Interview with Rusty Gregory
I was chatting the other day with certified Trainer and Low-Carb coach Rusty Gregory – I put the question to him and asked him to give us his answer on the subject…
Mark: What got you into the low carb way of eating?
Rusty: I’m more of a low carb person and you could probably call my approach a modified paleo. I do dairy but I just eliminated sugar and anything else that raises my blood drastically. All this happened about five years ago. Now when I was being brought up through school, through the education process here, I got an undergraduate degree and a Master’s degree is in Exercise Physiology abut the nutrition courses and all those were basically pushing a low fat, high carbohydrate diet. These give more calories from carbohydrates and therefore, according to that idea, if you find yourself eating too many calories you just cut back on the calories and/or you exercise more to lose weight.
You know that’s what we’ve heard for so long.
So about five years ago – after had heard this for decades – I picked up a book by Gary Taubes – Good Calories, Bad Calories. He wrote this huge book on basically that’s making us fat and sick in this country and of course he went beyond that. Gary went all over the world and looked at various studies and as I learned this, I was like “this makes too much sense”.
It’s like the whole effect of sugar and what it’s doing to our pancreas and the secretion of insulin and the storage then of glucose, the fatty acids into our fat cells that makes us fatter and fatter.
It all made sense.
And as we cut out sugar or those foods, potatoes, rice, pasta, all those types of things, guess what? We lost weight! It just made too much sense.
Here in the United States back in like 1965 – Taubes wrote about a particular medical group that discovered insulin and its effects when you eat sugar and glucose but all that somehow it just got swept underneath the rug and we jumped on this low fat, high carbohydrate diet that has led to all kinds of problems ever since.
It was just the science that made sense to me.
And you know I’ll even take it a step further and I want to be careful when I say the word science because there’s so much bad science in the field of nutrition. They discovered that when you eat sugar your pancreas secretes insulin. It didn’t take studies to show us that, we just observed it, we watched it, we saw it. And once we learned how the body worked there’s really very little refuting it. So that’s what made sense to me.