Great news. Dirty Keto is now on Amazon. Go, if you're living in the US, go straight to Amazon and get dirty keto, watch it, rate it and review it. If you're outside of the US, meaning Western Europe or Canada or Mexico, it's not there yet. Don't ask me why. Listen, those people made me put a PG-13 rating on it when there was nothing in it that would have caused that.
But let's get ahead of this thing. Let's watch it, rate it, and review it. Go get Dirty Keto right now and on with the show. Thanks for listening to Vinnie Torterich on NSNG Lifestyle Audio. Welcome to Fitness Confidential one on one. Vinnie Torterich, founder of NSNG, goes long form with top luminaries in the field of health and fitness.
I am in each other, rich folks. Your good intentions have been stolen. But don't worry. I'm here to help you get them back. You may be soft and succulent at the beginning of this process, but hang in there before long you will be lean and mean, guaranteed, just like the woman on the other mic today. Yeah, she, uh, she's been doing this for quite some time. She's a doctor of optometry and you'll go, wait a minute.
She's an eye doctor. What the hell? This woman, this woman figured out a long time ago before, before the days of my buddy Sean Baker walked into my house one day and started saying, Hey man, I'm just eating meat, nothing else. And I said, Hey man, you're nuts. But this woman was doing it before that. And she's got doctor next to her name, just like Sean does.
And we're going to find out a few things about this woman, because I think she's close to my age. She looks a lot younger. But I think we're close to the same age. And she could do something I could never do. She could do cartwheels. Well, I guess she could have babies too. So she could do a couple of things I can do. And I want to find out more about her folks I'm talking about none other than Dr. Lisa Wiederman. How are you doing, Lisa?
I'm great. And I'm so happy to be here. And yeah, so proud at the age of 60. I don't know how old you are, but at the age of 60, I can flip cartwheels. And I often do on the beach because it's just fun and it's just so great to feel good and be in control of a very severe sugar and carb addiction that I suffered most all of my life.
Yeah, you and I have that in common. But I figured out, I figured a long time ago how to get it in check for myself, because when you're our age, the only kind of addiction we've, first off, people when we were young, I'm 62 Lisa, we're close to same age.
When I was young, addiction was either drugs or alcohol and it was shameful, right? Absolutely. It was not talking. It was talked about in high stones, right? It's kind of a way people talk about Donald Trump nowadays. They do it out of the corner. They whisper it out of the corner of their mouth. They'll go, he's a cop.
Right. You should never know the reaction you're going to get. Right. So, you know, you know, think of people nowadays who are supporters of Donald Trump. He's a dropper. He's a alcoholic. He drank. He and they would have interesting things. You know, he bends his elbow a bit. You know, they had cutesy terms for it back then. Yeah, secretive and
Yeah, hidden. Yeah. Gay was like that too. Yeah. You know, you know, my, I would, I grew up in a deep south. No one ever talked about gay people. Right. My grandfather's term for gay people. You know, this man was born in 1918 or so. He called him Sissy's. He's a sissy boy.
He didn't, he didn't understand what it meant. You can't, a guy never went to school. He didn't understand. Right. My mom would say, you know, light in the loafers, helium heels. Right. It was shameful to, if you weren't anything but straight down the middle, when we grew up, you didn't talk about it. It was not talked about.
Um, growing up in the deep south, I did not know anyone who was divorced. Like none of my parents friend, no, they stayed in bad marriages over getting divorced. Right? It just didn't exist. When I got to Tulane,
And all of a sudden, everyone I went to school with did not come from Louisiana, except me. Apparently everyone was from Great Necklunk Island, as they called it, or Shacker Heights over in Ohio, rich Jewish kids. And every one of them would say, my dad and Susan are my mom and in Hank and say, why are you calling your dad Hank? Why are you calling? Oh, that's my second mom. I don't call her mom. She's Susan or he's Hank.
I didn't even understand how that worked because the only thing I knew about mixed marriages when I was a kid came from the Brady bunch. And they called him dad and her mom. And that was it. So you can imagine my confusion getting to college and going, yeah, my dad and in Susan and coming to visit us. You call your mom Susan? Like I couldn't wrap my head around it.
I still looked at divorce as shameful. I had friends who I knew were gay and they couldn't say they were gay. I knew alcoholics. Couldn't call him out. He just bends his elbow a little too much. He, you know, a couple of pops, right? You know, women wear glasses. What happened? Oh, she fell down the staircase every week. And how is she just hitting her eyes on the way down, right?
All of these things were buried, Lisa. So you can imagine people like you and me who loved sugar. We weren't even, I mean, it was embarrassing that that was a problem. Right? And like you don't think of it as a problem, because as a kid, I jump on my bike with my friends. We were right down to the five and 10 and get pixie sticks and Jolly ranchers and everlasting Godstoppers and
you know, on and on, it was just what you did. And it, I don't know, then I, then I got an easy bake oven. And next thing I know, I'm, you know, making too many cakes. And I'm glad you're really, I'm really glad you're bringing this up this way because I've, I've really said that through all those years of suffering this, I had no clue, didn't realize that it was really actually an addiction.
