I have struggled with weight loss for the majority of my life, including through childhood. At the age of 11, I was 5’4” and 180 lbs. with a 38” waist. I was round. With lots of exercise and a growth spurt, by the time I was 13 I was 5’7” and 140 lbs. and a 32” waist, in the best shape of my life.”

But in my late teens, I started to put on weight again and, try as I might, I could not stop gaining weight for years. Almost every diet I tried “worked immediately” and then, still following the diet, my weight would start increasing again! No matter how much I was starving myself at the time!

It was dreadful and utterly soul wrenching. I have done so many diets too: from the First Personal Diet to the Atkins diet, Eat Right for Your Blood Type, the diet based off the book 7 Principles of Fat Burning, I was vegetarian for 6 months, didn’t eat red meat for another year following that, I’ve cut out gluten and dairy in multiple different ways, I did the HCG Diet (homeopathic version), Plant Paradox, I’ve worked with different doctors and nutritionists on a correct diet, having handfuls of natural supplements to take with my meals, I’ve done cleanses where I only drink pre-made vegetable juices for 3 days and 5 days, I’ve done the diet where you only drink the cayenne pepper drink (water, cayenne pepper and lemon juice with a little bit of maple syrup) for days on end. I won’t say I’ve done every fad diet, because there have been so many, but I have done a vast majority of them.

Last August, I topped out at 332 lbs. Fortunately, I happen to know Bob Graves, the founder of eSavvyHealth. While I wasn’t particularly going to him for health advice, when we would talk, the subject came up as he was developing what is now available on the website. I started applying bit by bit the data we discussed.

While under “COVID lockdown” last year, from August to October of 2020, I lost 17 pounds, simply eating healthier, and doing minimal exercise. Then came the challenge, Thanksgiving and the Christmas season holidays! I actually ate whatever I wanted through the time, but keeping in mind the simple principle of eating food, not too much, mostly plants. While I indulged myself during the actual holidays, on my day to day eating, I was mostly not eating processed carbohydrates. I didn’t weigh myself at all through the holidays, so the test came on January 4th when I again was face-to-face with my scale.

From October to then, I had not gained a single pound! In fact, I was one pound lighter! I decided I was going to learn more about what is working and continue it. I did the Carbohydrate Wars lessons and have used the data therein to further home in on my eating habits, and I’ve increased the amount of exercise I do weekly. In the last 2 ½ months I have lost another 27 pounds, a total of 45 pounds since beginning this newest journey. And it is staying off.

I celebrated my birthday a month and a half ago, in the middle of this venture, and I had a wonderful cheesecake, full of sugar, carbs and all the “bad things” in it. But I had one slice, on my birthday, then went back to eating well. It didn’t slow down my weight loss journey! I am decided to get to my ideal weight (200 pounds, so still have 87 to go) and I am well on the way.

What I feel is most beneficial about the eSavvyHealth is the information on different foods and what produces the excess fat being stored and how to take that energy and use it. I no longer “diet,” I simply eat healthy based off of what works for me. Yes, I count my “net carbohydrates.” Why? Because it is what works for me. And yeah, maybe I try to eat closer to the ketogenic diet, but I have lost this weight while eating bread, rice, and other things that definitely do not follow the keto diet.

In the words of William Ernest Henley, “It matters not how strait the gate, How charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul.”

– O.L.

I grew up on a dairy farm and our family lived on milk, butter, meat, garden vegetables and blackberries we picked down by the creek. Now, though, it seems that food choices are becoming more important. I have friends who are vegetarian, lactose intolerant, gluten free. My wife eats only organic food, and filters all our drinking water. My daughter is vegan and eats nothing that comes from an animal. One of my friends did a cleanse, another went on a 70-day fast. Inviting people to dinner can be a nightmare!

So what’s important when it comes to healthy food, and what should someone who’s over 60 and health-conscious do? I started talking to people and looking on the Internet for answers. Medical doctors have very little training in nutrition, it seems. They are mostly interested in you when something goes wrong. My cardiologist told me my cholesterol was a bit high and said I should take a statin. “I could tell you to change your diet,” he said, “but nobody does, so take these pills, and get them refilled at the pharmacy.”

I was referred to eSavvyHealth by a friend and took a short online class in blood sugar. I didn’t know much about the subject except that my father had type 2 diabetes and he had to test his blood frequently and watch what he ate. The class was easy to understand, unlike some of the things my doctor told me, or the results of my lab tests.

But I took the class and found out that blood sugar has a lot to do with all kinds of health issues. Not only diabetes, but stroke, heart disease and plenty of other things. Almost everything you eat ends up as sugar in the bloodstream, and once you understand blood sugar, there is plenty you can do about it in order to stay healthy and avoid ending up slumped in a wheelchair watching nursing home TV.

And even though I had been told I should lose some weight, exercise more and that sort of thing, I never quite got going on it. Like the cardiologist told me, nobody really wants to change his diet, and nobody wants to exercise or change his diet. But that class gave me an understanding of what was going on in my body and it all made sense. A doctor can tell you to do something, but unless you understand why, it can be a struggle and doesn’t really stick.

I’ve got a lot of things I want to do yet, and I now understand some very important data about health that will help me live a longer happier life. – W.H.

A little over two years ago, I was out shopping with my wife when I began to feel uncomfortable. It started out like stomach gas, but soon just felt like increasingly heavy pressure in my chest. I’d generally eaten reasonably healthy food, or at least so I thought at the time, and gotten a fair amount of exercise. I weighed pretty much what I thought I should. So the obvious answer didn’t occur to me for about 15 minutes. When it did, I decided to drive to the nearest ER, which was, as it happened, 2 minutes away.

