Recording begins

Ari: Hi and welcome to the Less Doing podcast. I'm Ari Meisel and today I'm really excited to be talking with Jimmy Moore of Livin La Vida Low Carb which I gotta say right away I think is the greatest website name I have ever heard in my life. He’s also the author of a new book called Cholesterol Clarity: What The HDL Is Wrong With My Numbers? So, hi Jimmy, thanks for meeting with me.

Jimmy: Hey man, what’s going on?

Ari: So, What The HDL Is Wrong With My Number; let’s get right into it.

Jimmy: I know, right? [laughs] Yeah, we've been told a whole heap of information about cholesterol that unfortunately is 100% dead wrong. The way most doctors and most health professionals around the world, quite frankly, are looking at cholesterol. They’re looking at two numbers and predicating treatment based on only those two numbers on your cholesterol panel. so, it's total cholesterol and LDL cholesterol tend to be vilified - parts of your cholesterol panel - and if your total cholesterol is over 200 and your LDL cholesterol is over 100, suddenly all these medical professionals and doctors think you have a statent deficiency and that you must immediately fill that deficiency by taking this prescription drug with some very questionable side effects. Now, that's not to say this, not everyone should be off of statents. I think there are probably a minority few that could stand to benefit; mostly people who have already had some kind of cardiovascular event or as one of my experts in the book - we have 29 total experts in Cholesterol Clarity. one of them is a family doctor in Denver and he said, there’s a certain segment of population that i have to put on a statent drug and it's generally those people who refuse to make any changes to their diet and maybe, just maybe, this drug might be the only thing left that could save them. so, that’s kind of where we are is we're treating numbers on a paper rather than treating individuals and i think, if nothing else, hopefully Cholesterol Clarity opens people's eyes that that's the exact wrong way to be helping people with their heart health.

Ari: Okay, so now, everybody has cholesterol obviously and I think that somehow along the way cholesterol became vilified for some reason but not anybody really knowing what it is. You know, you ask somebody, what is cholesterol and most people don’t know. Most people don’t have a very good answer. i forgot which interview i heard you on, i think it might have been on Dan Greenfield's podcast but you said something that i thought was really cool which was that you don’t blame the firefighters to the fire. Right?

Jimmy: Right.

Ari: Just what is cholesterol?

Jimmy: So, cholesterol people think is this evil substance. the less of it they have in their body, the better off their health is going to be but the unfortunate thing for those people is that's just ignorant because cholesterol is essential to every cell in our body. Without cholesterol, you would die. I mean, absolutely, you have to have cholesterol in your body and here’s an interesting thought. Did you know that the people who lived the longest tend to have the highest levels of cholesterol? So, it's not odd to have a lot of cholesterol in the body. What is odd is to artificially try to lower this life saving substance and as you alluded to from one of my previous interviews I’ve done, absolutely, you need that cholesterol to be a firefighter in your body because the fire inside of your body is

called inflammation. so, when you have chronic inflammation in your body the only thing that's gonna be there to save you from that is the cholesterol which acts as a healing agent in the body. So, it would be like the firefighters going to the scene of a fire and you say, well, wait a minute. There’s a fire there and we see firefighters there so they must have caused it. We wouldn’t say that, that would be ludacris and yet that’s exactly what we’re doing with cholesterol. We’re saying that these firefighters, the cholesterol, are going to the scene of the fire, the inflammation so therefore it’s the cholesterol’s fault there's a fire going on. No, that’s silly. And so, what we need to do is get people to understand inflammation is the cause of heart disease, not cholesterol.

Ari: Right. alright, which I think is a really important point but now when we’re talking about inflammation, you know, you’re talking to somebody obviously who had a chronic or has – technically, according to the medical community, a chronic inflammatory condition. But there's inflammation from things like Chrome’s disease, you can get inflammation from running too much, and then obviously you can have the inflammation that affects cardiovascular disease. Are we talking about all kinds of inflammation that are affected by cholesterol?

