Jimmy Moore ~ Low Carb Asset or Liability?

Another timely bump.  Note that this is almost one year after original publication.  In response mostly to this post, Jimmy wrote:  Who Knew Eating Butter Would Be So Controversial?   Seriously?  There's a difference between eating a pat of butter here and there, and putting a half pound on a plate with some eggs and calling that a meal.  

A few weeks ago, I attended the annual Paleof(x) conference in Austin, Texas and it was such a fantastic experience for everyone in the Paleo, primal, low-carb, real food community. Getting to meet so many people who shared their stories about how the work I am doing is changing their lives is incredibly gratifying and makes me appreciate the unique opportunities that this platform affords me. And while it was a positive experience attending this amazing event, the fact is it was also pretty stressful. It’s happy stress, but stress nonetheless. Plus, as you’ve know I’ve been hunkered down banging out my book on ketogenic diets which entails yet another layer of stress all to its own. Isn’t it ironic that the process of writing a book about health could be so unhealthy? Ahhhh, but I’m not complaining because the end result will be so worth all the effort it took to get there. You’ll see.

With the rise in cortisol as of late, it has taken a toll on my ketones (under 1.0 mmol), blood sugar (hovering around 100), and weight (up ~20 pounds since January). I’m not worried about these things because I recognize what’s going on. Once the editing process of Keto Clarity is finished in the next couple of months, I’ll be able to devote time to recovering and getting all of these numbers back in line again.

Note the bolded play of the Martyr Card.  Cortisol.  Damned that hormone and its magical fat hoarding abilities!   

It's like deja vu, all over again ...

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Original Publish Date 4/20/14


Ahh Jimmy Moore.  

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Nobody's going to say it, so I might as well start the conversation on the fact that Jimmy's "nutritional ketosis" regime has stopped working for him.   His appearance at PaleoFX New Age CONference and MLM Expo was surely shocking to some.  It shouldn't have been.  This is Jimmy Moore we're talking about and this is nothing new.  More on that in a bit, but first, how about that picture there on the right.  So proud is Jimmy that he made this his profile picture on Twitter and Facebook.  

My own personal ketogenic rehabilitation plan: 5 local pastured eggs cooked in salted Kerrygold grassfed butter with garlic spices and a whole stick of unsalted Kerrygold grassfed butter.

After returning from last week's Paleo(f)x conference travel from South Carolina to Austin, Texas, my ketones and blood sugar have been going wacky on me. So to help get things back in line again, this is a great go-to meal to push ketone levels higher, blood sugar levels lower. If you're ever struggling with ketone production, try this and see how you do.

Jimmy went on to claim that he's so carb sensitive even leafy greens need to be limited.   This will be Gary Taubes' lasting legacy from GCBC for Dummies, aka Why We Get Fat.  If Jimmy replaced half of that block of butter with an equal amount of calories in not only leafy greens but even a potato or two, he'd be far better off.

For anyone not familiar with Kerrygold, that's an 8 ounce block there = 1 cup of butter.  To go with butter to cook 5 eggs in.  I'm not going to bother with the fancy nutritional break down here, but this meal is roughly 35 grams of protein and a whopping 180g fat.  In one sitting.   This is NOT healthy.  For anyone.  NOBODY in the history of mankind has ever considered a block of butter a meal.  This is beyond insane.  AND HE IS ENCOURAGING OTHERS TO FOLLOW HIS LEAD.

Later in the same day as posting this, Jimmy had this exchange on Twitter:

Yes folks, butter is gathered!   This would be humorous if it weren't so sad and so many still follow this guy's lead.   I don't know what Victory Belt is thinking giving this guy a second book deal, but that he is any sort of leader or mouthpiece for the low carb and paleo communities is a joke.  Worse than Fat Head comedy routine fare at that.

I got in trouble for "persecuting" members of the low carb community when I began calling them out with my Is LC morphing into HAES series.   I stand by that series, and no, no matter how much know-nothings repeat misrepresentations of what I say, I was not mocking ANYONE for their weight. 

