wasn’t eating a TON of calories a day. But the calories I was eating, again, were mostly carbs. I had the occasional binge episode. I needed to change, or I was going to die young. At the time, my wife was watching YouTube all the time. I wasn’t. I sort of scoffed at her over it. Well, one day when I decided I wanted to lose weight, I started down the YouTube rabbit hole. It was filled with everything. Nutrition plans, how to meal prep, exercises, different types of trainers. My wife convinced me to go see a trainer. I had used “free” trainers before at several gyms. These trainers might see idiots like me a few times a day, and some are just checked out. They start talking about cutting calories a lot, lifting weights with splits, protein powders, etc. As you see above, I had done a lot of moving in my life. Including tons of weight training. Most of the trainers I had dealt with then try to sell you on these plans to come back. I could bench press a decent amount. I could leg press a ton. Knowledge of how to move heavy weights wasn’t the problem…

Trainer – Enter S – my trainer from the JCC in York. I met her around my birthday in November of 2016 and my first weigh in was 348. I have all of the slips yet for receipts. I had lost 24 pounds in the previous 2 months. But the reason I was there was I was walking 4-5 miles a day and eating 600 calories a day. For 2 months. I came downstairs one day to let the dog out, and I had the worst pain in my life – back spasms. I couldn’t get off the floor. Wife was laughing hysterically. As I would try to stand up, there was like a cramp in my back. So we show up to the urgent care. Lady asks me to get on the scale, and I can’t really stand up. She takes my weight at 348. They ask why I was there. I tell them back pains and I couldn’t move – like a cramp. She tells me, “have you considered losing weight”? I’m now livid. She tells me to see a nutrionist. I do. For the second time in my life. Tells me to eat whole grains, fruits, rice, etc. The same advice of the one 10 years earlier I went to see. And followed that, and no help. So the wife told me, “look – try a trainer again, what can hurt?”

S dealt with “muscle confusion”. That is, every single time I went in, there was a different workout. She tells me the below, which is the first time in my life I heard these things:

• “I want you to start off with 2700 calories”
• “I want you to do 40/30/30. That’s 40% carbs, 30% protein, 30% fat”
• “You only need to work major muscle groups one time a week. We will target all of your major muscle groups over that hour, and it will always be different exercises”.
• “Stay away from running”

This is a 180 from everything I have been taught, and with this, you could see my skepticism. I have heard of the 40/30/30 but I just thought it was some marketing gimmick. I was a calorie expert, in that I could look at anything and give you a pretty close approximation of calories. Hence you see the “180”. This is going to be the beginning here of a lot of things that I did differently than the medical establish teaches you.

For a year I did this. Walked a little, not much. Exercised every Saturday. I didn’t know I was ADHD. I only learned that in 2024. What happened was I was excited to go to the gym. Every time it was something different. Unique. Different intensities. Different machines. Different locations. Different times. That is about 50 sessions I had with her that year, and at the end of the year I was at 300 pounds. From the start, 72 pounds. But that Christmas, I was having some down times, and I destroyed a box of peanut butter eggs in 2 days. I was ashamed. Felt bad. S was talking about trying keto. I thought “another trendy diet, sounds like Atkins”. After that Christmas and putting some weight back on, I decided to try keto.

Keto changed my life. The first thing when the gym bros or health “experts” say when they hear “keto” is that it’s too hard to stick to. It doesn’t matter because you are still just doing calorie deficits. That it’s too much saturated fat and will cause you a heart attack. All of that stuff is going to make your cholesterol go higher. Well, respectfully, go fuck yourself. I would have GIANT salads like this every day. Loved them so much!!

The truth is, that it was the first time in my life that my body talked to me. I stopped thinking about food all the time. Dinner time would come, and you are like, “am I even hungry? – No. So I don’t really NEED to eat, right?” I have covered all of the reasons in the nutrition section, but everyone just thinks you are eating 6 pounds of bacon and day and drinking fats. The reality is, the foods you do eat are required to live, and they provide great satiety. If you really think about it for a minute – are you overweight because you consumed too many calories, or because you were really hungry and overate bad foods because your body wasn’t telling you it was satisfied and leptin signals were being blocked.