Jimmy: Yeah, it’s pretty much all of the chronic inflammation that would lead to a lot of the autoimmune issues that you were just talking about. It’s basically brought on by stress, primarily, and i think your eating and your diet that people don't even realize are raising inflammation levels. So, it's even things that are promoted in our culture as heart healthy. So you think about whole grains. You know, they've gotten a free pass for a long time as a healthy part of your diet. In fact, the USDA tells us we need to be eating 6 to 12 servings of these a day as part of a healthy, heart healthy diet. And then we’re being told to skip the butter and the other real food sources of saturated fat and replace it with vegetable oils like canola oil and soybean oil. Well, those are the very things that are leading to more inflammation as well. So between the whole grains and the vegetable oils, we’re increasing the amount of inflammation in our body thus making ourselves more susceptible to heart health problems and not less, and yet, those are the very things that they're telling us to eat more and more and more of. Meanwhile, we’re esstuing saturated fat which could do all sorts of great things to your cholesterol panel yet people are running to the hills in the opposite direction.

Ari: Yeah, so one of the things I love, whenever I have a new client who has, usually people with chrome’s disease is who I'm dealing with this kind of thing or other digestive stuff but a lot of times I’ll have someone with chrome's disease, they will have come from a doctor who told them to stay away from fatty foods.

Jimmy: Right.

Ari: And, i love when they do that. So, first of all i say, okay, yeah that's great. Don’t have fried chicken that’s been fried in canola oil or peanut oil or something. Butter is fatty food.

Jimmy: Yeah, that’s what they say. Although, most of the time when you hear that phrase fatty food, 9 times out of 10 it's not just fatty it's also carby. So, you’re having the unintended consequence of that. it's like, you look at fast food and they say, oh that’s such a fatty meal and you look at most fast food it's mostly carby. You get a quarter pounder with cheese and fries and a coke, guess what? That’s a very, very high carb meal. Yes, it's got some fat in it as well but the preponderance of that meal is carbohydrate and yet our society looks at that and says what a high fat meal.

Ari: Right and as Mr. Livin La Vida Low Carb, I'm assuming that we’re sort of getting to that issue that sugar is really the inflammatory enemy?

Jimmy: Correct, yeah. Sugar and really all forms of sugar and things that turn to sugar in the body; I was talking to somebody just this last week. I was talking to them about a lot of what I wrote in Cholesterol Clarity and, oh, I don’t eat a lot of sugar in my diet but I’ll have a banana for breakfast and a glass of orange juice and I’ll eat a bowl of oatmeal. And I'm like, do you realize everything you just said to me is loaded with sugar? Oh, but it’s natural sugar. I'm like, your body doesn’t care if it’s natural or if it comes from a coca cola. It is still metabolically the same, sugar is sugar is sugar in your body; your body is going to respond. Yeah, you'll get a few micro nutrients from perhaps the banana but at the end of the day we’re trying to keep the sugar load down. Eating a banana, drinking a glass of orange juice, eating a bowl of oatmeal will just turn to sugar in the body is not doing you any good.

Ari: Okay, in preparation for this particular interview, I get my blood tested quite a bit because I'm an advisor for a company called Inside Tracker but I got a test done as close as I could to this interview because one of the things that i found mind-blowing since i heard you in a couple of other interviews which i absolutely did not know before was this thing about carb tolerance related to triglycerides.

Jimmy: Yep.

Ari: And what i want to know, and i think this will be real interesting to everybody, but I’ve gone from when i was doing iron man training and my diet was 8000 calories a day and probably 85% carbs to where i am now which is more like 65 to 70% fat….

Jimmy: Yep.

Ari: But i would not say.... i mean, it's hard to say. I wouldn't be on it if i was saying that i was low carb, i love to have a good bowl of pasta…

Jimmy: Sure.

Ari: …and i love having bread every now and again, but my triglycerides about 2 weeks ago were 54.

Jimmy: Wow. That’s great.

Ari: So, what does that mean? Does that mean that I'm just a carb monster and that’s okay?

Jimmy: It means your carbohydrate tolerance level is extremely high compared to most people and I think a lot of that for you being that you are such an exerciser and that you are using that as a fuel source for your training, i think that you’re able to get away with more carbs than probably most people. So, good for you, 54 is amazing! But that's really, really, really good.

Ari: Thank you. So then I can keep having a bowl of pasta sometimes.

Jimmy: How many carbs would you say that you eat in a day as far as grams?

Ari: You know, that’s the thing. When I was actually really thinking about this, like I said I love a good bowl of pasta but I probably have a bowl a pasta once every week.

Jimmy: Yeah and that’s probably pretty good.

Ari: Yeah but I know that when I was… as I'm looking back through my history because I have it up here – when I was training for iron man, I was having a lot of carbs. I mean a lot, a lot of carbs; I was at 94 still.

