Transcription
Hey guys, it's been a kind of a weird winter, to be honest with you. Uh, things going on my personal life. Uh, my father's been in the hospital, my truck died, I'm trying to find a new car. I got, you know, other issues. But the thing that's keeping me positive is how well this dietary trial is going.
Um, the Emergence Diet, if you haven't heard about it, is, uh, it's a starch-based diet. It's based on low branched-chain amino acids. It's fairly low in fat, and that's what I've been doing. I had a really successful trial in October. If you didn't hear, I lost 15 lbs, and I'll put that graph up and you can see. And then in November, I was kind of, uh, experimenting, and, uh, things went on a plateau for a while. And then, of course, Thanksgiving came. There's a little bump there. You can actually, I have the, the, the graph that's generated from my scale. So these are actual, these are my actual weights from my actual scale. You see the little bump at Thanksgiving time. But then, you know, I got real strict again in the beginning of December, and it, and it goes back down to the old lows that were, that matched the end of what was happening in October, right?
And then my father went into the hospital, and then I spent, uh, like a week living at my parents' house, in and out of the hospital all the time. Um, and that was the week before Christmas, right? And so I had, like, a, you know, probably five different Christmas dinners with different families and different, uh, you know, parts of my family, right? Uh, there was a lot, there was a lot of feasting. And then there was New Year's, and there was more feasting. And so I actually, so I lost about 14 or 15 pounds in October, pretty much plateaued until about December 15th. And then by the, by, by New Year's Day, by January 2nd, I had regained like, 10 of the pounds. Or, but then I got home and I got strict again on this Emergence, and I was eating my cassava flour pancakes in the morning.
So one of the amazing things when I first went on this BCAA restricted, high-starch diet was that my morning fasting blood glucose immediately normalized. So I had been getting readings like 115, uh, 119. And I started that diet in October, and within 10 days, those readings were down to like the, the mid-80s. And then they continued to go lower. They got down to like 80, right? 75 some days. And then after the, the Christmas, the hospital time and Christmas and New Year's, I was getting blood readings back at 103, 104, 108. I got one morning. So when I switched back to the, the very strict diet, you know, it took maybe 10 days to two weeks. Now I am routinely clocking in at 80. Uh, my blood glucose is 80 in the morning, which is like perfect. You can't do better than 80. And what's amazing about that is the, the, the blood glucose normalization has preceded the weight loss. So I've now lost, uh, nearly all of the weight that I, um, regained at the holiday times. That gray line is my actual results, and the blue is like the three-day moving average or something. And you can see how steeply that, that my weight is declining. Once, once my blood, uh, glucose normalized, then the weight loss really starts to follow it.
It repeated the experiment twice now, uh, and I went into a very much not doing that, which wasn't really a choice. It was just the holidays came, father went in the hospital, etc. So that gave me a second chance to try this, and it's worked just as well, if not better, the second time. So far, it's only been three weeks. I'm super stoked to get down to my, uh, target weight by swimsuit season, right? I'm hoping July 1st, boom, I'm at my target weight.
I was taking my RAA, I'm now doing 480 milligrams, uh, twice a day. I was taking my C, I'm still doing 600 milligrams in the morning. I'm going to switch to the 300 milligram, uh, twice a day once I get the, the 300 milligram tablets are in the mail. Um, and I'm taking my, uh, four Po tea capsules a day, four 600 milligram Po tea. I'm taking vitamin D now, 10,000 units, now that it's winter, right? Uh, vitamin D is important. And I've been taking, uh, betaine, uh, which is for methyl groups, and apigenin, which is a polyphenol that can help your NAD+ levels. It's very interesting what it does. It's a whole discussion. All of these things, the C, the Po tea extract, and the RAA will help you burn glucose. And that's the point of this diet is, is to eat starch and to regain your ability to burn glucose, which is, if you're overweight, that's the thing that you've lost. Your ability to oxidize glucose is the thing that you suck at, and you need to get better at it, right?
I highly recommend going to fireinabottle.net. Get yourself some C, get yourself some of the Po tea extract. Tea of browning. You know what have I been doing dietarily? I've been doing my cassava flour pancake recipe. I think it's in the Emergence Diet video. I was doing 50/50 cassava flour and fure gluten-free flour. I switched that now. I same recipe, but I just do pure cassava flour now. They're actually better that way. Cassava flour is like the most pure form of starch that you can buy, or just regular cassava, either way, it doesn't matter. That, that is a, that's in a whole food form. I mean, obviously you can buy corn starch. I was doing potatoes. I had got an air fryer. I've been doing like air fryer potatoes in the evening. Sometimes I'm playing around with this Emergence Diet hash brown recipes. It's sort of like a McDonald's style hash brown that you can make in your air fryer that incorporates, uh, gelatin and some cornstarch and pot and instant potatoes. Something that's very easy to make. I'm, I'm still working on it, so the recipe will be forthcoming.
Um, I had a couple cheat days. Uh, the Bills were in the playoffs, unfortunately, we know how that ended. But on those two days, uh, you can look up what the Bills playoff dates were in January. You know, I had cheat meals with, uh, you know, three or four slices of pizza and four or five chicken wings, probably, right? Uh, there's some cheat meals in in that weight loss part of the graph too.
