Stevie Puckett

Tag: choices

  • Nutritive Mismatch

    Today I keep thinking about Mark Scatzker’s book “The End of Craving.” I read it at the end of last year, and it was one of my favorite books of the year. There were many interesting case studies and ideas in the book, and I highly recommend it.

    In particular, my thoughts return to Dana Small’s research and ideas about what she calls nutritive mismatch. When the tongue senses the sweetness of food and drink, the stomach expects to find the corresponding amount of energy in the stomach. When the two calibrations don’t match up, the work of metabolism is left undone. Undigested sugars are left to float around in the bloodstream!

    After learning this, I immediately changed my diet to eliminate artificial sweeteners. I’ve heard arguments before regarding reasons to stop using them, but this one tipped the scales to avoid for me. It’s a fine line because I want to eat in a low-carb way and believe that artificial sweeteners allow me to have my cake and eat it too, hahaha, but now I see that they may throw a wrench in the works of the body’s calculations.

    It is shocking to have an understanding that gets blown out of the water. It has happened several times in my lifetime regarding nutritional information alone. I hope that by continuing to learn and to be willing to try the new ideas in my own life that one day I will truly have an optimum way of eating that serves me well.

  • Shawn Baker

    I wrote yesterday about Kelly Hogan and Zero Carb Life. Today, I want to mention the very first modern person I ever heard of who made an intentional and ongoing nutritional plan to eat only meat. That person is Dr. Shawn Baker.

    It was fall 2019, and I was exploring the low-carb rabbit hole on Reddit, and someone mentioned Dr. Shawn Baker and some of the points he makes about what he called a carnivore diet.

    The funny thing is I didn’t recognize the name right away, but when I saw his picture, I recognized him because my husband was in school with him 25 years ago or so! This group of guys and their significant others would eat out together for all-you-can-eat crab legs or tacos or whatever the special of the day was on Tuesday nights after work. I met Shawn Baker at a few of those meals. He was the tallest and most muscle-bound man I’d ever seen IRL, and I remember he played Rugby.

    When the group got together to eat out, he would keep eating and eating and eating at the restaurant that advertised all-you-can-eat deals until the restaurant manager would come out and say they had to cut him off. Then, he would argue with them a bit about whether this was an all-you-can-eat place or not. Although it felt outlandish to me at the time, it’s nothing compared to his current talking points. Suffice it to say, he’s been prepared and preparing for battle for years and years. God bless him. It’s amazing to catch up with him again in life and see him still saying the things that are unpopular to say and, at the same time, helping so many people in his unique way.

    So, this new way of eating called carnivore that I was learning about in late 2019 intrigued me. I was pretty worried about trying it, though, because I had electrolyte issues when I would go very low carb. A couple of years earlier, I learned through trying keto that the leg cramps and sleeplessness could be cured by adding more fat. Yes, fat. I had tried supplementing potassium and broth and adding salt to everything, but adding fat solved the issue.

    Dr. Baker is also an inspiration to me. Thanks to him, I made my first run at switching to a carnivore way of eating in January 2020. I lost 25 pounds in one month that month, and it was easy. The pounds just flew off. I have never had results like that before in my life.

    In the past, the most I had ever lost after 18 months of trying was 30 pounds, and it took me only six months to put it back on once I folded and let carbs back in at a rate of more than 40 grams a day. It was just not maintainable for me.

    The carnivore way of eating is maintainable, though. It strikes all the right chords for me, yet to others, it may look and sound like quite a weird idea of how to eat for good health. I can see now as I prepare to begin again that I’ll just have to have the courage to be a little weird and a lot determined to stick to the carnivore way of eating plan.

  • These Aren’t the Important Things

    This is an excellent article by Kerry MacDonald, who has been traveling around the country this year learning about microschools and other alternatives to the conventional classroom.

    In a World Full of Robots, Humans Wanted | Cato Institute

    “So we got progress reports home saying she can only count to 100, but she should be counting to 150 at this point. And her Spanish comprehension is not where we want it to be. And around this time, it’s starting to click with me that maybe these aren’t the important things.”

