The Blog of Ron Blouch

  • CAC Zero, CIMT Normal After 16 Years on a High Saturated Animal Fat Diet

    Coronary Artery Calcium (CAC) score = zero.

    Carotid Intima-Media Thickness (CIMT) test = five years younger than my current age in healthy test subjects.

    [Edit 2/18/20: a second CIMT taken six months after the first one shows no visible inflammation in the carotid arteries. That is an improvement.]

    I decided to pay out of pocket for a CAC scan last month since I could not get my doctor to order one. They are not yet standard-of-practice, or even well understood, in the orthodox world of conventional medicine. I had one done ten years ago, also zero, and also paid for out of pocket because my doctor would not order it. I did that one six years after going to the dark side and starting to make saturated plant and animal fat the predominant source of energy in my diet.

    It was hellish scary, making that switch. I’d lost 90 pounds by following Barry Sears’ Zone Diet from January 1, 2002 through October of that same year. Then 10 pounds more later.

    Ron Blouch Zone Diet Fat Loss 2002-2012

    Sears believes saturated fat will kill you. He articulates the why of it very well. He was a bleeding edge lipidologist (specialist in fat science) at MIT with 9 patents in lipid delivery systems before he bailed from academia and wrote Enter the Zone. Choosing to believe he, along with most of the rest of the brightest scientific minds in the academic, scientific, and medical communities, were wrong about saturated fat was a terrifying decision but it made sense and I chose to bet my life on it.

    The CAC scan I had done in 2010, after six years of heavy saturated animal and plant fat consumption – about 60% of my daily calories – was zero.

    It remains zero ten years later.

    That includes a two year long period of sugar and starch re-addiction that began when I did Tim Ferriss’ Slow Carb Diet in 2014. I was working to see if I could reach bodybuilder levels of leanness, just for fun.

    Ron Blouch from Fat to bodybuilder lean via the Slow Carb Diet

    Foundational to the SCD is a one day high starch, high sugar binge done each week for the duration of the fat cutting cycle. The high calorie intake re-starts a metabolism that has gotten sluggish from caloric restriction over the prior six days. I never recovered from binge day after the diet was over and I’d reached 5% bodyfat. It re-triggered the addictions I had not realized I had kicked in 2002. I did not regain the 100 pounds of fat I had lost 12 years before but I did put on 50 fresh pounds of it while watching my vitality and health disappear.

    After several years of failed attempts to kick sugar I decided to do a high fat, hard ketogenic diet in January of 2018. I had never tried one before. I was hoping it would help with a severe concussion I had taken six months earlier. I also used it to do a whole-life re-set and finally kick the sugar addiction.

    In July of 2018 I modified the keto program by eliminating all plants except a single daily cup of coffee and shifted to a high fat, all meat, fully carnivore diet.
    Ron Blouch from fit to fat to fit again via carbohydrate consumption then restriction


    Despite any damage done from the two years of sugar binging, and despite the idiotic amounts of saturated fat I have eaten for 16 years, I have no calcified atherosclerotic plaque in my arteries around the heart.

    A legitimate problem with the CAC test is it can only locate arterial plaque that is old enough and large enough to have begun to calcify. In the early stages of plaque formation the masses are soft. It can take years for calcification to begin, which means you can have a zero CAC score and still be loaded with active atherosclerotic lesions. A CAC provides no information beyond an implication that past conditions remain true today. It is a powerful test but it provides an incomplete view.

    The CIMT test – an ultrasound of the carotid arteries at the neck – provides a visual look at both calcified plaque and soft, inflamed, active plaques that have not yet begun to attract calcium. It is the soft, active plaques that most often break apart and lead to arterial blockages that cause heart attacks, not the older, hard plaques that show up in a CAC scan. Last June I paid out of pocket for one (again, no support from conventional medicine because it’s not yet in their diagnostic paradigm) and discovered, corroborating the blood test numbers I’ve consistently seen since three months after I began a ketogenic diet in 2018, that my neck arteries show minimal signs of active inflammation and have minimal hard plaque in line with healthy test subjects in my age range.

    I’ve been eating a diet that should have killed me long ago according to consensus science.