And as time goes on and as all addictions do, they worsen over time, which then makes the behavior much more secretive. Nobody wants to binge in front of somebody, right? So it becomes very isolating and very secretive and confusing because what the heck? I'm not an alcoholic. I'm not a drug addict, but I was a drug addict. I was still getting the same dopamine hit and had no clue. So that
ends up being, though, through many years now of me totally being in the know of this severe addiction and understanding that I cannot moderate. There's no such thing as eating half of a cupcake in my book, right? That just doesn't happen. And so when I talk about this, and the reason why I feel this is
the most difficult addiction to overcome is because it's so normalized. Everybody around you, your friends, your family, your coworkers, where we go and what do we have and what are we eating? Everything centers around food, whether it's family holiday traditions or friends that you always go out to certain restaurants or the tailgating or it's food, food, food, and it's our addiction thrown in our face on a very repetitive basis.
without the knowledge where people say, well, what do you mean? You're not going to eat chocolate the rest of your life. What, how, I don't get it. Like why? And yeah, I say, I, I can, I just choose not to, because I know I can't moderate. And yeah, it's a, it's a big problem. Yeah, like I said, this shows several times, you know, famously said to my friend, Dr. Drew, either on his podcast or on this podcast, I was like, yeah, you know, they're showing how,
Sugar lights up the hypothalamus the same way cocaine does, and he's an addiction specialist, and he sprung back here as well, then he, not exactly the same because cocaine does this, that, and the other thing, and the rewards, but he's doing all this doctor talking, I just let him go for a bit. I said, yeah, but Dr. Drew, we're not giving cocaine to kids at birthday parties, right? We're not telling kids that this is how you celebrate.
right? We're giving them sugar to celebrate. So as you just said, it normalizes the crap out of it. So that when you find out you have a problem, it's shameful because there's no. Carp addiction play that there was a Ohio and some of these different things that that are bullshit where they they they make it worse for people. I had friends that went to a Ohio and some of these different
you know, 12 step programs for sugar, but it's so weird, right? It's not like Alcoholics Anonymous or any of the ones that, you know, so it is a weird thing because it's everywhere all the time, right? And for someone like me who I can actually probably say, if I was being honest with myself and usually I'm not dishonest with myself, you know, I was an exercise believing
Right. If, if you're going to be an ultra cyclist, of course you're not going to get fat from having too much sugar. It's not a fact. The only thing you have on the bike is what? Oh, more sugar, more dextrose. Right. Yeah. And to the point where you start throwing it up, because even if you're on the bike eating that crap all day, at some point your stomach goes fucking them out. Right. I can't handle what you're, you know, I can't, I'm not picking up what you're putting down anymore. Right. Yeah. But I was at, you know,
So if you're not getting fat from it, you see there's no telltales. You don't have telltales, right? Um, I was good friends with the, um, you might not know who, who these women are, but I could talk about them because they wrote about it in a book, the Barbie twins. Do you remember the Barbie twins? No, Shane and see a Barbie. They, they were one of two times when Playboy had to go back into a double printing on the same month from their cover story.
These women had incredible bodies. They were built like Barbie dolls. Their name was really Barbie, B-A-R-B-I. They were identical twins and they were gorgeous, right? They were exercise, bulimics and regular bulimics. They, they binged and purged all the time, right? And they were very ashamed of who they were. Yeah. Right.
And to the point where they want to go run the stairs in Santa Monica and the famous stairs, that whole area just burned, you know, right there is right there on the edge of the palisades. You know, I remember Shane calling me out one night, one in the morning, Hey, can you meet me out of the stairs? Because she didn't want to go out there and run into a rapist or, you know, a group of coyotes that could show up real coyotes, not people coming across the border. You know,
Can you come out there and run the stairs with me? I have two anymore. Can you imagine being that addicted to sugar and then having to get rid of it because you're ashamed because you have to look a certain way because your job depends on you looking a certain way. You know, I didn't just have the problem. I was around people with the problem and my clients who had to look a certain way. Can you imagine being in Hollywood?
And your life depends on you looking a certain way, right? And having to go through your problem with sugar and then purge somehow. I mean, it doesn't get any sicker than that. Yet we don't look at it that way, right? So and so actors must be healthy. So and so model must be healthy. Look at them. Look how lean they are. I wish I could be like that person, that unattainable person.
You ever feel like that in your life, Lisa? Yeah, I mean, I was a perfectionist. And I grew up in a family where, yeah, it was just normal to have dessert after dinner. And I look forward to it. And I'm going to say, here's one of the things with what you're bringing up here with the purging, whether it's exercise bulimia or full-on bulimia.
At that point, it becomes even more difficult to overcome this addiction, because I'll tell you, I suffered from bulimia for most of my life. And you don't wear your addiction with that, with either of those types of bulimia, right? Whereas, you know, so alcoholics obviously is sort of where their addiction, they eventually get into trouble or people realize their behaviors and, you know,
heroin addicts, certainly. And with food addiction, some people wear their addiction in obesity. And others of us figure another way out. And it makes it even more difficult to overcome because we're not wearing our addiction. And it's even more secretive. But it's no less humiliating and no less debilitating to our lives.
And yeah, there's a big pressure in general to, I want to say to be perfect, but you know, you want to look good and you want to come across and give the impression that you've got your act together.
And again, it makes it that much more difficult to overcome. And like we were talking about as it being so normalized, I say, you can't even walk into Home Depot to buy a hammer without M&Ms and Reese's and the latest crushed potato chips inside the Reese's peanut butter cups in front of you. And there's just no
There's no understanding on the part of people who cannot comprehend what sugar addiction is like. And I don't know what your thoughts are on it as far as a spectrum of severity of this type of situation. But I really do think that there is, you know, there's a big difference between, you know, sitting on the couch and eating yourself until you get sick.
and people who are just kind of occasionally binging, but it's seriously damaging to our health.
And I call it slow suicide because with this type of addiction, you're not shooting up and potentially overdosing and dying the next day. You're not drinking yourself to a blackout and killing yourself in a car wreck kind of thing. With this, it is literally a type of slow suicide because eventually it just catches up with you and damages your health.
