Level Up Wellness

04/01/2024

Happy April Fools Day! This is your reminder to not be a fool the other 364 days of the year by eating your veggies and getting moving! 🍎🥦🏃‍♂️

04/01/2024

Happy April Fools Day! This is your reminder to not be a fool the other 364 days of the year. 🍎 🥦

10/08/2023

How many time have you heard people dismiss information based on “conflicting evidence”? In all honesty this is only used when people don’t have any idea about how nutrition science works and allows them to place their trust in much less reliable sources. When people distrust nutrition information because of “conflicting evidence”, it just opens them up to accepting whatever aligns with what they already think or want to be true. I don’t think you need a book to tell you that this is not a good way to evaluate information. Even worse is some bad actors in the health sphere use the excuse of “conflicting evidence” to strike doubt into perfectly reasonable people so they can then profit from them by selling them some BS program, diet, supplement, etc. evidence speaks the loudest so a bit of science literacy can go a long way here. Don’t fall for hype. In the meantime, you can follow my page if you’d like. I take it in upon myself to do a lot of the heavy lifting for you. Or not of course, I’m not your parents lol! But again, don’t just trust me outright; ask good and relevant questions and learn the basics of how to interpret science. You owe it to yourself and the rest of the world.

10/04/2023

You can’t complain about results you didn’t get from the time you didn’t put in.

09/29/2023

Gut health has seen a massive surge of popularity in the last few years, and rightfully so! However, just like everything that blows up in the health sphere, there are tons out there spreading less than stellar information about it. Don’t fall for hype or people telling you that eating vegetables or legumes is somehow bad. You may feel much better without these things immediately, but that is likely only because you had compromised gut health before removing such things from your diet. Heal the gut and your body should be able to tolerate most foods. Gut health is really complicated and getting to the bottom of it can take time, effort, social support, and gumption. Meanwhile on the other hand, removing tons of foods from your diet and only eating a select number of foods is incredibly simple advice, hard to mess up, and always works in much the same way! But the thing is that it isn’t actually fixing the problem. In fact, that lower dietary diversity is almost certainly going to increase your gut dysbiosis in the future, but you’ll never know because you simply covered up the problem by removing foods that your body should be able to handle without correcting the existing gut imbalance. This is unfortunate because it leads to people eventually coming back to super healthy foods and having an even worse reaction because they have forced their gut into an even more dysbiotic state. Long story short, there’s no shortcut to health. Health is found in healthful living and there is a LOT of things we can do for gut health that most people don’t fully consider or implement. If you’d like some help with those things, maybe consider shooting me an email at levelupwellness101@gmail.com. Or not, I’m not your parents 😂 Whatever you do, just know you CAN get well! God bless 🙏🏼😁

09/26/2023

If you spend much time online in the heath and wellness sphere then you’ve probably heard the term “anti nutrient” thrown around quite flippantly with very little understanding of the decades of research we have on the compounds. We’ve known about, quote unquote, anti nutrients for decades. So why is it just now getting so much attention? There could be many reasons, but it seems a large one is simply the health and wellness community picking up on the “next thing”. Online health and wellness trends come and go and many times have very little or even nothing to do with actual evidence.

Anti nutrients, and the way they are presented just happen to be a shocking idea to people who simply don’t know better. I mean, “cmon! It seems so obvious that plants are trying to kill us, right?!”. And this emotional response is what allows so many people to use this argument of “anti nutrients” to promote their own “anti nutrient blockers” and other ideologies.

This is what I want to emphasize. Listen to your favorite influencer talk about anti nutrients. When they are talking, take note, are they telling an emotionally engaging narrative to support their points? Or are they providing actual evidence for their claims? Chances are, they heavily rely on storytelling and plausible sounding ideas told with great conviction. I give people this piece of advice all the time. Ready??? ——> When evaluating online health info. An easy way to w**d out lots of garbage is to ask your self one simple question…

“Is it science? Or storytelling?”

When people rely heavily on storytelling, that is a huge red flag that they may believe they have a good understand of the topic, when they actually don’t. It can also mean that they simply don’t know better, or simply haven’t read the research they are citing.

So take it easy and relax about the whole anti nutrient thing. You’re way better off focusing your energy elsewhere.

04/26/2023

A plant based diet may not always be the best business model, but if it’s best for you, isn’t that what really matters? 🍎🥦🍉🍌🥬🥑🫘🫑🥔🍅🥝🍇

04/15/2023

If you’ve been around, then you know that you have nothing to lose from carbs and a whole lot to gain! 🥔🍠🍎🌽🍌

04/11/2023

04/11/2023

Health advice you actually need.
If the nutrition & fitness “experts” you follow:

• Talk about anti nutrients in vegetables
• Seem obsessed with ancestral diets
• Care way too much about seed oils
• Warn about the perils of “too many carbs”
• Tell you not to eat whole grains, fruit, or legumes
• Give their advice without a shirt on

Unfollow them. They don’t know what they’re talking about and might just be full of 💩

03/28/2023

Ready to reverse the root cause of your diabetes for good? Keep reading… Did you know that low carb diets actually cause more insulin resistance? “Hah! Yeah right”, you might say, but the science behind this has been known for decades. It’s the rest of the world that hasn’t caught up to the science. Follow me here for a moment…

Did you know that before the discovery of insulin, diabetes used to be treated with a high carb diet based around oatmeal? Sounds like a good way to kill people right? WRONG! Patients placed on this diet saw large reductions in their insulin resistance and an increase in insulin sensitivity and many peoples lives were saved and prolonged as a result.