Read any LC diet book, beginning with Atkins, and there is the same promise of effortless weight loss consuming tons of food.  It's the insulin stupid!  But these gurus all ran into the same problem everyone else has:  weight is difficult to lose when you have a lot of it to lose, and if you succeed at losing it, it is even more difficult to maintain.  I get that.  I've lived that.  But the low carb community on the whole are poor ambassadors for their "way of eating".  This is when weight loss morphed into "I'm doing this for my health" and *healthy* got attached to low carb all over the place.  

Q:  Why do you care about Jimmy's weight you middle aged woman, you?  (paraphrased from marksuave recent comments here).
A:  I don't.  I care about others who might follow his lead.  I care about their health and that they are making the best choices for themselves based on the facts as we know them, not as folks like Jimmy twist them.

When you read, look, listen and learn from the LC gurus, the health picture is pretty dismal indeed.  Jimmy has been using phrases such as "I'm doing keto for my health not weight loss" since last Fall.  Translation:  "I'm gaining weight again".  In 2012, weighing close to 300 lbs, Jimmy told Abel James he was the healthiest he's ever been.  A year later, as he dipped below the 250 pound mark, readers were treated to a litany of health problems he was suffering that ketosis had resolved.   

Lately he's taken to using the word *thriving* to describe his life on beta hydroxybutyrate.  

Why when I read that does the image of this guy keep popping into my head?

Now I am sorry to point this out, but in most studies involving weight loss on a reasonable low carb diet, metabolic markers do tend to improve.  Not all of them, however, and that cannot be ignored.  But Jimmy Moore may well be the first person to ever lose 80 lbs and see his LDL go up 80 points (or more).   His fasting blood sugars had been creeping into pre-diabetic range for years prior, he required berberine to bring them down.  (This, by the way on the backdrop of an ex low carber and a current one admitting to prediabetic and frank diabetic FBG levels recently).  

And yet ... There he was at PaleoFX last weekend moderating two panels.  One on how to piss off your mainstream doctor and waste thousands of dollars on functional medicine, and the other to clear up the cholesterol confusion only he seems to have.  (Pay no attention to that MLM banner ... run away!!)

Jimmy has taken to loaning out his soapbox -- aka the Livin la Vida Low Carb Show -- to all manner of chiropractors and "nutritionists" practicing medicine without a license on the internet.  This is his "relevance" at this point.  The low carb community gets mad -- boy do they ever -- when anyone points out the circus side show nature of it all.   "That's just Jimmy" pretty much doesn't cut it any more.  That's a dangerous man is what he is. 

So yesterday it was brought to my attention that one of my biggest fans, goes by the name of Eddie, is turning a bit on his friend.  It seems Eddie is not happy with Jimmy's butter stunt.  It makes a mockery of low carb.  Eddie doesn't like me too much because I expose the underbelly of his beloved community.  I also blog on the science here as regards what type 2 diabetes really is.  In his world view, there is only one way to go with that -- VLC and metformin.  It's a myopic view shared by many in the low carb community and they must prevent people from being exposed to folks like me who might show you otherwise through credible scientific references.   But anyway ...

He is upset with this stunt.  Hellooooooo?!!  Where have you been?  

• 2007:  Jimmy gets to 248, goes on Kimkins, loses 35 or so pounds.  Generates a lot of publicity, rakes in a lot of money.  
• 2010:  Jimmy gets to 280, goes on an eggfast -- nothing but eggs and coconut oil and butter for a month.  He reported a partial cholesterol profile at that time.  Not good.
• 2011:  Jimmy gets to 290, goes on a beef, egg and CO "challenge" that quickly morphs to a BECO + chocolate diet.  
• 2011:  After falling off that diet he fasts for 6 days and reaches his pre-KK weight of 248.  This sets him up to regain and he is up to 285 by year's end
• 2012:  Jimmy tops 300 lbs and goes on "nutritional ketosis" experiment for one year.