Yeah and you know it's funny you should bring up you brought up Home Depot I was in Lowe's just yesterday about 24 hours ago from right now and I had to buy a big sheet of foam core I'm one of my years resolutions is I'm I'm learning how to do model trains so I had to buy a big four by eight sheet of foam core and some wood to build this frame and holding
So I'm pushing the big court, you know, the big cart and I have to go in that area. And there were two construction style guys in front of me. And I happen to notice these guys are not together, right? They're standing in line with their big cart. And I noticed the guy in the first spot had two cokes. He was drinking from a bottle of Coke and he had another Coke. And my first question was,
Did he walk in here with two cokes? Where, where are cokes in lows? Right? Because my brain doesn't go to that. Right? My brain was, where's the foam core? I want to get in and out. And then the guy behind him had a soft drink to a different soft drink of some sort and a bag of something. Both of these guys were overweight, not by a little bit, by a lot.
And I'm sitting there looking at it. And then I looked and there it was off to the side. There was a thing where you could open the thing, take all the cokes you want, just check them out as you go through. And a wall of sugar and junk, right? I'm talking everything from chips to like gummy worms. Yeah, it was having your drug dealer, not only on every corner, but at every checkout counter. Out of lows. I mean, the people in lows, you figure,
especially in this area where the guys go through with the big things because they're pushing a lot of plywood out of there and everything else. You think they might have it on the other side of Lowe's where, you know, you do it yourself as they're doing the, you know, let me go find a piece of you pipe because I'm going to fix my plumbing myself or whatever. No, these are construction guys. These are got on that end, they got it everywhere, right? It's everywhere.
I was just, I was blown away because I was like, where did this go? Each person in front of me had stuff with them. Where did it come from? And then I noticed it was over here. It was right off to the left there. I was just in staples yesterday.
And I was blown away by they practically have an aisle of food and crap and snacks. And I guess it's because they think people are purchasing to have in the back break room at the office. And we can talk about that too, because at the practices that I work, of course, there's the break room, the lunch room. And there was always, always junk. There's always massive amount of food.
It's like you can't escape it when, when you have this issue. Um, like I said, you know, Home Depot, Lowe's staples, even, even a retail store like Macy's where you're, you're online just to buy, you know, an outfit and you get up to the counter and they've got a display of different varieties of Godiva chocolate. Yeah. You know, it's, it's just like, well, we'll just let, we'll just keep making money on people who need to get their hit, get their facts.
And again, the difference is when we were kids, not that long ago, right? What did they have that checkout? They had tobacco products back when people were healthier because when you have a tobacco product there, you're going to either go, I'm a smoker or I'm not a smoker, right? Those are the two options. And everyone knew smokers were not healthy.
Right. We didn't have to, you know, people RJ Reynolds lied to us for years. I think everyone kind of knew that smoking was not healthy for you even before you had to put the surgeon general's warning on cigarettes. Right. We all inherently knew this was a bad idea. No one ever had to tell me cigarettes were bad. I knew that when I was a kid. Right. So we didn't think bazooka, bubblegum was bad.
Right. But you know, they, you're right. They had some bazooka. They might have had jolly ranchers. They had a few things where you could pick up a penny candy at the thing. And it was a sometime treat. It wasn't the wall that exists there now of everything from hoe hoes to, like I said, gummy worms to twizzlers,
to chips and Funyuns. I'm making up shit now, but you had the ever everlasting gobstoppers too. You mentioned that. And I've never heard. I've never heard that candy before. Where? What is that? Yeah, it's just like, it's like a jawbreaker, basically, but you suck on it and all the different flavors and layers of the hard sugar come about. And then I think on the on the center of it, there might have been gum or some other hard
I don't know. I don't even remember. It's just all I remember was just a big onslaught of sugar, you know. Never heard of that before in my life. What was the one? It was folks, by the way, Lisa and I have a mutual friend, my best friend, one, Mr. Don Coddington. Don Coddington's Friday, five o'clock.
Um, Don told me of one, one time and I was like, I don't know what that is. And he goes, uh, don't, don't mess with me. You know what that is. I was like, I've never heard of turns out it was like an East coast. And I can't remember what it is now. A devil dog. Do you know what a devil dog is? Yeah. The first time he said devil dog, I thought he was making it up.
Oh, no. And it turns out there's something called the Devil Dog on the East Coast. It's like as common as a Twinkie. Never. Still to this day, I've never seen one or had one. Wow. Yeah, no Devil Dogs in my life. But an ever ending gobshopper. That sounds like a lasting gobshopper. Yeah, just as a kind of a Jawbreaker thing that really takes a very long time to go from this big
big ball down all the way. You could suck on it for a couple of days, I guess. This show just went double ax. It almost sounds like a group that would open up for the Ramones back in the 70s. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. The everlasting Godstoppers opened up for Joy Ramone in the game. Yeah. I thought you were making that up the first time you said it. Yeah, no. You know, the most egregious one. And I've talked about this over the years.
When I've had people that have come to me and they say, you know, I want to run a marathon and I'll put together, this is way back when I used to do this. I put together a marathon plan for them, right? And I would have to tell them, listen, I get that you're doing this to be virtuous and to challenge yourself and it's going to take a long time because I know you've run a 5k and a 10k and now we have to get you to half marathon and then marathon.
We need to inch you up, but here's the problem. You're going to find yourself at a running store. And when you get to check out, there's going to be the wall of sugar. And they're going to explain to you why you need all of these crappy foods in your body. There's going to be powders. There's going to be gels. There's going to be goops. It's all crap. None of it is good. I know you think you're going to run this and you're going to be a sinewy as the guy that showed up from Kenya.