Jimmy: Yeah and that’s pretty good. Anything under 100 means that you got it pretty dialed in to your personal carbohydrate tolerance level. In my book, the optimal range we talk about for triglycerides is under 70; now my trigs right now are 37.

Ari: Wow. Okay, but now does any of that have to do with genetics? Some people can handle it better and some people can't?

Jimmy: You know, I think it has a lot to do with the metabolic damage. Like I used to weigh 410 pounds in my life. I didn’t get to weigh 410 without having some major metabolic damage going on. So, I think the more damage you have from eating a lot of the realistic, modern day, and I’ll just throw it out there, very high processed carbohydrates garbage, as I call it, foods, I think that does diminish your ability to be able to metabolize and tolerate those high amounts of carbs. Apparently, you have not reached that despite the chrome’s, you’ve not reached that level for yourself, and be happy about. But, be careful with pasta because it’s still wheat and it’s gonna maybe make you less and less sensitive over time. Even if you do do it once a week, it can have some extreme metabolic effects. Now, I’d be interested with your triglycerides to being so good, what's your HDL?

Ari: The HDL was 65.

Jimmy: Yeah, and that’s great as well. So, really anything close to 70 is pretty good. Definitely above 50 and that tells me you're eating lots of good, healthy fats. So, that’s good. Then, the only other thing I’d say is get an NMR lipoprofile test done so you can see the kind of LDL particles that you're producing and how many of those are the small LDL. What happens is when you eat wheat, which is in that pasta, even just once a week it can shift your LDL particles to more of the small dense kind that you don’t want despite having some good trigs. Again, just something to think about if you get that run and you see a number that’s kind of off filtered, that could be the wheat talking there.

Ari: So, okay. That’s something that I heard you talk about; I've heard you talk about the NMR profile before and one of very few tests that i have not run on myself. I’m definitely putting that on my Christmas list.

Jimmy: Yeah.

Ari: Since we are coming to a high number as an example for everybody. So, my LDL is 127 and what i found interesting about this is that according to most optimal ranges that’s too high.

Jimmy: Right, that’s what they say, it’s too high although one of the people that I interviewed was Paul Jaminet from The Perfect Health Diet and he said a perfectly normal LDL is 130 or less so you're perfectly fine.

Ari: Well, when I saw that originally which I got a little nervous and then I started doing more and more research and i was finding out the ration apparently is more use, is that true?

Jimmy: Well, the ratio I assume you mean LDL to total cholesterol ratio?

Ari: Yes, correct.

Jimmy: Yeah, that's an interesting marker but again that doesn’t really tell you a whole lot because total cholesterol i kind of a mis-numbered marker as well because it's got two things in it that are strange. One is your HDL cholesterol you want to have higher. And so, that's part of your total cholesterol is your HDL cholesterol and if your total cholesterol is higher because your HDL is higher, that's not a bad thing. You want that to be higher. Then the other thing is your LDL, the thing that you just mentioned is only, and a lot of people don’t realize this, is only an estimated number. It’s not a precise, measured number unless you do that NMR lipoprofile test I just talked about. That specifically measures exactly the amount of LDL particles that you have. So, no, I don’t think the LDL to total cholesterol ratio is very relevant. What is relevant is the triglyceride to HDL ratio and that one you want to have 1 to 1 or less. So, your trigs were 54. Your HDL was 65. You're perfectly fine; that’s like 27.8. Perfect.

Ari: Okay, now there’s something funny I think you alluded to also is that you want to get your HDL higher.

Jimmy: Yes.

Ari: You want your total cholesterol to be lower so aren’t those conflicting?

Jimmy: Well, I don’t think you need to have your total cholesterol lower, I think you need to…

Ari: No, in general, that’s what they say.

Jimmy: Oh, that’s what they say; that’s exactly right. So, yeah, I just had a woman write to me a couple weeks ago. She was all worried because her doctor was pushing a statent drug on her and her total cholesterol was 225. So, I enquired further about her other numbers and it turns out that her HDL, get this, of that 225, her HDL was 105 of it. So she had incredible HDL, almost 40% of her total cholesterol was just her HDL cholesterol and yet her doctor was pushing…

Ari: [16:22]

Jimmy: Well, actually women have a little higher HDL than us guys. The highest I've been able to get my HDL is what it currently is, which is 79.

Ari: Exactly.