Additionally, keto allowed me to easily move from 3-4 meals a day with snacks to 1 bigger meal a day late in the afternoon. This also then made it relatively easy for me to do “fasting Fridays” 3 times a month where I would eat a big salad on Thursday evening, and my next meal was like eggs Saturday morning before my trainer visit. This also allowed me to then look into 3 day fasting. If you don’t know what autophagy is, it won the Nobel Prize for medicine in 2016. With it, you get into a state where your glycogen stores are depleted, and your body then starts to “eat itself” by finding first malformed cells. The body takes these cells, recycles them, and you seem to potentially kill cancer cells. Every major religion has fasting protocols. It is important to understand electrolytes, what they are, and why they are important during fasting.

Something you don’t understand until you are on keto is how good the sleep is. I call it the “coma sleep”. When you start to really sleep well, your body can remove the cortisol, and you wake up refreshed. Sleep can then start to become your secret health weapon. If your body is resting properly, suddenly your efforts on the track or in the gym pay off more because your body does a much better job healing you up.

I found that when I first went into ketosis, my mind couldn’t do DEEP thinking for awhile. However, my recall was instant. When you live your life addicted to carbs, you know that you can get some really deep thinking going, but sometimes it’s hard to recall certain words. It is suggested by Dr. Lustig that dementia and the like are “type 3” diabetes, as the carbs/sugar disrupt neuropathways. I don’t know exactly how this works – but I remember something like amylaze or something like that. This isn’t my wheelhouse, which is why for my research paper I will be reviewing all of this stuff I did from 6-9 years ago, source it, and provide better information. But know that once you are “fat adapted” after maybe 4-6 weeks, your deep thinking starts to come back, but you also keep the instant recall.

Keto helped me go from 305 or so to 197. My trainer BEGGED me not to run. However, at the time I was trying to get into the military working under US Cybercom and had to meet height/weight requirements, waist size requirements, and fitness requirements with running. I had wanted to be in the military my whole life, but the weight was the issue. Now that I understood what was going on, I spent 2 years trying to get into shape for the military. I was trying to enter under a Direct Commission for US Cybercom the same way a doctor might enter the army to work in the hospitals. What was very interesting with this is that those who were in the military hated this idea. They think nothing of a JAG officer with a DC or a doctor with a DC – but they hadn’t considered that the warfighter now faces different warfare than just with guns, tanks, and planes. I worked for 15 years under US Cybercom –> 9th SC (Netcom) –> 7th SC –> 93rd SB. I detailed some of the above, but I was on the forefront of defending our nations military installations at the defensive side of things. I did score an interview, and was one of 11 selected out of thousands of applicants. However, it seemed they were looking more towards offensive operations, and while I didn’t know this, it had looked like they were trying to go for former enlisted soldiers from 10 years earlier that went to school, got their degree, and worked in the cyber field – and THAT is who they were potentially looking to DC. It’s unfortunate, as I was already managing a platoon size for 7 years. At the DLA, I was an enterprise admin over 42,000 machines defending endpoints across the world in hundreds of locations. These types of skill sets are very hard to find. Anyway – this story shows you that I had a deep, deep dedication to getting fit – and for me, running was my favorite thing to do.

A few weeks earlier, I had done an outdoor sprint triathlon. 300m swimming in a pool (not a fan of lakes), 15.9m biking, and 3.1 miles running. One thing not mentioned in my story was that my mother’s health was starting to get progressively worse. At this point in my training, I was at about 75-125g of carbs a day and still losing weight. This is why I don’t want people to freak at me saying “keto”. Because not only will you lose weight, but as you go on and add more exercise that are intense, you can add carbs to fuel those activities and your insulin really isn’t affected because you are targeting your carbs around your intense exercise. THIS is the problem most of you have. You have ZERO needs for carbs unless you are doing HARD lifting, sprinting, racing, etc. And THIS is why everyone got fat. People started adding more carbs to the plate because they were far, far cheaper to get your 1800 calories.