Number one, that's not going to happen. You're white. Number two, you're going to probably show up at the starting line heavier than you are now because they're going to keep explaining to you how you need to carve up before every training room run in every race. So stay away from the wall of sugar. That's the first thing I would have to explain to people whenever they got into running, which is sad. It is sad. And, you know, it was interesting when I
First found about this no-carb, zero-carb way of life. It was through a group I happened to find back in 2009, 16 years ago on the internet before Facebook and Instagram and YouTube. And Charles Washington and a group of people came off of a, they got kicked out of a low-carb group because they were just doing this zero-carb thing.
And he was a runner. He ran half marathons.
As a couple of years went on as I was doing this carnivore way of life, I just decided after not running my entire life, I was gonna run a half marathon. And it was totally fueled by basically rib eyes and bacon, not a single bit of carb. And it's just really interesting that to understand more and more about the physiology that we don't need carbs to run. And I did a sub two half marathon, my very first one. I was pretty proud of it.
You know, you came on to coronavore really early for internet early. I remember the first time I heard about eating mostly meat and a lot of bacon and it was in the 1970s. And I heard about this group, this longevity group where everyone was trying to lift past 100. And they figured out that if you just stopped eating anything processed and more so,
mostly animal protein. And even more so, not much in the dairy end of animal protein. They were talking eggs, all the fat you wanted. And they also, this is another part of what they were talking about for longevity back then. Don't eat a whole lot. And if you're eating enough animal fat, you don't have to eat a whole lot.
And they talked about how you wouldn't be hungry anymore. You know, I was like looking into the stuff back then. Now, I wasn't interested in doing any of it because I was an athlete and I was trying to pack on as much muscle as I could. But I thought what they were talking about was interesting at the very least. And then when I got to college and started looking into the stuff and started playing around with it, it was
It was crazy to me around, listen, I don't know if you were looking at this back in 1983, 84. But, you know, that's when we had this big, overeat, carb phase. And the first time I saw it happening, I was, I used to go up to Aspen every summer to train people. And it was the early days of me training people and say, mm, 84 somewhere around there. Everybody was,
reading this book, eat to win. Do you remember this book by Dr. Robert Haas? Eat to win, eat to win, eat to win. So I get a copy of this book. It was already like five people are ready. It was all kind of frayed up. It was a paperback version. I read eat to win. And I thought I was reading the onion. You're familiar with the onion or mad magazine? Yeah. I was like, wait a minute.
This is a joke, right? This guy, he literally put the words in there. It was the first time I heard it. Fat burns in a flame of carbohydrates. So the whole theory was, if you never ate fat, you couldn't get fat. And if you ate carbohydrates, your body would have to pull fat from your body to fuel your body. And my question was, where does it pull protein from?
Right? But nobody would know, Vinny, you get skinny, eat like this. You get skinny and say, no, I think my great grandmother from the old country who had no education will tell you if you eat pasta, you will get fat. But it didn't matter. There was a place plopped right there and right in the middle of Aspen called Metzalunas. There was two Metzalunas. There was another one in Brentwood that became famous because OJ Simpson's wife ate there.
and then was murdered about an hour later, along with a waiter who worked at that same company, right? They never caught, they never caught the murderer to this day that murder has never been solved. At any rate, there was a Metzalunas in the middle of Aspen, and this is where all of these rich celebrities, I was like, am I living in Bizarro world? My great grandmother knows this, knows this is not the truth.
They were just serving mounds of pasta. Yeah, great grandma knows to cook in pork lard. Yeah, the whole thing was crazy, Lisa. I couldn't believe what was and now was the beginning of everyone going, Oh, no, if you don't eat fat, you can't get fat. Yet that was around the time when we all started getting fat, right?
Yeah, I know it well. I did the rice cakes and pasta. There's no fat and pasta, right? So I'd have the bowl of angel hair and yeah, everything was low fat and margarine instead of butter. And it's horrible, just horrible to think back to what was the message, the mainstream media message back then.
So in 2009, you happened onto this guy, Charles Washington, you said? Yeah. OK. Zeroing in on health group. OK. And he was saying zero carbs. Yeah. So basically, they were a group that were doing Atkins, the induction phase of Atkins. Really, the first two weeks, supposedly, of the literal Atkins diet is
carnivore, it's, you know, eggs and bacon and fat and butter. And they were all saying, you know, they did so well on it. Why do we have to quote, unquote, climb the car bladder and start putting weight back on and start having cravings again? And then they were doing research like Villamar Steffenson and Fat of the Land and not by Brett alone. And we were in there kind of really
bouncing ideas off each other. Amber O'Hern was in that original group. So there was quite a few intellectuals in there that were not, including myself, not taking this lightly. I thought, gosh, this seems weird, eating meat and drinking water.
OK, is this healthy? And there's no studies, obviously. But then, you know, there were some significant studies. And Stanley, the bear, Stanley, had been doing it for, I don't know, 40 years. He was the sound man for Grateful Dead, right? And he was basically a carnivore. And yeah, so that was my...
came into that because as I was reading people's journals when I came across that forum, as I was surfing the internet, as I diligently did to try to get an answer out of my misery, yeah, there was people in there resolving them, reversing diabetes, reversing depression and anxiety, reversing Crohn's disease, reversing severe arthritis. And then there was also, I was reading these journals, there was two women in there that basically reversed their disorder reading.
And I was all ears at that point. And I just jumped in. That was March 9, 2009. And I started then understanding and realizing that this really was an addiction. And carbs are not essential. And so you're kidding me. I just now I just don't eat them. And now I feel amazing. And I've lost the cravings. Yeah. Our journeys are not dissimilar.