Jimmy: Us guys, it’s very hard to get it higher, too much higher than that. For women, pretty much over 100 is pretty regular if they're eating enough fat in their diet. So, it has to do with their hormonal needs for cholesterol. This woman was doing fantastic and yet she was so worried so I had to point her to the whole triglyceride, HDL ratio saying that the total cholesterol really doesn't make a whole lot of sense. All the doctor saw was a 2 in front of her total cholesterol and all he was thinking was statent, statent, statent.

Ari: Right. Okay, well, so you mentioned before that you were 410 pounds. Now, you didn’t get… well, what do you weigh now?

Jimmy: I am currently 233.

5

Ari: Okay, so you’ve lost 100s of pounds and you didn’t just do that by lowering your cholesterol so let’s talk about that.

Jimmy: Sure.

Ari: So, how did you get there? How did you do it?

Jimmy: Well, it all started. No. My mother-in-law bought me a book for Christmas in December 2003. Yes, mother-in-laws do like to make subtle little hints to their son-in-laws that they're fat but I read this book. It was Dr. Atkins New Diet Revolution. I had never heard of eating fat for health and cutting carbohydrates. I thought that was going to clog your arteries and I thought carbohydrates were necessary for fuel. All these things that we always hear and yet I'm reading this book. I tried low fat diet after low diet over and over and over again always failing on those things. So I said, what the heck? Let’s give it a try. So, I started like so many Americans, on January 1st, 2004 to lose weight doing the high fat, low carb diet and in the first month I lost 30 pounds. Now, that sounds like a lot but I was 410 and it brought me down to 380. Ooh, I was still big. [laughter] But I already was feeling a lot better after one month of doing this and it kind of clued me in, something is different about what I'm doing now than what I was doing before. At the end of month two, I had lost another 40 pounds and I was starting to exercise because I had such robust energy from doing this. At the end of 100 days I had lost 100 pounds. Now, I did have about 10 weeks there where I didn’t lose any weight at all but during that non-weightloss period I lost 6 inches off my waist and it was at that moment that I realized, this is so much more than about what that scale is telling me. This is about improving my health, letting what I'm doing nourish my body and make me optimal and healthy and oh, yeah by the way, a nice side effect to that is weightloss. By the end of the year, I had lost 180 pounds and everybody was asking how’d you do it, how’d you do it? So, I started my blog which you gave the name up earlier and eventually a podcast. Now I do three podcasts, 5 days a week. I'm just really passionate about educating people about living a healthy lifestyle whether that’s low carb; whether that’s paleo. Even if you want to do a vegan diet I'm not opposed to you doing a vegan diet; it’s a whole heck of a lot better than the sad American diet. Let’s get people on real food and then make adjustments from there.

Ari: Obviously the criticisms, I think, the criticism of that seems to be that it really doesn’t put the focus necessarily on good quality fats and proteins, it’s really just focusing on those fats and proteins. So…

Jimmy: Well, I think if he were around today he would be touting that very strongly. In fact, I got to talk to his widow veronica in an interview and she said, oh, Doctor Atkins regular, as she called him Bobby, regularly had grass fed steak and organic vegetables and grass fed butter. So, he, himself, consuming those high quality. While it may not be exclusively written as such in his books, I do think the quality issue would have been something he would have been touting if he was still around today and that’s something I credit the paleo community for kind of guiding people eating low carb. I, myself, kind of started paying a lot more attention to food quality because of my friends in the paleo community. So, yeah, it’s a fair criticism but I think it’s no longer is an issue because so many of us in the low carb world are eating those higher quality of foods.

Ari: Sure, but now there's also that issue of gluconeogenesis rather which is, for those who don’t know is, basically how your liver turns lean proteins into sugar, right?

Jimmy: Right, right. And that was kind of the key thing with the whole you mentioned nutritional ketosis earlier. That was something that I was struggling with over the past few years of trying to figure out why was I putting on some weight. Even though all my health markers were still really good, I was putting on a few pounds every single year and it was getting frustrating because I couldn’t figure it out until I realized I was getting that gluconeogenesis kicking in from eating chicken breast, thinking well it’s low carb. Yes, it’s low carb but it’s also very high in protein and Atkins and low carb, by definition, is not a high protein diet. Never really has been even though the media likes to call it that. What it is, is a high fat diet and moderated in protein and low carbohydrates. And again, finding your carb tolerance is first and foremost. For you, being able to tolerate so much carbohydrate in your diet and not have any ill effects on your triglycerides, I would say you could probably get away with a lot more protein as well because it makes sense. If you're sensitive to carbohydrates, you're also going to be extremely sensitive to too much protein because of that gluconeogenesis. So, you have to moderate your protein down to your personal protein threshold and we’re going to talk in great detail about this in my next book, Keto Clarity, coming out next year. But it’s really essential for people to figure those things out and then eat fat, all those natural, healthy, saturated and monounsaturated fats to society and you’ve found the secret to health and weight management.