    The 100% meat, no plant, carnivore diet even more so.

    Ron Blouch lifetime fit and fat via carbohydrate elimination

    If nothing else I should be dead from scurvy if the current orthodox models of how the body functions are correct. They are clearly wrong. More investigation is required from curious, open minded investigators who want to understand how our prior views have been incorrect. In the meanwhile the pioneers who are willing to fly without the safety net of established science to back up their choices will continue on.

    After sixteen years of eating extraordinary amounts of saturated animal fat – while reducing sugar and starch intakes to minimal levels before eliminating them entirely during eighteen months of an entirely meat, zero plant diet – my arteries are perfectly clean.

    That is amazing.

    It is also a relief.

    It is not stress-less going against the beliefs of others, particularly smart people who make their living studying the very things I chose, and continue to choose, to disagree with. Especially when you are betting your life on it.

    Gratitude to those who came before me and paved the way, often against far more opposition and with much less support than I have had.

    Finally, I offer some love to anyone who is willing to make the change to improve their health and return their body to its primal best by working to give a diet shift a try. I tell my story because when things got hard – and they were often very hard – it was the stories of those who had difficult times but got through them and succeeded that kept me on track when my entire system was exploding in resistance to the changes I had made with immediate and overwhelming desire to go back to the old ways, not stay tracked in on the new. Good luck to you as you make your way.

  • 50 Years of Fat and Fit via Carbohydrate Addiction and Restriction

  • Fasting Results on a Fully Carnivore, Zero Plant Diet

    I haven’t posted pictures for nine months because my body has not visually changed. After six months of a hard ketogenic diet beginning January 1, 2018 I switched to a fully carnivore, zero plant diet on July 1st. By January 2019 my body had found its fat/lean set point.

    I maintain about 12% bodyfat when eating an unrestricted all-meat diet. By following my hunger signals – I eat when hungry and stop when full – I consume 3000-4000 calories a day, usually taken over three meals – with supper being the largest.

    In January of 2019 I began to incorporate water fasts into the program to drive detoxification and renewal of my body’s metabolic mechanisms after decades of abuse. In January, February, and March I did a three day water-only fast each month. In April and June I did a five day fast. I just completed the first seven day fast and am posting the visual results below.

    The jury remains out on what the fasts are doing. Each one has been different.

    On January first I weighed 175 pounds. The day before the seven day fast I weighed 175 pounds. The body dumps weight during the fast then restores itself through careful re-feeds in the weeks after.

    I have two more fasts remaining this year – a seven day in October then either a seven or ten day in December. After that I will re-evaluate and decide how to proceed next year.

    If you click on the image it will enlarge. The differences are subtle but noticeable. All four images are from the same seven day period, one clothed and one unclothed. I often speak of the roll of extra skin I maintain from the years I was overfat. It’s visible in the clothed pictures but re-distributes itself in the unclothed images.

  • 2018 Year End Diet Pictures

  • 2018 Diet Year in Stars

  • Resolutions 2019

    Starting today, January 1, 2019, I resolve the following:

    To do a series of 8 pulsed water only fasts over the course of the year. Three three day fasts, two five day fasts, two seven day fasts, one ten day fast.

    To follow the fasts with a two week period of high-density, high-nutrient re-feeds.

    To make every bite of food that passes my lips the result of a conscious choice about what to eat.

    To begin the year continuing to remain plant free while watching the results I get and modifying if necessary.

    To remain dairy free.

    To enjoy alcohol sparingly.

    To enjoy off-diet foods occasionally in situations in which they are warranted.

    To do one to five sets of daily jumpsquats, two to four weekly kettlebell and pullup workouts, and one heavy lifting in the session in the gym per week.

    January – 3 day fast
    February – 3 day fast
    March – 3 day fast
    April – 5 day fast
    June – 5 day fast
    August – 7 day fast
    October – 7 day fast
    December – 10 day fast

  • Diet Progress Report

  • A Reasonable Alternative to the Vegan World View

    Because I’m engaged in such an unusual diet I’m exposed to unusual thinking. I’ve learned more about food, nutrition, human health, and the health of the Earth in the past year than I had ever known – even after 20 years of relatively intense studying and experimenting with diet and exercise.