I cheated a lot because, you know, with my clientele, what I did was I just kept them very low carb, right? If Hollywood handed me someone says, this woman just had a baby, we need to get her back on a red carpet and six weeks, just go do it. I wrote about it in my book, Fitness Confidential, just grab them and
just hike them up and down the Santa Monica mountains, that whole area that just burned and just take them off of all carbs. Right. And, you know, I would kind of have to kind of like, you know, getting someone off of heroin. I kind of have to babysit them for the first few days, right? Until they got detox. Yeah, the detox. Yeah. And then they, they would get it and they, they would hang on and look amazing. And everyone would always say to me, well, I guess doing this for six weeks won't kill me.
right? I won't die from, you know, eating too much bacon in six weeks. But when you bring up Atkins, you know, Atkins learned about doing this from a couple of his patients who happened upon the letters, the letter on carculants, right? Yeah, they're bunting, right? Yeah, yeah, banding. And so they
They read the letter of carpalance and then Atkins had the wherewithal to go. What are you guys doing again? Because most doctors don't want to hear about what you're doing, right? They don't have time. They don't care. Um, but he was like, wait, you guys are doing what? This letter of carpalance. So he reads the letter of carpalance and he goes, Oh my God. So he tries, he tries it on a few more patients. Next thing you know, he's writing the book.
But unfortunately, what I think, and this is only my theory, Lisa, the reason the induction period was only two weeks was because they figured that's about all you can get people to do. And then people who wanted to lose weight would just do the two weeks over and over and over because they knew that as soon as you started adding carbs back in, you went right. So the first two weeks, you would lose all the water weight. You might lose 15, 20 pounds if you were fat enough to lose that much.
And then after that, you would just slowly go back, right? The idea was always, you gotta just do this and then you can handle it and you can control it after that. My question was always, why can't we do this all the time? Body builders, famously, would look good for one day. Rest of the year, if you saw what they look like in Gold's Gym, all the famous guys, you barely recognize them.
right? Because they're into the pizza then. Oh, they would eat because bodybuilders will tell you, we like to carve out because our bodies need more insulin to build muscle and all these things that are literally not true. But then you look at guys that look good all the time. One Vince Duranda, right? Who who famously ate if depending on who you asked between 12 and 36 eggs every day, right?
Vince Durand looked good. Vince Durand looked ripped. He could take a shirt off at any time. And he looked right. I was good friends with Mickey Hargate, one of the first Mr. Olympia's long before steroids were invented by Dr. Goldman. These guys looked awesome. You know, he and I talked a lot about it. It's like, what did you guys eat in the early 1950s?
They all ate with Steve Reeves ate. Now, those guys were all genetic freaks. But what were they eating? They were eating steak and eggs, period. That's how before there were steroids, that's what you ate to put on a lot of muscle, as long as you worked out hard enough to stimulate that muscle and make it grow, right?
If you look at those guys, you look at Vince DeRonda, you look at Mickey Hargate, you look at Steve Reeves, and I can go down the line of all the guys before the steroid era, these guys looked great all the time, not just on competition day. At some point, those guys got into, we need to carve up because we need these carbs for energy, right? And that's still what they think in the bodybuilding world today, that you can only look good on one day.
Right. But of course we have more of these guys dying now more than ever. Yeah, which is a crazy thing, but they're taking so many drugs. It's, it's hard to know what's doing what. Right. Yeah, we don't know anymore. And I, you know, it's funny when you hear so many people that say, Oh, yeah, I did that Atkins thing. I lost a lot of weight, but I put it all back on. Well,
Yeah, of course, unless you continue to do what you did to drop the weight, you're going to go back to look in the way you did when you ate the way you previously ate. And people, well, so this is really kind of the story of why I pretty much came out in social media, because it's not such a comfortable thing to be vulnerable and discuss these kind of
you know, embarrassing, humiliating, secretive kind of addictions and habits, but I felt if I could just help one person out of the misery that I lived, it's all worth it. And when Dr. Baker went on Joe Rogan and I started reading some of the comments, so this was about, I don't know, five years ago, people would write in there, oh, that's all well and good until you die of a heart attack, or that's great, but you can't possibly think that this is sustainable.
And I was calling raising my hand then because I was about 11 years at that point. And I, you know, put in some comments on my it absolutely is sustainable and.
You know, people say, oh, I get so bored. I could never do that. That's so boring. I'm like, you know what's boring? Boring is standing online in the pharmacy for medication. And boring is sitting in the waiting room of your doctor's office. That's boring to me. But eating a proper, you know, human diet and ancestrally appropriate diet, that has so much variety. Even when you pair it down to ruminant meat, salt, and water, if you're doing the Michaela Peterson lion diet,
There's so many different varieties of, you know, flanking ribs and ribeye and, you know, New York strip and Chuck roast and you could just go on and on. Ox tail and then go onto the lamb and the lamb chops and braised lamb. And it's, it's not boring. You know, it, it's all in your, in your mindset and what you've actually decided what is or is not healthy to put in your body.