This race was 8/3 and I think I was 205 the morning of. I completed the race, got into my car, and my first call was to my mom. She was so proud of me! She was about 10 months into a pancreatic cancer diagnosis. She was a tough cookie, but things were getting worse.

Immediately after this, I started to implode mentally. My trainer was amazing at listening to me. She was, for all intents and purposes, my acting therapist during this 3 year period, and was more or less a nutrition advisor. I started to see how these roles play an important part in getting healthier.

What happened next was I was losing it mentally. My wife just got pregnant, and I also had my interview with US Cybercom and was NOT selected. I began obsessively running and biking. The volume I was doing, I was using Training Peaks for to try and rest. But I was also fasting more. Not eating as much. What happened in this span is what caused a lot of problems for me for the next 6 years.

My trainer had advised me to hit specific calories. Don’t run and bike as much. The running and biking actually seemed to help keep my OCD in check. I didn’t KNOW I had OCD. But what was happening in my brain is that anxiety was taking over, and my mind obsessively not only dealt with all of the highlight reel, but my other OCD complication was I kept anticipating her death, and feeling her die 50 times a day. When I did long distance steady state cardio to music, it would calm me. Part of me believes that the OCD pathways fed on my glucose. And by exercising a lot in zone two, I was routinely draining my glycogen stores, reducing the glucose available to my brain to nothing – which then was forcing my body to break down muscle tissue for glucose for my brain for “baseline” operations. The calories I was eating – were being consumed quickly by my exercise. I believe at my peak, I was averaging 2 hours of steady state cardio a day. This could be 3 hour rides on both Saturday and Sunday, a 4 hour hike Friday late afternoon, biking for 1-1.5 hours during 2-3 weekdays, and running after biking and super long distances on Sundays. I was still hitting the gym and swimming for 30-60 minutes after training or before. I put in 12-14 hours a week.

I was addicted to the exercise. Little did I understand the dopamine hits I was also getting from the runner’s high and biking. My dopamine sources went from ice cream and pizza to giant salads with chicken and runners high. I swapped a bad source of dopamine for one that was more productive. But the exercises I was doing with biking. I would ride trails all over the place. Different distances. Some days were long and slow on flat parts of a rail trail, another may have been a 1 hour hard sprint on hills. Another day could have been running at Couselor park for 5 miles at zone two with some elevation at times, another time in the development here for hard zone 4 running with some sprints, to the track at the military base where I would do several miles of sprints of different durations – 50 meters x 4, 100 x 4 meters, half the track x 2, one time around, then back down, and do that a few times. Again I had NO idea I had ADHD. But my mental health was at its best when I was doing these exercises.

“Sound body, sound mind?” Could this perhaps be because ADHD has been around forever, and people just inherently understood that by moving around a lot, many with ADHD could be much more healthier mentally?

The change….

At 225 pounds, I was able to bench press 225 three times. This is not going to get me drafted in the NFL combine anytime soon, but it was a good measuring stick here because when I “stopped” losing weight at 197, I could not bench 95 pounds one time. I had “chewed” through maybe 10 pounds or more of lean body mass in order to hit a number on a scale, and because I wanted to be a runner/biker, I didn’t seem to care much about the amount of weight I was putting up. My goal was not to be in a pageant and boast a six pack. My goal was to be 165-175 and be fit to enjoy triathlons and my children and live a long, healthy life. But when I couldn’t bench 95 pounds, part of me in the back of my head also instantly understood what the fuck I have just done over 3 months of massive amounts of exercise to RAPIDLY hit a goal WEIGHT for the Army.

This 3 month period of my life would change everything for the worse. Remember – AS I am celebrating my triathlon, things under the hood had changed. And not for the better. What was interesting is when I did that bike ride for the triathlon, a year earlier I was doing much better numbers. While I was much LIGHTER on the bike, my POWER had decreased to the point where I was SLOWER pushing my lighter body. Houston, we have a problem.

I didn’t run a lot in September. My mother was getting worse, and I started to get some back pain. Not the issue from above, but this was like a pinched nerve. I tried to do some speed running, but I was now bringing my distance way down. I wasn’t running a lot. I did a 5k in October at York College, and my sprint work made me faster where I hit my personal best of 27 minutes or so. But my back started hurting more. My shoulder was hurting. I thought I tore something, and I had to back off my weight training with squats and benching.

