100 Pounds Ago...I Started Learning How to Love Myself More Than the Pleasure of Food by Charles A. Postma - HTML preview

Acknowledgements

I am a very utilitarian person. This book is short and to the point. I could but have chosen not to clutter it with superfluous words and phrases meant to convince you that I am some sort of towering intellect. I hate acronyms that make you ask yourself, “now what did that mean again?”, and keep making you look back to find its meaning to make sense of what I am trying to tell you. Whenever possible I avoid using words that the average person might have to look up in a dictionary. Many thanks to Mary Decker and my sister Renae Postma for lending me their editing talents. Their contributions are deeply appreciated.

The most important books I’ve read when it comes to improvements to my personal return to health was Fasting and Sunbathing by Dr. Herbert Shelton. Fasting helped me get rid of plaque psoriasis, seasonal pollen allergies, improve my circulatory system, gain body strength, improve stamina, and shed 100

pounds of visceral and subcutaneous fat. The Salt Fix by Dr. James DiNicolantonio helped me finally achieve normal blood pressure when I began adding more high-quality salt to my diet. To Lynn Farrow who wrote The Iodine Crisis. Since starting to supplement iodine I am no longer constantly cold. To Dr.

Ken Berry, author of Lies My Doctor Told Me, for helping me recognize and utilize the healing, anti-aging, and restorative power of a wholesome diet. To my wife of over five decades, Sue, who has been there with me every step of the journey. And finally, to the Bible for healing my soul, reshaping my priorities, telling us the diet we have been designed for, and revealing to us where autophagy came from. Thank you, Lord.

I am not a doctor. You will find no medical recommendations in this document. There are many references to randomized, controlled studies that the reader is strongly encouraged to investigate. The traditional sources of medical information have failed us catastrophically. Bad and fraudulent “science” have put far too many of us into an early grave. Our most precious mortal possession is our health and entrusting it to the same people who make their livelihoods from our sickness has not worked out very well in retrospect.

Copyright ©2023

By Charles A. Postma

3

Preface

Twice in the last few decades I lost sixty pounds and promptly gained it all back. There were a few other efforts at weight control of lesser accomplishment that also were not sustainable. Honestly, I’d given up.

I was going to be happy with myself at 260 pounds and learn to live with it. I had autoimmune diseases that were not too taxing on my quality of life, but the thought of not being able to enjoy my gluttonous lifestyle was simply unthinkable. I so enjoyed plowing my tongue into the center of a chocolate truffle or a white cream filled donut. Sugar is addictive. I knew it and did not care. Getting my sugar fix several times throughout the day was cheap and totally legal. Standing in the grocery store checkout line grabbing a chocolate bar next to the register was so natural. And I would always amuse myself that it wasn’t going to make it home, except in my stomach.

In 2013 I read The 5:2 Diet by Michael Mosley. However, the diet regimen proved too complicated for me. No, the diet wasn’t too complicated, it just wasn’t simple enough for me. I am not a calorie/carbohydrate counting, food weighing, rules following kind of guy. That’s probably why none of the several 111 diets rolled out on the world since the 1970’s that I tried did not work for me. I think the reason why manmade diets have a success rate for reaching and staying at goal weight of only 1.7% is because they are manmade. Fasting does not have this fatal flaw.

It does not matter if you believe in the Theory of Evolution or Intelligent Design we evolved or were created to go for extended periods of time without food. Prehistorically, if the spear or arrow missed its mark or the bear beat you to the berries, you fasted. Settlements of humans were always located next to a source of water, so we never needed to go for long periods of time without it.

Fasting, as a dietary intervention, does not need to explain or justify itself. It has been with us for thousands and thousands of years. Our ability to go without food, living off fat reserves, is something the body does instinctively and expertly even if it has never known a period of hunger for more than a few moments or hours at any point in a lifetime.

Autophagy, the healing power within fasting, is the star of a fasting event. The orderly process by which autophagy renews the body was documented by Yoshinori Ohsumi who won the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his 20 years of work to do so. Before our obesity epidemic, fasting was rarely used for weight loss. It was used to reverse disease. Once you understand the supernatural healing power of autophagy during fasting you might think that using it for something as trivial as weight loss is almost disrespectful. However, I will take it as a side effect!

4

Table of Contents