I find that when people talk about food and they say it's boring, my thing is always you shouldn't be looking at food as entertainment. If you're looking at your food for entertainment, you got a different problem. Right. It's almost the same as people that walk around the cell phone in their hand all day, just staring at the cell phones like
You need to get a life. You need to put the phone down. Oh, but I need it to for directions. How did we find our way around before the cell phone? We all found our way around, right? And the galley, exactly, or the Thomas guide or whatever you had to have. We didn't, you know, people don't know where they're going anymore. We're looking at phones. We're using food as entertainment. It shouldn't be that way.
food assessments, right? Sure, it should taste good. You want it to be flavorful and everything else. But, you know, if you can't make it through a Lowe's or a Home Depot without buying something, without buying sugar of some sort, while you're waiting and you're guzzling it in line, you know, when it becomes that mindless, we got a real problem, right? We got a real problem. So you start doing this, you start raising your hand.
and going, look, I'm over here doing this. When do you decide to basically hang your shingle out and go, I'm gonna see if I can help people? Because when you do that, Lisa, I mean, you're a doctor, you have a practice and everything else. Do you have partners? Are they okay with it? How does all that work? Yeah, that's a big, complicating situation because now I am so passionate
understanding now about root cause healing. And I was taught through school, of course, you get the symptoms, you take the case history, and you prescribe the appropriate drug. And that's not what I want to do anymore. I don't want to mask a symptom. I don't want to treat a symptom. I want to find out why your eyes are dry. I want to understand why you're getting macular degeneration or cataracts.
And that put me into a lot of hot water because now I'm not practicing standard of care. And it's not appropriate for an eye doctor to talk nutritional interventions. And so it just came about that. Yeah, it was really frustrating at that point because I started seeing that I was not going to be able
to bite my tongue. When I had a diabetic in my chair and this patient is now presenting with bleeding in their eye and I show them on the computer because I've just taken a photo of the inside and here's your retina. These are called dot and blot hemorrhages you have in here. You've got the starts, it's called background diabetic retinopathy and you can go blind from this.
They're like, oh, gosh, Doc, what do I need to do? My doctor said my A1C was pretty good. Well, why? Because he doubled up on your metformin drug, right, to artificially bring this blood number to where it seemed medically acceptable, but it's still doing damage in your body and you can reverse this.
Oh, no, no, no. My doctor said, I'll be diabetic for the rest of my life. I said, no, no, no. You will be intolerant of carbohydrates for the rest of your life, but you won't be, you don't need to be diabetic. And some of it, some people took to it and came back six months later for their follow up and literally hugged me, told me how much weight they lost, told me their doctors now got them on half the medication and it was wonderful.
And the other half of people, Vinny, I'm sure you probably wouldn't find this too surprising, but the reactions that you can get when people say, well, what do I got to do? I said, well, you're going to eliminate rice and pasta and bread and wine. Oh, no, no, no, no doc. I'm Italian. I can't do that. Yeah. I can't do that. And you would have thought I told them they needed to chop the right arm off. And I said, OK, well, we'll see you in six months and we'll monitor the bleeding.
You know, and it, you know, that's, that's hard for me to wrap my brain around. It really is, but everybody comes to this in a different way. And I say, you know, you have to have your why that makes you cry that really has you motivated to say, I need to do something. I want to do something. I want to have a good quality of life going forward. And so many people think that
aging means arthritis, cancer, diabetes, dementia. No, it doesn't actually. Our bodies are here to be healthy and evolve. We have to remove the toxins and
You know, I say equally important is spending time out in nature in the sunshine. We've been totally wrongly convinced that the sun is harmful and the sun causes cancer and the sun causes cataracts. And I'm going to say that it absolutely does not and it's the opposite. You know, you need to really spend time out in the sun and less time
in front of artificial light. So, you know, we have this Allen, A-L-A-N, artificial lights at night, which is very detrimental to our health because it's detrimental to our sleep and to many processes in our body. So, I say equally important of, you know, getting to eliminating sugars and grains and processed foods is, you know, I say that's junk food we get out. We need to get junk light out, which means television, laptop,
phones, tablets, and all the fluorescent and LED bulbs. They're not natural to us as animals. We need to be in front of sunlight, moonlight, firelight, and candlelight. That's what is natural to our bodies. And we're doing so many things now that are so unnatural to us as organisms. And living in, you know, I'm still not at the point where I
have figured out either a fair day cage or turning my Wi-Fi off at night. And I don't have ethernet connections. I do use Wi-Fi. But I'm going further and further into more and more things that are so unnatural to us because we were not meant to. The rate of heart attacks is increasing. Cancer is increasing, right? There's got to be more of a reason than just sugar and grains.
Yeah, you know, I've had specialists after specialists come on and say, turn off the computers, get off of everything. And I've actually, I tell people, if you look at a computer screen or a phone right before you go to bed,
And then you turn it off to turn the lights out. Close your eyes. You'll see a strobing in your, you know, your brain will still be strobing because those are strobing lights that we're watching all the time. There's a flicker rate that you cannot perceive. Right. But is there, right? Yeah. And your brain is picking it up and you'll close your eyes and you'll see the flickering and
That's why whenever I'm not doing these podcasts, I do not look at phones all day long and people. Oh, well, OK, Grand Torino. OK, you're better than us. It's like, no, I'm not going to waste my life doing this stuff, right? Yeah. And it's just the way it is. You're much better off making trains. Yeah, that's why I'm building a train two years ago. I built the kayak, right? Every year I got to find something to do to keep me away from
falling into these things, right? And I suggest people, other people find things to do. It might be whittling. I don't give a fuck what it is. Go figure it out. Go do something, right? It drives me nuts that we're not doing any of it. And it's a problem. It's funny where you mentioned sunlight. I just did a whole Wednesday podcast that's going to probably come out right before this show comes out next week, where
you know, someone jumped on me. A lot of people jumped on me because I just happened to mention that, you know, it's a bad idea to put sunscreen all over your body. And even my neighbor was walking on the street and she goes, I got a bone to pick because I have cancer on my lip and I got sunscreen. I'm like, look, you know, I got to tell you, I'm sorry, you got the sun. You know, you got the cancer and you got this thing, you know, you know, she had the
But you can't put this chemical in your body on the biggest organ of your body and expect it to not cause other problems. At least I was yelling about this in 1989. I had a radio show back then.