The end

At the end of November, my mother had full blown dementia. I was up there every weekend for like the last year to spend time with her, but it was now at a point where she couldn’t walk, but tried to keep walking out of the house and mumbling. My step father is one of the best men I have ever met in my life, and took care of my mother. At one point, it got too much for him for himself, and we called my mom’s best friend (who was a nurse) from Florida to come up and help. It was Thanksgiving. 6 hours later, Vicki arrived. In a rotation with Vicki, Joe, and myself, for the next amount of days, we were on shifts taking care of her. I was living in York, PA, and my job was 90 minutes southeast of me. My mom was 90 minutes east/northeast of me. My job was 2 hours south of my mom’s house. For I don’t know how many days, I was working, coming home, changing, going to my mom’s, then going to work from there at like 2 in the morning. I had some sleep or naps here and there, but the days all got smooshed together. No child wants to do the things I had to do to take care of my mother, but part of me was proud to do it, as she took care of me as a child. It was the least I could do for her. And, I got a small taste of what nurses go through daily and mad fucking respect to you. It hardened me a bit in that I could then more or less face anything.

Her funeral was December 18th, and I was 218 pounds. I had gained 21 pounds over the last 45 days. I wasn’t exercising, AT ALL. My back had a twinge in it and my shoulder was killing me. I wasn’t eating a ton. You idiot calorie math people look at that and say, “Nate, you must have consumed 60,000 calories more than you expended, so you must have eaten more – physics proves it”. Well, respectfully, YOU are the reason our country is fat. When you go through stuff like this, you understand how important sleep is. You understand how stress hormones can seriously hold weight on you – and down regulate your metabolism because your body is in this weird state. It makes you tired. You don’t want to exercise. My body was breaking down physically. And, emotionally, I internalized everything. When taking care of my mom, I had a job to do. I didn’t cry. I had spent the last 12 months with every chance I could, to go spend time with her and savored every moment of it. I did an “interview” with her before it got seriously bad, and I did this so we could preserve her spirit, her laugh, and her character in video.

What was also going on these last few months is because I wasn’t exercising, my OCD started kicking up. I read an article in October that on September 16th, 2019, the repo market almost blew up. I had recalled what this was from my grad school 18 years prior. I had lost my job in the dotcom and twice during the GFC. I went through a terrible ordeal with these events. And now, I had a baby on the way. What happened here is I started to fall down rabbit holes of finance and investing. I watched Margin Call and “The Big Short”. I positioned myself in January 2020 as I knew the markets were going to implode, and I was worried about job loss, recession, depression, etc. Long story short, I took a chunk of change, played the implosion of markets during COVID correctly, made a small fortune – and that then allowed me to renovate a rental (which took 2 years) and then later buy my short term rental. Both of these properties will pay themselves off and provide me and my family a steady state of income forever – whether or not I ever work. I had learned to shoot guns. Stored 2 years of food. This journey here for the next FIVE years consumed me – I needed to protect my family. All of these moves paid off – but it took a tremendous toll on my free time, my marriage, and quality of life. But I digress.

January of 2020, I went to physical therapy for my shoulder. Over the course of 3 months, it was repaired. I was driving 3 hours a day in my car, listening to every investment podcast I could chomp down. I would write all the time. I realized, “I used my brain to THINK myself to losing 175 pounds, why don’t I used my big brain and my MBA to make a lot of money to help my family”.

I tried to start running again. 2 weeks in, severe back pain and I could barely walk. Still hadn’t changed a thing of what I was eating before.

February 2020 – end of February I was 228 at a getaway with friends. Again, still hadn’t eaten more. Still couldn’t run. Stopped training with S in November after 3 years. Figured I was disciplined enough to do it myself now. No – the lesson I have with this is that ACCOUNTABILITY is a really big part of continuing a plan.

