“I am not writing this book for the lean and healthy of the world, although I certainly believe they can benefit by reading it. I am writing it for those who fatten all too easily, who are drifting inexorably toward overweight, obesity, diabetes, hypertension, or some combination of them, or who are already afflicted and are living at increased risk of heart disease, stroke, and, in fact, all chronic disease. And I’m writing it for their doctors.
This book is a work of journalism masquerading as a self-help book. It’s about the ongoing conflict between the conventional thinking on the nature of a healthy diet and its failure to make us healthy, about the difference between how we have been taught to eat to prevent chronic disease and how we may have to eat to return ourselves to health. Should we be eating to reduce our risk of future disease, or should we be eating to achieve and maintain a healthy weight? Are these one and the same? ...
My goal is to help each of us shed a century of tragic preconceptions about the nature of a healthy diet, to learn to ignore the bad advice we have been given, and to replace it with a way of thinking about diets, our weight, and our health that works.”
~ Gary Taubes from The Case for Keto
This is something like the 620th PhilosophersNote I’ve created over the last 15 or so years. It’s the first one I created after taking an 18-month sabbatical to launch Heroic.
Now that we’ve launched the v1 of the Heroic app (which pilot study data shows can boost your energy (by 40%!), productivity (by 20%!) and connection (by 15%!) in just a few minutes in the app for just 30 days by helping you go from Theory to Practice to Mastery in your Energy + Work + Love), I’m re-integrating the Philosopher in me and doing everything I can to help you get your Soul Force score to 101 while the team hammers the product road map.
For whatever reason, as I perused the thousands (!) of books in our little library in the studio-barn here in the country outside of Austin where we now live, I was drawn to this book by Gary Taubes.
We’ve featured two of his other GREAT (!) books that have deeply influenced my thinking on (and practice of!) nutrition: Why We Get Fat and The Case Against Sugar. So, I was excited jump in. I read the book cover to cover over the weekend in a few Deep Work time blocks.
It’s FANTASTIC.
The inside-flap cover summarizes the book perfectly: “The best-selling author of Why We Get Fat and The Case Against Sugar reveals why the established rules about eating healthfully might be the wrong approach for most people, and how low-carbohydrate, high-fat ketogenic diets can help many of us achieve and maintain healthy weight for life.”
If you or a loved one have struggled with reaching your optimal weight while trying to follow the conventional wisdom that all you have to do is eat less and exercise more, I think you, too, will enjoy Taubes’s thoughtful perspective on just how flawed our current thinking is regarding the cause of obesity. Hint: It’s not an “energy balance” issue; it’s primarily a HORMONAL issue.
The book is PACKED with Big Ideas. As in, jumbo packed. Get a copy here and know this: As much as I enjoyed the philosophical look at why our current thinking on nutrition is so fundamentally flawed, I thought the practical side of how to dominate a Low-Carb/HighFat eating approach was even better. Although it’s super important to understand WHY this approach works, if you feel so inspired, feel free to jump straight ahead to Page 200 for 50 pages
of incredibly powerful, practical wisdom.
And now, let’s jump straight in. We might just fundamentally and permanently change your life and help you create more Energy and Zest while getting you to your optimal weight faster than you ever thought possible.
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