    The first formal diet I ever did was an attempt to eat Vegan. In 1997 my wife, son and I went vegetable only for four months. No animal products at all. I felt absolutely great. Mind clear, body clear. Unfortunately, I was starving the entire time. No meal ever satisfied the hunger. I recall being stuffed and ravenous simultaneously after a big feed. It was only the application of an iron will that kept me on track.

    After it was over I had discovered I loved unprocessed, organic Vegan food (except soy. Bleah) but needed a steak with my vegetables.

    It had been instructive.

    Why did I try Vegan first? Because like everyone else in the US I had been impacted by the Vegan Cultural Imperative. I had no desire to harm animals. I had questions about the long term health of eating meat. I wondered at the sustainability of animal agriculture. I had any number of thoughts about food but gave no consideration to the source of those thoughts.

    How had I heard about all of those things? They were and are ubiquitous. We all hear them all the time. They are a constant undercurrent in the news and, increasingly, the culture.

    Over the past several years I’ve spent some time at WeWork locations in New York City. It’s a super-hip, hyper-connected, shared work space that allows people to subscribe to the service and find communal rooms in several restored, re-sourced buildings in all the major cities in the US.

    I felt like a dinosaur in there. The crowd was fully hipster – age mid-20s.

    WeWork recently made all of their spaces Vegan, no longer allowing meat to be served in their buildings. That was a marketing decision. In an increasingly competitive shared-space market, a market they invented, they branded themselves the hippest of all of the competing rent-a-space companies by taking a current foundatational belief of the most elite of all cultural elites and defining their business around it. Consider how many people have to be willing to be Vegan, at least for their time at WeWork, for the business model to succeed. That is a lot of people.

    My dive into a fully Carnivore, Zero Plant Diet has taken me down paths I had never considered before. I’ve learned more about food and food sourcing than I ever knew. I had already been buying much of my food directly from farmers for years, giving me an understanding of where food comes from, yet I had not really considered all the implications for the impact that food – both plant and animal – makes on the ground on which it is grown.

    We have all heard that grazing animals destroy the environment. What we have not heard, and what I had not fully considered before, was how plant farming destroys the environment. One of the more interesting articles I have read was a blog post entitled “The Most Vegan Item In Your Grocery Store Is A Steak”. It laid out the case for the terrible damage being done to ecosystems and the animals that live in them due to past and present deforestation for crop fields. It also described the incredible amount of animal life destroyed yearly through the process of plowing, cultivating, and harvesting plants. As many as 7 billion animals are killed a year for our worldwide crop harvest. Many very small creatures die for that salad we eat every day. Contrast that with the single death of a steer – feeding one human for six months to a year. I’d never thought about it before because I’d never heard anyone talk about it. The Vegan ethic is a powerful, compelling story and it’s presented as truth so often and so subtly I had no idea there were competing opinions.

    Even more ever-present than the death conversation is the Vegan argument on the sustainability and environmental cost of animal agriculture. As it turns out that story is far more complicated than the one we have been told. There are other, competing versions that tell a different tale. One of the most interesting is contained in the linked article below. Most notable is its presence in a relatively main stream source. I’ve been reading about the Earth healing impact of properly managed grazing operations for a while but the information was coming from fringe websites. The Guardian got a whiff of the story and told it pretty well in the article.

    Intelligent, concerned, caring people can look at the evidence for either vegetable or meat consumption and disagree with each other. I find myself increasingly coming to believe that it is almost impossible to be a Vegan without creating long-term nutritional deficiencies. While it is clear we can eat plants, and possibly even thrive on them, it seems more and more obvious to me that after a decade or more of consuming only plants the body begins to degrade. It is often subtle. It may even extend life-span by creating a long term state of pseudo-undereating but it does so at the cost of strength and vitality.

    I’m hesitant to say this out loud. I don’t want to upset my vegan friends, of whom I have many. Yet I now believe it needs to be said. The narrative we’ve been given is misleading at best, most likely deceptive. It needs to be corrected and if no one steps up to do it it will never be done.