    In a World Full of Robots, Humans Wanted | Cato Institute

  • Relationships and Focus: Creating Satisfying Relationships

    • Feeling good is powerful, and it is the place you must start to improve your relationships.
    • You will immediately feel heightened freedom and energy when you release others to their own creation and focus on yours.
    • People benefit from being around your positive energy almost as much as you do by allowing it!
    • You can be an example of a person who focuses on the positive as you go through your life feeling good and being secure in your personal power most of the time.
    • Make room for inspired action in all your relationships. Action that will result in new and better interactions and connections with others for you to enjoy.
    • It’s so important to be disciplined about what you are focusing on about other people in order to have satisfying relationships.
    • Don’t let your mind obsess about how someone is so awful, and don’t dwell on those things that you find annoying about someone else. Instead, cut them a break…no, cut yourself a break!
    • You have to control your focus to feel good. In fact, it is the only thing you do have control of. You can’t control others or at-the-moment situations you find yourself in, but you can control what you think about and what you give your attention to.
    • Every accomplishment and thing of beauty comes about because somebody believed in somebody. Believe in those around you. Believe in the best of them to see more of it.
    • And believe in yourself and your ability to keep your focus on what you enjoy and want to see more of…then look for it.

  • Powerful People: Relationships and Going with the Flow

    As you are walking around town working to get stuff done, did you know that it’s not so much what you say or how you say it but how you vibe that determines how your interactions with others will go? People are tremendously perceptive. Many are experts in body language and decoding a vibe, and they don’t even know it. You can be certain that others sense your vibe well before they can even make a logical argument to explain what they think of you.

    Can you do anything about what others think of you? Should you even try? No, don’t even try, not directly anyway. Taking direct action meant to control what others think of you is a waste of life energy. Instead, use the indirect method by working on your own vibration. Create time and space to focus on feeling good. It doesn’t have to take a lot of time…less than 5 minutes, really. And it doesn’t have to be a big production either. In fact, the simpler and less obtrusive, the better!

    Now some people might think that I’m talking about meditating every day. Meditation is a great way to bump the vibration up for some people. Personally, I find meditation a better tool for quieting mental chatter to get more in touch with intuition and tune in to your higher self. Reaching for the feeling of love and appreciation and the sweetness of life during meditation is a great way to use daily meditation to lift your vibration, too though.

    There are lots of ways to feel your vibrations soar each day. Listening to your favorite music for a few minutes…especially good beat, high flying, enjoy life type songs.

    Getting outdoors is another great way to raise your vibe. Whatever you can do outside that helps you notice the beauty of nature and absorb the majesty of life. You can do an activity like fishing, or hiking, or you could just gaze at the mountains, trees, or oceans for a bit.

    I also like what I call the Leading Questions Game. Think of questions you can ask yourself to get a happy response. Have fun with it. Remember, this is a game. Ask a question, then give yourself a few seconds to come up with something. So you might say, “Who can I appreciate right now?” or “What has been the happiest moment of my life so far?” or “If I felt like a powerful force for good right now, how would I feel.”

    Make it a priority to feel your own vibration soaring for a few minutes each day. Allow the high vibe, make a space for it. Do so, and you will find day-to-day interactions flowing like never before.

    There are powerful people around us all the time. People who can either help us create a new and better story or people who will help us rehash our old story. Relationships are about the potential of the next part of your story. Through your relationships, you become more of who you are. Much of the juice of life comes from interactions with others too.

    Even as we live our lives and have our experiences, we can maintain a fundamental view of others as people with the potential to connect meaningfully with us. Through times of connection, we all learn something new about ourselves. Different teachers and mentors will come into our lives through our relationships.

    It’s human nature to look to others to make us feel good. One of the best feelings ever happens when we look into someone’s eyes as we laugh with them. It’s so easy to appreciate the moment when that happens. But remember, no one else is responsible for how you feel. Would you even want them to be? I don’t care to be that dependent on anyone! I don’t control how others feel, and no one but me controls how I feel.

    You are worthy, and your perspective is valid. You have a unique point of view, and it matters. You matter whether anyone else recognizes that at any moment or not. Do not be dependent on other people’s opinions of you for your own happiness!

    That being said, strive to make appreciation the whole point of your interaction with others. That appreciation will strengthen you, even though, at first glance, it might feel like something you are doing for someone else.