Recently, I've been experimenting with chestnut flour. Chestnut flour is very interesting, right? People think that it's, I talk about acorns and how they're bad, right? And, and the chestnuts are kind of similar, but, but weirdly, for whatever reason, the chestnut is a very different thing than an acorn. So a chestnut's a true nut, but it's very low in fat. Um, you know, they call it the, the bread of the tree or the potato of the tree or something like that. Unlike acorn, they're very low in fat. They're equivalent to the, the European and the Asian chestnuts, which are the only two kinds that you can buy, are equivalent in fat to like a whole grain brown rice, which is to say they have more fat than white flour or white rice. But in the greater pantheon of foods, they're very low in fat. They're very high in starch, and the protein is around 5 to 6%. And in terms of BCAAs, they have about 40% less. Sort of calorie per calorie, chestnuts have 40% less BCAAs than rice, than wheat flour. Uh, probably half of what corn has. Corn has a lot of BCAAs. It's got 40% less than potatoes do. And it's a very traditional food. It's been used for thousands of years in Europe, in Asia. You know, it grows in China, it grows in Japan. I live in Upstate New York, so, uh, to me, chestnut feels more regionally appropriate than something like cassava.
Um, I just posted a video about my chestnut hack. If you look up the chestnut cocoa hack, this is a chestnut flour with a little bit of cocoa powder and some chocolate chips in it. I add some collagen to that, and you just, uh, basically essentially boil it. It takes five minutes. You bring it up to a simmer, and it's like a thick, it's basically like a hot cocoa. I actually eat it with a spoon. It's thick enough, you eat it with a spoon, but it's basically a hot cocoa. If you want a more chocolatey, just add a few more chocolate chips. It's delightful. It's surprisingly filling. I've been cruising through kind of breakfast and lunch on that.
In the spring, mammals emerge from torpor. That's what the, that's what the diet is named after. And so, uh, animals become insulin resistant in the fall. That helps them gain weight. It seems like the mechanism for that involves branched-chain amino acids, because remember, the first mammals hibernating probably were eating ants. And so the things available to them were fat and protein. And the ants, the further they got from the equator, the ants are higher in the unsaturated fats. And so the unsaturated fats trigger torpor. But since ants are pretty high in protein, the proteins were used as the building blocks to do de novo lipogenesis. And so we can sort of now that we know that, we can back calculate and say, okay, well, if we remove that component, you know, the, we evolved, right? We evolved to use the BCAAs. And so we're like, okay, well, if we take those out, then, uh, the unsaturated fats lose their leverage over us to cause the insulin resistance. Because if you're obese, you're full of unsaturated fats, but the unsaturated fats use those BCAAs as a lever. And so if we reduce those in our diet, you know, that gives us the leverage to burn glucose again, to get out of torpor, to get our blood glucose down, to lose that weight. We have tools, RAA, C, Po tea extract, right?
The Po tea extract, what it does is it blocks inflammatory signaling coming out of your intestine, your gut. So that your gut bacteria can no longer signal that inflammation. The C signals to your body that stearic acid is high, and that you live in, uh, somewhere where summer is. The ants at the equator are high in stearic acid. So the mammal eating ants at the equator is sending the signal to its body that it lives in a land of eternal summer. The animal in Upstate New York eating ants is eating mostly mufa, and that's sending the opposite signal. That's sending the signal that winter is coming. You know, for the Emergence Diet, we're avoiding most fats, although, you know, we're using chocolate chips in the recipe. Chocolate chips are very high in stearic acid. And the C is another signal of summer. It reduces inflammation. Uh, it does all kinds of stuff. It, it lowers your, it lowers your endocannabinoids to help you deal with the munchies. It lowers appetite. It, it reduces SC1 levels in the liver. Uh, it's good stuff.
I'm honestly shocked. I mean, obviously I do a lot of research and I spent a lot of time thinking about all these things before I kind of came up with this proposal for the Emergence Diet. I'm honestly shocked at how well it's working so far. Um, it's fun when you spend a lot of time and you hit your walls and you things are frustrating, and then you put it all together and you're like, okay, this is my, I'm submitting my thesis, this is my final answer, and it works, right? You're like, mind blown. Uh, and that's what's happening so far.
I think you guys should try it. Um, everybody can, you know, the best conversation about this is over on Reddit, r/unsaturatedfat. Uh, you can follow me along on Twitter. I'm on TikTok now, so check out Fire in a Bottle on, check out, I think it's Fire. I, I should know what my username on TikTok is. I don't. Fire in a Bottle, maybe I'm not sure. EI that, or it's Fire in a Bottle. Uh, same thing on Instagram. So I'm trying to post more to Instagram and TikTok. If you want to follow along on those sites, that's why this is a vertical video. See, see what I did there? Uh, we're learning, right? We're learning how to edit video and do all these things we don't know.
I think that's good for now. Uh, I will see you guys next next time. Good luck out there.