    What are the long term effects of eating only meat? No one yet knows. There are strong clues if you know where to look for them but the last cultures that ate only meat to the exclusion of almost everything else are long gone. The 50,000 people who are migrating to this way-of-eating (WOE) are pioneers in a plant eating world. We are experimenting. That entails risk.

    It also leads to outsize reward if you get it right.

    Having more information is always a good thing in my experience so I’m passing all of this on to present a way of thinking that is counter to what is common but contains truths worth considering.

    Guardian on Sustainable Grazing

  • Jumpsquat Upgrade to Sets of 45

  • Four Months of Ketogenic Eating Complete

    Phase one has ended. I’ve successfully gone four months fully ketogenic.

    I have lost 17 pounds on the scale but my body looks completely different. I suspect I’ve lost 25 pounds of fat and put on 5 pounds of muscle from doing nothing but jumpsquats, eating properly, and providing daily adequate protein to allow growth.

    I’ve never suffered as much on a diet program as I did on this regimen with the exception of the 100 pound weight loss experience in 2002. I don’t think there was a day from January 1 through mid-October of that year that I was not in real and often intense discomfort. This program was similar although the sources and nature of the suffering changed in phases from start to finish.

    I still believe the protocol is healing my body, not harming it, but I do not yet know that is true. I’m proceeding through uncertainty while watching carefully.

    Today I begin to return carbohydrate to my body for two months before going fully ketogenic again for four months on July 1st.

  • Jumpsquats Upgrade to 40 Per Set

    After a setback in February due to a slip on some ice I’ve finally moved from 35 to 40 jumpsquats per set. The additional five repetitions take my body deeply into its reserves, driving my pulse and breathing to the max in the 30 seconds after the set ends while creating significant post workout fatigue and soreness.

  • Jumpsquats Upgrade to 35 Per Set

    After four weeks of two sets of 30 jump squats per day I increase the number of repetitions per set to 35 on my way to 50.

  • Why Ketogenesis and Intermittent Fasting?

    In July of last year I gave myself a concussion. It didn’t seem bad in the moment it happened but within hours I was starting to experience confusion and upset. Within days I was having trouble thinking cogently. Within weeks I was having bouts of rage to go along with my inability to think. I had a headache for three months.

    It eventually began to clear but I could tell my mind was no longer the same. Everything came more slowly. I struggled to construct thoughts and ideas that had previously flowed without effort.

    I began to research the problem.

    The past five years have seen an explosion in the science done on Traumatic Brain Injury. The work of the doctors and scientists who led the charge to make public the damage being done to football players in the NFL began to dovetail with work done by a few early researchers in the medical and academic communities. That has lead to an exponential uptick in solid science on the topic and, more importantly, treatment protocols.

    After sifting through the most accessible layers of material I began to notice that several things kept showing up, of which the two most relevant to me were that ketosis and fasting are foundational to the repair of the brain.

    More important than ketosis and fasting, however, is the need to get rid of inflammation in the body and brain. Chronic clinical and sub-clinical inflammation has to be eliminated before anything else can be done to effectively fix brain function. The most common cause of inflammation in the body? Consuming foods to which the body reacts negatively. Ketosis and fasting tend to eliminate inflammatory foods all by themselves but more was required, which I will discuss below.

    All of the above dovetailed perfectly with my desire to return to the dietary ease and the fit, healthy, lean body I had lived with for the 11 years I was not addicted to sugar. In 2014 I spent six months using Tim Ferriss’ Slow Carb Diet to successfully take my body to an extreme level of leanness. Unfortunately, the diet required me to binge on high calorie, high carbohydrate foods one day per week. I became re-addicted to sweets and starches and was unable to stop myself from eating them despite applying every bit of willpower I had remaining after having such a great physique win via the diet and loving my strong, lean body. The subsequent fat gain and deterioration of my health was remarkable to witness but not pleasant to experience. It had become time to permanently solve those problems while also integrating into my diet the protocols that came with my newfound understanding of traumatic brain injury repair.

    Trying a ketogenic diet seemed like a natural next step. I had never done it before despite years of disciplined dietary experimentation. I had already experienced extraordinary gains from my first round of intermittent fasting in 2005. Combining the two seemed like a great fit as many of the most famous ketogenic experts were promoting exactly that: keto done with IF.