March 2020 – COVID. I was running a contract of like 100 people for the government and we all remember lock downs. I had to try and scramble to get laptops for people. Come up with stupid reports so remote people weren’t stealing time. Constant meetings over the phone. Emails stacking up faster than I could count. Stock market crash, I made a small fortune off of it. But stress. Am I going to get COVID and die? In late January, I was tracking this. I was going to the store a few times a week stocking up on toilet paper, groceries. I had 2 years of food. My wife, once again, thought I was nuts. Lockdowns hit, toilet paper shortage, and there I was, prepared.

But this introduced the FIRST food change. I was going to work every day and having one meal a day, a 1400 calorie salad. And, I was still gaining weight back. Again, you calorie math idiots just think I’m too stupid to count calories or I’m lying. “Cortisol has entered the chat”. Now my wife was home. I was home. And she started making lunches that smelled amazing. Asked me if I wanted some. SURE!! So this wasn’t a huge lunch. Maybe an egg sandwich.

Fast forward to June, 2020 – my son is born and placed in the NICU for 10 days. My wife was dealing with gestational diabetes, and we were worried that bad things were going to happen. I’m not a religious man, but that day at the doctors when we got news of problems, there was a cross that I found. It was in my pocket or something – no idea – maybe it was an errant delivery to me. I don’t remember, all I remember was there was this cross that I didn’t buy. For a day, I was deeply religious and called on my limited recollection of my religious studies for confirmation at 13. I didn’t overeat. With COVID, no one was going out to eat. I weighed myself. 245 pounds. I had tried 3 more times during the previous 5 months to go running. I would be good for 1-2 weeks, and then BAM – disc issues and pinched nerve. Can’t walk. Like, it’s intense.

At this point, I had gained 47 pounds back. I had remained low carb, and I was eating about 75g a day. My lean body mass was shredded a year earlier from all of the running and biking, and I believe that severely damaged my metabolism. I had tried weight training programs at home – maybe 10 times now? I get a few weeks in, and get bored out of my mind. With the child, my wife told me I was no longer “allowed” to go on three hour rides. This limited me to ONE place I could ride. Over the next few years, I rode it less and less. I understand now, it’s because my ADHD needed that variety of places. I CRAVED a calm mind, and long distance durations – in my non-medical opinion – would reduce my OCD symptoms by depriving my brain of glucose – in which it was then tapping my lean body mass. I was biking for 3 hours at a time the year before on low carb, so I was easily using a LOT of ketones to fuel my flat rides. When I added hills, I was only then depleting the glycogen stores to get my brain a rest. The flat ride for 30-45 minutes was monotonous, unchanging, and never got me the high OR quieted my brain.

As I’m writing today, I’m at 306 pounds. My highest weight was 2 months or so ago I hit 327. For reference, in October of 2022, I was 297 pounds. Last year over 4th of July I was 301 pounds. Since September of last year, I ballooned up in a very short period of time. For the past 4 years, I had reverted back to a “regular” diet which wasn’t low carb. I had moments of indulgence, but I have had a balance – not a ton of exercise, not going nuts eating, and my body stayed around 300 pounds. But in the fall of 2024, I was starting to crack with the OCD. Constant negative headlines on the news. Limited time before stock market crash. Stress with escalating costs renovating my short term rental. Tenant leaving. Lots of things were piling up. This is when I was diagnosed with ADHD/OCD. The stimga of these are terrible, but having had this my whole life and not knowing, I kinda think that everyone has misconceptions of these conditions. This isn’t “bipolar”. It’s not “multiple personality disorder”. My flavor of ADHD allows me to hyperfocus on things for extremely long periods of time on things that interest me. Luckily for me, I have a LOT of interests. My OCD was a constant reminder of my mistakes of the past and had me always planning for the future. These things helped me grow from mistakes, but also made me extremely prepared for the future. But when I started taking meds for the OCD and ADHD, things started happening.