Ari: Okay, so now since obviously it’s very different for different people on each level but how do they find that level? How do they figure it out?

Jimmy: Yeah, I think you start with the carbs. So, you get your carbohydrates down to a level and you do the whole kind of shifting around. Everyone is like, well, what do I need to eat? What's the percentages? And I'm like, it’s really not about that and even if I told you my percentages that might not be what's right for you. So, I tell people get your carbs down first so start at 20 grams. If you're doing very well on 20, maybe add a little more, a little more, a little more til you find your personal carbohydrate tolerance. Mine is about 25 to 30 grams before I start seeing weight gain and hunger and all of those kind of clues to that you're looking for. I get a little fatigued if I eat too many carbs so I immediately know I've gone beyond my carb tolerance level. I need to back back down. So, once you get that one dialed in then hit the protein. When I first started nutritional ketosis, I was probably eating 160 to 170 grams of protein in a day and I had to back it down. When I first started tweaking, I tried 110; that’s a lot lower than what I was doing. Still wasn’t enough and so I went to 100. Still wasn’t enough. 90; still wasn’t enough. It wasn’t until I hit 80 grams of protein along with that 25 to 30 grams of carbohydrates that I found a sweet spot for me. Then, of course, the rest of the calories all came from good sources of quality saturated and monounsaturated fats and that’s the beautiful equation that works for Jimmy Moore. So you just got to figure it out for yourself: your carbohydrate tolerance, your protein threshold and then eat fat to subside you.

Ari: I think that is a really reasonable formula to figure this out, which is great. So, if you're only getting 25 to 30 grams of carbs a day, what's a typical day of meals look like for when you're not fasting for 24 hours?

Jimmy: I was going to say, I do a lot of fasting spontaneously only because when you eat the way your body wants to be fed, which, if you find your carb tolerance and you find your protein threshold and eat plenty of healthy fats, you're going to be nourishing your body with what it needs. So, yeah, some days I’ll eat one meal and then I don’t eat the rest of the day. For example, that one meal could be… I really love eggs. They're such a versatile and nutrient dense food to eat and I get some local farm eggs from a guy at my church. He has chickens. He allows them to roam and

everything, it’s really done the right way and he only sells them to me for $2 a dozen. So, I stock up when I get me some eggs. I mean, you talk about saving money and getting a good nutritional bang for your buck. That’s about the best thing you can do is buy eggs. So, I’ll have four pastured eggs cooked in some grass fed butter and/or some coconut oil. Then, I’ll throw some raw cheese on top of that. Have a little sauerkraut for some good probiotic buzz. Pour some sour cream on top of that; occasionally I’ll also do a whole avocado. So, as you can hear from that meal, it’s extremely high in fat, moderated in protein. Really, the only protein is from the eggs themselves and then carbohydrates are pretty much limited to whatever’s in the cheese and whatever is in that avocado. So, that’s what works for me to me satisfied and I can go 8, 10, 12 and sometimes as much as you said, 24 hours between meals after eating a meal like that.

Ari: That’s cool. I have this smoothie that I call my fat smoothie which is about probably 85 or 80% fat probably.

Jimmy: Yep.

Ari: I’ll have that in the morning and then I'm usually good for most of the day but do you work out at all?

Jimmy: Yeah. So, I do two things; I’ll do strength training when I work out. I do enjoy lifting weights and getting stronger. I never was really interested in that when I was younger; my brother was the football player and he was always lifting weights and I was in the band. So, it never interested me until I started paying attention to how it made me feel when I was in a really good state with my body. So until I got interested in nutrition, I didn’t get interested in fitness. So, I do lift weights and I also, Mark Systen, who you probably know from [27:42]. He’ll call me every once in a while and he’ll say, are you doing your sprint? He’s kind of got me on this sprint kick where I have to run up and down the front of my street here for like 30 seconds. I’ll then walk back for a couple of minutes and then run for 30 seconds all out and walk back for a couple of minutes and do that about 7 or 8 times because that’s a really good thing you could do for fat burning. So, I’ll do that on occasion as well. So, yeah, it’s all a part of it. On the days that I lift, I tend to eat a little more protein on those days. So, instead of 80 grams of protein, my protein threshold goes up to about 100 grams on that day to help with some of the muscle recovery.