    But there was more.

    It is possible to eat a ketogenic diet that still tends toward inflammation. The foods we choose to eat are important so I took a look at my deepest goal – a long term and permanent change in my health and vitality – and decided to eliminate three foods that are acceptable in a keto protocol in proper quantities but I believe I have had trouble with in the past: dairy, alcohol, and sugar. All three of them are well known trigger foods, causing bacterial and fungal imbalances in the digestive tract.

    That leads to the final reason I’m doing this diet: to see if I can fix what I suspect is a lifelong case of gut problems caused by decades of eating badly, particularly when I was a child. That, plus several trips into wilderness areas out of the country in my teens, may have left me with organisms in my digestive tract I have never been able to completely eradicate.

    I have come to believe that years of eating gluten, a food I have not consumed since 2006, did damage to my body that has not yet healed despite all the years of dedicated effort to fix it. I believe dairy, alcohol, and sugar are the current culprits, keeping the early damage from healing. The constant stream of decades of gluten in my childhood (and later) upset the bacterial and fungal balance in my gut and damaged the delicate lining of the intestines. Dairy, alcohol and sugar have very likely continued to act as irritants and kept the early problems in place, even though their impact was dramatically reduced once I finally quit gluten and reduced the volume of the others a decade ago. The re-addiction to sugar in 2014 began to break those systems down again. Now I must repair them. Hopefully for good this time.

    Perhaps now the choices I’m making and the experiences I’ve been describing fit together into a more clear whole. I’m working to:

    1. Lose fat while keeping my body strong and fit

    2. Build the foundation I need to repair my brain from prior damage.

    3. Build the foundation for a lifetime of extended health span and increased functioning at every level.

    4. Repair my digestive tract by restoring the proper balance of gut flora and healing the gut lining.

    Those four things, together, drive all of my effort and inform the choices I make.

  • Jump Squat Set Number One

    I have been doing jump squats on and off for three years. They have changed my entire body. They will be the core of my diet and exercise program for this year, with the goal to be doing between two and five sets of 50 consecutive jump squats per day, every day of the year.

  • New Year’s Resolution 2018

    Welcome to the blog.

    Starting today, January 1, 2018, I resolve the following:

    To spend the year alcohol, sugar, and dairy free.

    To eat on a 20/4 hour Intermittent Fasting/Feasting cycle.

    To do my 9th four month long experimental diet: a high fat, moderate protein, very low carb ketotic program. I will eat for ketosis from January 1 through April 30, then again from July 1 through October 31.

    To do between two and five single sets of high repetition explosive jump squats per day every day for the entire year.

  • Fat loss

    I have struggled with fat and body composition all my life.

    In 2002 I lost 100 pounds and kept most of it off for 12 years.

    I thought the struggles were over. I was fit, strong, and healthy.

    In 2014 I did an experimental bodybuilding diet (Tim Ferriss’ Slow Carb Diet) to see how lean I could make myself without losing muscle mass. The diet required one day of binge eating in every seven days. I binged on foods I had not eaten for 12 years. I got very lean and very strong. You can see the result of the diet on the far right in the image below:


    I also re-addicted myself to sugar and starches.

    While never re-gaining as much fat as I was wearing in 2002 I did balloon up to almost 230 pounds:

    Interestingly, knowing I was unable to stop eating sugar in the fall and winter of 2014/15, I used my overamped caloric intake to fuel muscle growth by doing sequential sets of high repetition heavy squats and deadlifts in the gym. I am carrying at least 25 pounds more muscle in that picture than in any of the previous images and I put it all on one very unpleasant squat, deadlift, and pullup at a time day after day after day.

    I have since removed 30 pounds of fat and currently look like this:


    It’s time to finish the fat cutting and return my body to proper leanness while preserving the muscular gains I made by lifting heavy in the gym.

    Fat loss is simple once you understand the process.

    It is not easy.

    I have never known anyone who lost substantial amounts of fat and kept it off permanently without real effort, often excruciating. I’ve been at this for 14 years and I’ve heard many claims that fat loss should be effortless if done properly. I have yet to meet a single person who took it off and kept it off for whom that was true.

    I will post my progress here on the blog.