Don't Die Early - Book

MikeFlyMike

I have become a bit of a book hound lately.
Reading everything paleo-ish I can get my hands on. While they pretty much all say the same thing, some are more scientific, some are more about exactly what is happening in your body.

Most recently I had read It starts with food. I really like their "don't be a baby" approach.
Somehow I stumbled upon, "Don't Die Early" - I think it was from a blog entry from the Fat Head website.

It is very technical. It is not a diet and really doesn't address that. It is about inflammation, diabetes, cardiac disease etc.
I am not done, but it is written by a guy just like me that as he got older, started to wear out (and he actually a cardiac scare) - then he took charge and found some real answers.

I am not done with it, but I just ordered 3 copies to give as gifts. Interestingly, if I give a "paleo diet solution" book to someone, I'm calling them fat. If I give them a book on cholesterol, diabetes, cardiac disease - it shows I care

My only possible complaint, it that it probably isn't for casual reading and gets very technical - far more that Sisson or Wolf does. Again, not telling me much of anything I don't know - but his perspectives on cholesterol testing is much more detailed than just "large fluffy ldl vs small dense ldl". He recommends testing your glucose first thing in the morning, then 1 hr and 2 hrs after each meal and tracking that for a week. He speaks about how by the time a person gets a "pre-diabetes" diagnosis, much damage has been done.

Anyway, just a recommendation for those wanting to up their lifestyle from diet to whole body management - he outlines several additional tests other than just a lipid panel.

http://www.dontdieearly-book.com/

caribougal

Interesting. I'll have to check it out.

When I had gestational diabetes, I did pretty much as you said. I checked my sugar when I first woke up (so fun to poke a needle in your finger first thing in the morning). I also checked before each meal, and then at 1 hour and at 2 hours. The goal was to see how high my sugar went at 1 hour, but more importantly, was it still going up at the 2 hour mark, or going down. Obviously, going down is better.

I learned... as a diabetic, my sugar was still increasing at 2 hours if I ate...
Bagels. No bagels. Not half a bagel. Not a bagel thin. Not a bagel with "protein" in the form of lox. The blood sugar always spiked.
milk.
Chinese or sushi. Amazing amounts of sugar added, as well as the sugars from rice.

I ate pretty clean because I was highly motivated not to have a big baby as a result of the diabetes, and not to have to manage my insulin with drugs if I could avoid it. I still ate carbs, and in fact learned that I could not go really low carb, at least then. When I went really low carb, my sugar would spike with any little bit of carb I had. It's like my pancreas freaked out and didn't know what to do when I went low carb. Of course, I only gave that a few days. I wonder what would have happened if I had given myself 2 weeks to let my body adjust. Actually, I wonder if I would have avoided gestational diabetes if I had been eating paleo when pregnant.

Thanks for the review, Mike.

her4g63

Definitely going to check this out -- thanks for posting (and your review)!

Cerebrus189

Great find! This one is next to read on my Amazon list. I have to get through Practical Paleo first though. I love the technical stuff. It's just a lot more substance and something I can sink my teeth into.