Ari: That’s great because that’s a question that comes up with a lot of people, oh yeah you can eat that perfect diet but what if you want to work out? Don’t you need more protein? All those kind of things that just don’t really make actual sense for people who think they need to do it.

Jimmy: Yeah.

Ari: So, everyone has their own version of sweet tooth but I actually tend to crave salty things a lot of the times more than sweet things. Do you miss things or crave things ever whether they're sweet or crunchy? What is your sweet tooth?

Jimmy: You know, I'm coming up on 10 years since I did this, started doing this, and I would say for the first 5 or 6 years it was really bad in terms of I would have occasions when I had to have. I mean, sweet was my thing. When I was 410 pounds, I was drinking 16 cans of coca cola a day, two boxes of Little Debbie snacks cakes a day. Two whole boxes of those every single day. Sweet tooth, that’s putting it mildly. [laughs] So, no. Now, almost a decade later, I can’t say that I just so crave those things and I do credit ketosis for that. I think once you get your body in that nutritional state where you're relying on ketones for fuel, you realize that’s a lot better feeling than whatever

that sweet thing is going to make me feel temporarily. The problem is once you start eating those sweet things then that kicks you out of ketosis and then you start getting the hunger and the cravings and all this kind of coming back on with a vengeance again. No thanks, I’ll stay in ketosis, thank you very much, because I feel best when I'm there.

Ari: When you're in and out of ketosis, you said you feel kind of tired and you can feel it but are you just running on fuel or are you testing?

Jimmy: Oh, I test on a daily basis. During my experiment, I did an official experiment publicly, from May of 2012 to May of 2013 and tested every single day, morning and night, and sometimes every hour on the hour for a whole week. I put myself out there as an N equals 1 and self-experimentation, the whole quantified self, I wanted people to see what was happening to me doing this. So, yeah I'm testing for blood ketones and it’s pretty much the same as measuring for blood sugar except it’s a ketone meter and very expensive strips to do that. But you can test for that and see the amount of beta-hydroxybutyrate which is the ketone body in your blood to see if you're in that state of nutritional ketosis. Now, what you're looking for is .5 millimole to 3.0 millimole and if you're in that range you are in nutritional ketosis. During the experiment, I was that most of the time. Since that has ended, I've continued to test morning and night just to kind of see how things would react and whether they get me in or out of ketosis. It’s been very interesting kind of following all that, continuing to test. I will probably continue to test, as I said earlier, I'm writing a book on ketosis that’s coming out next year. So, definitely more information; it’s always good to be in the know.

Ari: I totally agree. Just to make another point for verification. So, when you're doing the blood prepping, you're not looking at the [31:55], right? That’s more urine based and..

Jimmy: That’s right.

Ari: …and not as accurate, right?

Jimmy: Yeah, acetoacetate is in the urine. Acetate is in the breath and beta-hydroxybutyrate is what’s in the blood and the most accurate one that I have seen of all three of those, which I tested breath, urine, and blood. It tends to be the blood because you get an exact measurement on the meter to know exactly where you stand. Now, a lot of people use those ketone sticks for the urine, the acetoacetate. The unfortunate thing about that is if you're dehydrated, it’s going to show that you have a high amount of ketones when you probably don’t or if you drink a lot of water like I do, it could dilute the number of ketones that you have and show a false negative. So, not very reliable. I did test that for the first couple of months of my experiment and it just did not correlate very well to the blood ketones.

Ari: Okay. You mentioned that the test strips that you're using are a little more expensive but what would do as the next best thing to test with if it’s not urine? Is the breath a good example?

Jimmy: No, the best one would be the blood ketones.

Ari: The next best thing if you didn’t want to go ahead and get a blood meter and prick your finger.

Jimmy: Yeah, next best as far as commercially available right now is the urine, unfortunately. The breath ketone meters are still under development; there are several companies working on that right now and I test marketed one such company. It was okay, it was very difficult to quantify whether you're in ketosis, all it was was kind of a yes, you are/no, you’re not. Whereas I think measuring for exact

levels kind of tells the tale of where you are. So, if you're really interested in this, suck it up, prick your finger and put the blood in the machine because it’s going to be so much better information for you if you truly want to try this.