Here’s the part that people miss. They will eat healthy whole food carbohydrates without changing their food environment and have a large glucose spike. They all say the same thing, “even healthy carbs spike my sugars!” And then resort to a low carb diet. But this is a mistake. What you need to do is consume these foods in a low fat environment. This isn’t to say fat is all bad, but when living with diabetes you need to know this; high fat and high protein foods increase insulin resistance.

You still probably think it’s crazy right? The thing is that low carb diets WORK! But, they don’t actually get rid of the underlying insulin resistance. What they do is cause your blood sugar levels to normalize. This is good, but it is NOT the ultimate goal. If you have people on a low carb diet eat a meal with plenty of healthy whole food carbs and then measure their insulin response, you will find that they get a large sugar spike because they haven’t addressed the underlying insulin resistance.

Low carb diets have brainwashed our society into thinking that rock stable blood sugar levels is the ultimate sign of success. But this again is a fantasy. An optimally heathy human body is designed to have blood sugar levels that fluctuate a bit after meals, but in diabetes, insulin becomes less effective making these fluctuations worse and eventually leading to the problem we all are so familiar with. Please understand this; high blood sugar is only a SYMPTOM of diabetes. The root cause is insulin resistance. If you choose to eat a low carb diet, you are only treating a symptom of diabetes while the root cause, insulin resistance, continues its smoldering fire underneath the surface.

People can get awesome results from eating low carb, no doubt! But we have to understand that it is a band aid solution that only treats the symptom of high blood sugar. Imagine a life where you can eat 10-20x the amount of carbohydrates you do now and your insulin response is normalized to the point where there aren’t any problems. This a reality that is absolutely achievable. It’s a situation with tons of moving parts and if you aren’t fully informed on all those moving parts, you will end up like everyone else feeding into the low carb paradigm that doesn’t actually address the root cause.

If your ready to turn your health and life around for the better, the door is open! But it feels overwhelming to most. That’s why this page exists. To help you achieve the best results in your health and understand the rock solid science behind this approach.

03/21/2023

Want to ACTUALLY fix the problem of insulin sensitivity once and for all? Address the underlying root cause! Cutting carbs works, however, its a band-aid solution since were not actually fixing our bodies way of metabolizing carbs. What cutting carbs does is manage a “symptom” of insulin resistance, which is high blood sugar. If this works for you and you enjoy it, then great! However, if your really ready to to fix the root cause of your high blood sugar once and for all, its going to require a different approach. Diabetes is not, and never was, a disease of sugar toxicity.

03/19/2023

Sugar is NOT the primary driver of insulin resistance. Yes! you read that correctly. Sugar can sure as heck make insulin resistance worse, but it’s not the primary cause. This may just be one of the most pervasive pieces of health misinformation. Now that wouldn’t be that big of a deal if it weren’t for the fact that millions of people suffer unnecessary consequences from things like diabetes because they never actually understand what it takes to reverse the process in the first place. Low carb diets give quick and amazing results, but they are usually a band-aid solution. When you test for insulin sensitivity, they don’t actually fix the problem. In fact low carb diets can often impair insulin sensitivity. Eating a low carb diet to manage diabetes is akin to managing leaky water pipes by turning off your water supply. It has immediately impressive results, but doesn’t actually fix the problem and can come with downstream side effects.

03/15/2023

Eat ”real” food, not too much, mostly plants. That, more or less is the short answer to the supposedly incredibly complicated question of what we humans should eat in order to be maximally healthy.

-Michael Pollan

03/12/2023

Rich nations like us are so obsessed with protein that many people skip out on the healthiest options for the sake of “protein”. And guess what? Too much protein can actually be a bad thing; YES, you heard that right. Excess protein consumption, particularly from animal based foods, is associated with the loads of chronic health conditions that cause so much of our suffering. Yet here we are continuing to try to shovel more of the stuff in our mouths and suffering the consequences. Here’s the deal, humans need a lot less protein than you think for optimal functioning. 56g/day for men and 46g/day for women; a little more if you are a strength athlete. The longest lived and healthiest populations in the world get around 10% of their calories from protein. The best part? They don’t think a minute about protein, carbs, or fats when considering food options. We have been sold the idea that good health comes from enough of specific nutrients, protein or other, and to a degree that’s true. But health comes from healthful living, not protein. Bottom line, eat enough calories, focus on plant based protein, and forget all the unnecessary details influencers try to sell you on. Your much better off that way.

03/04/2023

Sometimes truth isn’t sexy, and it’s not even easy all of the time. But is it worth it? Absolutely.