The big picture is with the OCD is that I don’t “obsess” over mistakes from the past anymore. I just thought everyone did that. When I took the meds, after a few weeks, you adjust to it and suddenly what happens is your wife says something to you and you have the appropriate emotional reaction in the NOW. When she says things, I’m processing it in real time. The mistake reel is still there. Worrying about the future is still there – but it is not searing pain or a compulsion to buy a stock immediately and put my life on hold until that is done. I wasn’t checking the stock market and precious metals 38 times a day, but maybe at day close I glance. I wasn’t spending hours every evening planning out every contingency of the future, I was able to sit there with my 4 year old and let him snuggle me – and his smile lit me up. It’s as if most of my life in the present was clouded by sooooo many intrusive thoughts that things going on in the NOW were muted. So these meds turned the NOW up more and turned the past/future down more – and reduced my compulsions to act on them.

With the ADHD, I had no idea what all of that was. I just thought – someone went squirrel. Turns out, 20% of the population is ADHD. And, I can see how my entire life has revolved around dopamine hits in some way. Where we all seek pleasure to some extent, my default mode was I didn’t have enough at baseline levels. This led me to CONSTANTLY seeking out highs. As a child, in the winter months when I couldn’t go outside? Pizza and ice cream and the like gave me those highs. Chess gave me that. Playing my trumpet did. And I gained weight every winter eating carb rich foods. When it was warmer, it was my bike, baseball, baseball, tennis, running, golf, being outdoors. My dopamine levels were satiated by these activities of competition, and because I was sooooo active most of my life for 8 months a year, the OCD – in my mind – was kept in check because as I was losing weight every summer, I was torching any of those carbs that were coming in to me. I ate relatively the same amount of calories all the time. I dieted all the time. But what was on my plate – in makeup – determined my carb levels and insulin resistance. My dopamine seeking behaviors were positive in warmer months, driving me to be active. But in colder months, my dopamine hits could only come from carbs and bad food.

And – as we get older, what happens? Work happens. College happens. And things people like me did for dopamine hits are removed from me. I didn’t play in chess tournaments anymore. My time to play the trumpet went to near zero. With the new baby and injury, I wasn’t exercising anymore. The wife yelled at me writing so much (a dopamine seeking thing for me) and I had to stop that. I loved to learn new things, and no more grad school for me. I had then found dopamine hits in making money and multiple streams of income. But the ADHD meds started me to STOP seeking all of this dopamine seeking behavior. I am eating now maybe a single meal a day. I rarely get hungry and think about food, and I’m down 21 pounds in 2 months simply ensuring I have the right dopamine levels. Which was the “A Ha!” moment for me.

How could someone like me, who dieted most of his life. Who obviously has been supremely active. Who is meticulous with math and spreadsheets to track things. Who is wicked smart to learn anything he wants to lose 175 pounds, make money, and get 2 graduate degrees – how could THAT guy be 327 pounds? Was he dumb? Was he just not trying?

My hypothesis is that an overwhelming percentage of morbidly obese people are undiagnosed ADHD and or OCD. I will leave the OCD out of this for now just because it’s a lot less common than ADHD, and ADHD is, by nature, short of dopamine. And how my mind gets quieted with meds? It also quieted me in my 20s drinking my face off partying. In college, it helped me meet people and date – without the alcohol – my mind was racing so much at all times, that I was paralyzed from talking with women and meeting new people. My only friends are fraternity brothers from 30 years ago. This program will help everyone lose weight. Everyone.

But in business, let’s look at the pareto chart. You say, 80% of the problems are from 20% of the causes. Essentially – this is a guideline to identify the biggest problem an organization has, and as that is resolved, you go to the next biggest issue. While it is true that half of the adult population now is pre-diabetic or diabetic, it is my belief that whole ADHD people are 20% of the population – that ADHD patients may make up much more of a higher percentage of obese and morbidly obese people. It is also my belief – like me – many of them may go undiagnosed their whole lives. This ADHD makes it hard for them to hold jobs. Many who have ADHD suffer in school. This may because many of these subjects just don’t interest them, but if you take them into a metal shop, they may take like a duck to water to welding. This may have implications in trying to identify ADHD people when very young to allow them to get educated in things that interest them, while providing a BARE minimum of other subjects they may not like and have trouble focusing. While medication can obviously help this to some degree, we do want out children to learn what interest them.