And I was talking about, because before that, nobody was putting sunscreen on. Sunscreen kind of started coming around. Before that, everybody was just putting on oil to make the sun magnify on their skin. Right. Right. Our whole generation was trying to get as dark and as sun as blistered as possible. And then all of a sudden it's like, no, no, the sun is now bad.
And what have we had since then? Nothing but more and more and more. An exponential increase in melanoma. Yeah. All that sunscreen. I don't even want to be downwind from somebody spraying that toxic crap on when, you know, I'm near them on the beach. I, I, and, and actually Vinny, there's, I, I've really gotten more into trying to understand that because, you know, I, I always just like you, you get people say, oh,
No, you don't understand my dad died of skin melanoma and blah, blah, blah, and I'm whatever. But, you know, it's really important to really think about the chemical that is going on to the largest organ. The skin is the largest organ of your body and it absorbs into your bloodstream. So they've done it. They did a study where on one day, one application,
of that oxybenzone, you know, the standard copper tone, banana boat, whatever sunscreen, right? One application, one week later, they could still detect it in that person's blood. That's crazy because we just talked about oxybenzone on the show. And we talked about the skin being the largest organ in the body and it absorbs everything.
Think about it, folks. We get out vitamin D from the sun. The number one source, vitamin D is from your skin, taking it in, changing and then turning it into vitamin D. That's what our skin does. We're not supposed to be putting these chemicals all over it. And we start slathering babies like doggy dip. We just dip them in the stuff.
from the time they're born thinking we're doing the right thing. And I'm sitting there going, and we can't figure out why these kids have every effing allergy known to man. I mean, think about it. Nobody was allergic to a peanut when we were a kid. Did you know? Did you know? We had no no peanut tables and all that stuff. Someone would have said to you in 1975, people will become allergic to peanut butter.
You wouldn't have stopped laughing and say, what are you talking about? It's like, no, people are going to be so weak. We're going to make the human race so weak that even opening a jar of peanut. If you get on an airplane and they hand peanuts out the dust from those peanuts,
can screw up the guy back in seat number 87. He could die on that plane. He could go into anaphylactic shot. You want to say, get the hell out of here. What are you talking about? I always handed out packets of peanut on the airplanes. Yeah. All of a sudden, when I first started flying, the first thing that happened when we got to altitude, everybody had a cigarette in their hand or the airlines used to hand out cigars.
Can you imagine being on a plane now with one person smoking a cigar that whole plane would turn into a group of carons yelling their brains. It just yelling, oh my God, we're going to die. One person smoking a cigar. Oh my God. They would land the plane somewhere in the desert. They would have, you know, you know, agents come in and haul the guy off. People, they used to hand them out, right?
Now, now you open a bag of peanuts and the guy back in seat number 75 is going to go into anaphylactic shock. This is how weak we've become people. And there's a reason for it, right? There's a reason for it. We got to get ahead of this because we're not going in a good direction. Let's say you, Lisa. Yeah, I mean, you know, there's a there's a lower
cancer rate closer to the equator. I mean, you have to think logically about these things. And blocking the sun is one of the worst things you can do. And I know I am one of a very, very rare, rare few eye doctors
who will try to convince you to not wear sunglasses. That was all my list of things to ask you. Hang on to that for just a second, folks. I've been wanting to ask an eye specialist about this for a long time. Lisa, hang on to that, folks. Villa Capelli olive oil is the best olive oil on the planet. Now, there are two reasons I'm telling you that. Number one, they pay me to say that.
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will be right back. All right, Lisa, I the one question I wanted to ask you not about cornivore or anything else was I tried to wear sunglasses as little as possible because I always feel like now I've been wearing them here recently a pretty good bit because we have snow on the ground, right?
And when there's snow on the ground, you have the bright light coming up and this and that I'm trying to drive around is better to have on some shades. But by and large, I don't wear sunglasses hardly ever. What's the news about the sunlight hitting your eyes and what sunglasses can do to ruin that? Yeah. Well, so first, let's talk about in the car, perfectly fine to wear
sunglasses because the windshield is blocking the beneficial wavelengths anyway. Okay, so you might as well get rid of the glare and feel like you're safer driving, right? And likewise, you know, I'm not telling you here, let's be stupid. We're not going to be out in the snow and have the reflection or on a beach or on the water and have
amplified reflection of sunlight hitting our eyes because, yeah, we'll be smart about this in a certain scenarios. But I'm going to say very far and few between scenarios of needing to have them on. But having sunglasses on is, well, let me back up a minute. Going through many years of schooling and learning about the eyes and vision, I was
Okay, your eyes, there's rods, there's cones. This is how you see their lens, the cornea vision vision vision. Our eyes are way more complicated than just for vision. There's receptors, neurological receptors, because our eyes are actually connected to our brains. And there's specific receptors in the eyes that have nothing to do with vision.
And it's very important that those receptors get the appropriate signals that they need from the natural sunlight. And that's why it's really important to get early morning sun within the first two hours of the sun rising. It's beneficial in the middle of the day to get some sunlight and also beneficial for the sunset.
you think, just remember, where remarkable organism are just because of the angle of the sun and the different light rays that come at certain times of the day. This is regulating your circadian rhythm. And it's also regulating so many other aspects of mitochondria, the pineal gland, the superchiasmic nucleus, the SCN in the brain. These are all very
receptive to what is coming in through our eyes. So, and I'm going to tell you too, Vinny, those glasses that you're wearing right now, the plastic in them is probably what's called polycarbonate high index plastic because it makes them thinner and lighter and a big selling point for the optician to sell this type of glasses. They block as much of the beneficial rays as sunglasses.