See a pattern yet Eddie?  These are just the major extreme weight loss stunts.  Each time he has profited through affiliate sales and such as everyone marvels at the great weight loss magic.  I remember your comments on the stalker blog about how he would "show me" ... ummm ... show me what?  That he can lose weight?  He has shown the world that many times over.  He did it once with a low fat diet in 1999 losing 170 lbs then.  The only person Jimmy is impressing these days is the naive newbie or those who hope his shirt tails are long enough to garner them publicity and a chance at the internet prize$.

Have you seen this video? { EDIT 4/20 Awww, he removed the video.  No doubt because it shows him not only eating butter in a manner no normal person would, but because he did that while promoting Julian Bakery bread.  Julian Bakery now makes paleo breads and has co-re-branded as Paleo Inc.  Still very bad man and bakery to Jimmy Moore who hates that Paleo Magazine runs rull back-cover ads for Paleo bread and the like.  Oh oops!  Jimmy runs ads for Paleo Mag ... Awkward! }

Skip to around the 5 minute mark where he makes a "pizza" with *only* half a stick of butter on it.  2009 Eddie, 2009.  Jimmy has been struggling against self-made metabolic demons.  If his metabolism is broken, he did that, and it wasn't even the Little Debbies and Coke from his first 32 years to blame.  Perhaps you missed all the times -- when he allowed comments and discussions on his menus blog -- so many well meaning folks, myself included, encouraged him to moderate his approach, stabilize his weight, stop the "up the fat" and calorie denial that was sabotaging his efforts.  He didn't want any of it.  But you keep on calling me an awful human being when I call charlatans out on their games and do my best to present the full picture.  Remember, I came to this wanting to find reassurances about LC.  You can believe what you want from what others say, but that is the truth.

Good to have you on board calling out the damage he does to what remains of the legitimacy of low carb diets for diabetes and weight loss.  There is some.  It is not a silver bullet though, and there are options for some that LC dogma simply will not accept.  Why do you want to limit the information on which people make their health choices?   Rhetorical question.

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EDIT #2 4/20:

I forgot to add something that came to my attention recently as well.  People who just come across Jimmy's sites, or catch him as a guest on a podcast, see him at an annual CONference, etc., generally have no idea what's really going on.  It is OK to struggle with weight.  It is not OK to be dishonest about it while personally vouching for products and services and profiting off of them.  In the past almost two years Jimmy has encouraged non-diabetic people to waste money on diabetic supplies and it showed in his yearly review of Amazon sales.  Even this tweet is about "rehabilitation" for his ketone levels, no mention that this has not been working for some time for his weight maintenance.  Even if he were 230, it would appear that those 230 lbs are increasingly "bad" -- as in less lean, more fat, and more concentrated abdominal obesity, a situation we can all agree (I hope) is associated with being less rather than more healthy.   But in articles and elsewhere, his ORIGINAL now almost 10 year old weight loss before/afters are still used.

Articles such as this one:  Ketogenic diet expert Jimmy Moore credits low-carb diet for 180-lb weight loss.  Granted it's an examiner.com article, but ...

... Moore, 42, said eating more fat not only helped him lose weight, but boosted his energy, eliminated nagging carb cravings, and improved his cholesterol profile. "Saturated fat actually raises your good cholesterol the best of all the foods you can eat," said Moore, who detailed his research in his books, Cholesterol Clarity and 21 Life Lessons From Livin' La Vida Low-Carb. ....

... Jimmy is a leader in the growing LCHF movement, which has been buoyed by recent medical reports touting the many health benefits of unprocessed saturated fat. Moore discusses the LCHF diet on his widely read blog, Livin' La Vida Low-Carb, and his popular weekly podcast.

Moore joins a long list of health and medical experts who agree that unprocessed saturated fat does not cause obesity, diabetes, or heart disease. ....

Expert?  Research?

'I Am Never Hungry'

Moore has had no trouble maintaining his 180-pound weight loss, and said he typically consumes about 20 grams of carbs a day. That may sound restrictive to some, but Moore insists his high-fat diet — which typically consists of eggs, avocados, bacon, sour cream, and full-fat cheese — satisfies him completely.

"Sometimes I actually forget to eat," he said. "It's freeing to not be burdened with the need to eat every three to four hours, like most people do."