Three days later I came out of triple bypass surgery, ordered urgently by my cardiologist because an angiogram had revealed a high level of blockage in three coronary arteries.

Now, although this was rather disconcerting personally, it is not all that unusual an event for a 68-year old guy. Could have been much worse. But then it started getting really interesting.

Following the surgery, my cardiologist put me on a statin as a matter of course. I wasn’t happy about it, but it seemed to me that I wasn’t in a position to argue. However, after a couple of months I started experiencing blurred vision, and told my doctor I wasn’t going to take the statins anymore. He wasn’t happy about it, but he wasn’t really in a position to argue. (Subsequently, as it happened, I determined that the blurred vision was probably due to something else.)

During this period of time something else was going on. For quite a while I’d been having weekly breakfasts with a friend who has a very strong background in both nutritional science and publishing. He suggested some books he thought I might benefit from. I started reading them, although pretty slowly.

Fast forward to my next doctor visit. After being off the statins for a few months, my cholesterol had gone back up into the range it had been before my heart attack, about 240, at a “dangerous” level. My doctor now wanted to put me on another drug whose injections cost $1K per month. (Yes, $1,000 per month!)

So now I had to do something. The first thing I did was finish reading the books my friend had recommended, and I came out stunned. In a nutshell: The prevailing explanation of the cause of heart disease and its remedy (statins) was full of huge holes. Many “scientific” medical and drug studies aren’t scientific at all. A fair amount of the food I’d been eating my whole life that I thought was healthy, wasn’t. And the punchline: in the U.S., the fields of corporate agriculture, food manufacture, pharmacology, and medicine have been so corrupted by vested interests that there are few trustworthy sources of information.

That’s a lot to swallow, and I’m not asking anyone to believe it because I’m saying it. But I did apply what I’d learned. Based on what I’d read, I made substantial changes to my lifestyle and diet, I enacted a very specifically targeted supplement regimen; I even changed my job. (None of these changes, by the way, were aimed specifically at lowering my cholesterol level.) After four months of that came my next doctor visit.

A few days before the visit I had a lipid panel done (cholesterol test). I couldn’t wait to see the results, but I had to wait anyway, because the testing company wouldn’t show them to me until my doctor had seen them (what’s THAT about?). So, I’m sitting in the doctor’s office and he comes in, opens my folder, his eyebrows raise, he hands me a sheet of paper and says, “What did you do?”

My cholesterol had dropped 80 points, nicely into healthy range. (And, by the way, I felt better than I had in years.)

I told him what I’d done. He said, “Well, actually it’s impossible to reduce your cholesterol more then 15% by diet” (in spite of the fact that I’d just reduced it by 1/3). I just looked at him. Then he said, “I guess you’re the exception that proves the rule.”

I’ve never understood the logic of that particular expression, so I asked him what it meant. He said, “It means that the fact that the rule doesn’t apply in your case means the rule is true.” He wasn’t joking.

Now, this is a bright guy, with a reputation of being one of the best cardiologists in Southern California. But it was clearly impossible for him to get his head around an apparently effective approach to heart disease that didn’t fit the prevailing theories.

Since then I’ve been doing well. I’ve dropped 20 pounds, I exercise rather vigorously almost daily, my energy is generally at a level I haven’t enjoyed for decades. And my cholesterol is still looking good, with no statins or any other drugs other than a daily mini aspirin.

I was so impressed by what my friend had done for me simply by helping me get better educated that I decided to help him on a project of his: starting a company to do the same for others. Laws related to health privacy keep me from identifying myself, but you can probably figure it out. I truly hope others can have successes like mine. – D.H.

For decades, I’ve had the idea that I have basically healthy habits. In regard to diet, I’d make adjustments from time to time – sometimes vegetarian, sometimes not, for example. Sometimes I would completely avoid something I had decided was “bad” – e.g., coffee, sugar, fried foods, dairy products.

Even though I had changing attitudes about what I ate, I never thought about them deeply. I never got sick, was always active, slept just fine. I didn’t smoke, drink or do drugs. How serious could any of this be?

Things changed in my mid-60s, when I unexpectedly developed the first real medical problem I’d ever had in my life. I was determined to do whatever I could do to get past it, and the more I read, the more I encountered viewpoints about the relationship between diet and everything from diabetes and heart disease to cancer.

At first glance, this might seem like a positive development, a door opening onto something I could do to take control of my situation – at least in part. However, instead of feeling relieved, I began to feel more agitated. It was very important to me to do the right thing, but deciding what the “right thing” might be became a problem in itself.

There were just too many viewpoints about what, when and how much to eat. It might have been easier if all I cared about was losing a few pounds – but that’s not what I wanted. I wanted to find a road that led straight to wellness.

No matter how much their viewpoints contradicted each other, all the nutritional “experts” who were offering me advice were supremely confident that I’d be making a mistake if I didn’t do as they said. How could they all be right? Or wrong?

I’d still be trying to answer that question, and becoming more and more frustrated, if I hadn’t encountered eSavvyHealth. It helped me gain the perspective I needed to make my own decisions, pointing me to the basic concepts that I could use to make a plan that was right for me.

Instead of feeling that I had more and more rules to follow, I felt more and more free as I became better able to identify the things that truly matter. I found an approach that is right for me. I’ll never know for sure exactly how my health will be affected – no one could promise that – but I do feel certain that I’m making the right choices.

With a strong foundation, you can build any house you like. Without it, whatever you build will crumble. I have the foundation that I need now, and I am enjoying being creative and adaptable in regard to what I do with it. There are unlimited possibilities! – C.S.