So for people who wear regular, let's just say clear prescription eyewear, they also need to be very cautious about taking your glasses off and exposing your eyes without glasses. And I'm going to say also without. You cut your mic off. Listen, go back to you said also. I think you said contacts, but go back to that. OK.
So in addition to glasses, contact lenses will also block UV. Why? Because the contact lens companies are trying to market that as a bonus and a benefit. We have UV blocking in the polymer for your eye health, right? Well, guess what? I researched to find out which companies do not put the UV blocker in.
And you have to think no matter what, the best is your bare naked eye facing the sun. And we're not talking about sun gazing and staring for a length of time directly at the sun. We're talking about in the morning, look in the direction of the east, even if it's cloudy, even if it's raining, even if there's buildings or mountains or trees in the way, your eyes are getting exposed to the photons. And it's really important that
We go back to our natural state as animals and do what we would have done. Because when you think about it, we spend about 93% of our time indoors now and we live in a box and then we get in our car box and drive to the office box and then go drive to the store box and then drive back to the home box.
And there's so little time for actually being outside. And there's, you know, we could go on to grounding too, how really beneficial that is. Get your bare feet, not just bare feet, but even your hands. Because, you know, I'm in New Jersey. It's freezing cold out there right now. But if I go on a walk, I will touch
trees, touch leaves, touch things, because I'm not taking my shoes off all the time, even though, although I do go out in the morning and my bare feet and 15 degrees weather. Wow, you're better than me. I can tell you that. So, Lisa, you mentioned, and we've got to go here in a second because they have another podcast starting up. You mentioned my lenses are made of plastic. What has been better of these were glass lenses? Yeah, or you can actually request
CR 39. It's a type of plastic that is different as far as it doesn't block as nearly as much as the polycarbonate. The polycarbonate blocks almost 100%. Like I said, it's really no different than sunglasses as far as the rays. The tint of a sunglass really doesn't do anything other than right easier on your eyes for the glare, but
The tint also is giving an additional message to your brain that it is nighttime. And that's why I'm just going to mention this quick too because this is really an interesting fact. But when you wear sunglasses and you're out on the beach or you're wearing sunglasses and let's say you're out on a boat or whatever, you're much more susceptible to sunburn because without the sunglasses on,
Your brain is getting the message of like, whoo, there is a lot of midday sun coming in here. Let's prep and let's get some melanin going here and let's protect the skin. And then people say, well, I can't do that. My eyes are so sensitive. Well, they're sensitive because you put your sunglasses on the moment you get out the door. Start building up your solar callus. Just stop wearing them for part of the day. And then you'll be able to do it more and more. And next thing you know, you're fine.
Yeah, I'm not big on wearing sunglasses a whole lot. I just do, like I said, whenever I have to, if I'm on a glacier or it's snowy out or, again, on the water or something where you're getting that glare. But yeah, when I first had to start wearing glasses all the time, I said to the guy who, I said, look, can you make them out of glass? And he goes, no, because I shoot competitive legos. You don't want glasses shattering. You might drop them in. Is there a shatter?
Yeah, but I don't shoot with these glasses. I have actual shooting glasses, right? I don't shoot with these, right? So I don't get why they won't do it, but it is a lot heavier and most people end up with the marks on their nose and unhappy with the weight of the glasses. That's one of the big kind of things. I don't care about all that. You know, I don't know, but I it's good to know when I got from my walks, I should take my glasses off more.
Yeah. Yeah. My glasses, my sunglasses, not my sunglasses, because I even have sunglasses that all my sunglasses are prescription and my shooting glasses are all prescription, right, which means I got a gazillion dollars wrapped up in something that every several years they have to go do a re prescription on and cost me that money again. It's crazy. Lisa, tell people where they can find you.
Oh, wow. I'm mainly on Instagram and I have a YouTube channel. I go live. I do a carps over Sunday every Sunday morning and just, you know, chat with like-minded people who are trying to get out of this carb and sugar addiction. I have a membership group where I meet a few times a week and I can, you know, answer questions one-on-one there. The group is small.
And I'm hosting carb sober cruises, carbs over hikes, carbs over ski trips. I'm trying to just gather people together because Vinnie, I'm just finding there's so much value in the community of this and not feeling so unusual for being the person that doesn't, you know, eat and drink all these other things. And it's just really great to be around like minded people who are striving for optimal health. Yeah.
No, absolutely. So, folks, go check out everything Dr. Lisa Widerman is doing. Widerman, and you're always going to say Widerman. Widerman, go check out everything she's doing. Lisa, promise me you'll come back on the show because this has been a great time and I feel like we didn't even scratch the surface. I feel the same way, Vinny. I'd love to. Thanks so much. So, thank you for hanging on because we have to wait for this to upload. Folks,
If you like what's going on, you know what to do, we all go shopping on Amazon. Before you go to Amazon, go to VinnieTrotors.com, click through the banner. It puts coal on the fire, it gets my train down the track, and we can keep the show free for another year. We've been doing this for, I don't know, 2,600 shows, 11, 12 years. Let's keep it going. You guys rate and review this podcast and do all the fun stuff. We were talking about natural light and
Dr. Wiedemann was talking about fire light, sunlight, all the natural lights. And it reminded me of this song. So on behalf of Dr. Lisa Wiedemann, my name is Vinny Todoric, put life into living. And let's do it with this group, Parliament, and their song, Flashlight.
Thank you for listening to Fitness Confidential. Get more information at VinnieTorterHitch.com. Remember to rate and review us on iTunes and follow Vinnie on Instagram and Twitter.