Ari: And obviously you're going to feel better for it.

Jimmy: Absolutely.

Ari: So, Jimmy, we’re coming up on the end of the interview here; this has been really amazing information for me, especially. I thought that I knew a lot of stuff about cholesterol but I didn’t know 1% of what I've learned from you. Now, you also do a podcast every weekday, pretty much, right?

Jimmy: Yeah.

Ari: Well, more than one podcast. You're a very busy guy. You’ve written books now and you're doing all these speaking engagements, I want to talk a little bit about productivity before we wrap up.

Jimmy: Sure.

Ari: What are the top three tips that you have or the things that you live by that make you more productive?

Jimmy: Don’t get bogged down by the [34:39]. That’s number one, more than anything else. I’ll get emails from people, they’ll say, aren’t you going to respond to this person that said something negative about you online? I'm like, no. Quite frankly, I don’t have time to mess with negative trolls that only want to bait me to take time away from the good things that I'm doing. In my estimation, I feel like all the things that I do is too important to get bogged down by the [35:09]. That’s definitely first and foremost. And then second I would say, take time for yourself. The beauty of what I do is I am able to work whenever I want to work and the flipside of that, not work when I don’t want to work. So, I take frequent breaks. Sometimes in the middle of the day I’ll just go out and do what I want to do: hang out in the sun, do those sprints that Mark makes me do; those kind of things and taking time for yourself and that’s extremely important. I think if you get too caught up in your work, too caught up in the day to day activity of, well, here's another day and I got to do this for 8 hours. No, break it up and I think that will make you a lot more productive at the end of the day. And then the last thing is something I just learned last year. A couple of my paleo buddies Diana San Felipo, Shawn Crockston, different fellow podcasters said, Dude, step away from the microphone because I was literally working every single day, every single week, 52 weeks a year, never taking time off/away. That was probably part of the reason why I was having trouble with a little weight gain; I was having trouble sleeping. It was kind of ironic that here I am trying to teach people about health and give them good quality information about health while my own health was kind of suffering as a result. So, I've now implemented time away. November and December this year, there will be no living la vida low carb, expert conversations, no blogging, no nothing. I am taking those two months off away from my work. I will be doing a little bit of work; I will be writing on that Keto Clarity book but other than that, pretty much nothing else. I think that’s important to not burn yourself out. I mean, I've been doing this nearly a decade now and not many people last that long, burning themselves out.

Ari: That’s a good point. Well, Jimmy, those are really great steps; this has been really amazing information. For everybody to check out the book it’s Cholesterol Clarity: What The HDL Is Wrong With My Number? It is available now on Amazon, right?

Jimmy: Yep. It’s on Amazon, it’s in Barnes and Noble stores; it’s everywhere books are sold.

Ari: The best place to find out about you is – I would normally ask the guest to say it but I love saying it so much – so it’s, livinlavidalowcarb.com, right?

Jimmy: That’s right or you just Google Jimmy Moore and I think the whole first page is all my stuff.

Ari: Yeah, great. Well, Jimmy, thank you again and keep those numbers in check.

Jimmy: Yeah, man. Always.

Ari: Alright, well Jimmy that was really awesome. I mean, I'm telling you. When I dig into health stuff, I like dig into it deep and I didn’t know nearly half, even 75% of this stuff that you shared. So, thank you.

Jimmy. Awesome. Always happy to help, man.

Ari: Yeah, so I will…. I think this will be posted hopefully in about a week and I’ll email it to you when it does.

Jimmy: Okay.

Ari: I can’t thank you enough for taking that time.

Jimmy: Hey, it’s my pleasure and I appreciate it and congratulations on your success. That’s really cool that you kind of parlayed that into educating people to. We need more people like you and me out there, man.

Ari: Absolutely, I try. I'm sorry, I just have one more thought.

Jimmy: Yeah.

Ari: You mentioned Mark Piston; I'm a huge fan of his as well and I want to interview him for the podcast. I know he’s real hard to get to.

Jimmy: Yeah, email me and I’ll copy him in and say he needs to go on your show.

Ari: Okay, that would be amazing. Thank you.

Jimmy: It’d be my pleasure, buddy.

Ari: Okay, well I hope to talk again at some point but good luck with everything and I’ll be in touch soon.

Jimmy: Thank you, kindly. I appreciate it, man.

Ari: Alright, take care.

Jimmy: Take care, bye.

Recording ends