Moving Targets, Part 1

Carb wars and hydration hydras.

It’s been a long time since I’ve written a technical nutrition piece, recently favoring more holistic broad social and process oriented commentaries. Largely this is because I’m beyond burnt out from the many contrarian zealots and lack of nuance and curiosity in the space. However, I did promise a few people a “Carb Wars” updated article several months ago.

Author, August 2022

I’ve made some pretty significant changes in my dietary practices over the last few months that are pointing towards some very interesting results and data.

I’ll assume that many others suffer from the decision fatigue of endless spreadsheets, graphs, and statistical figures thrown around by “experts” and “citizen scientists” alike. So, this Part 1 will focus on “narrative bracketing” for context and relatability purposes — while trying to avoid trademarked territorial pissing or dogmatism.

I’ll review, analyze, and interpret data in Part 2 next month.

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I’ll be 38 years old in May. For most of my life have been in the paleo-primal-carnivore or closely adjacent health spaces. What I will outline here is how and why I shifted from the Standard American Diet (SAD) growing up to lower and lower and eventually no carbs, then back to over 40% carbs again.

As far as I can tell, I have had a lifelong polymorphism (differential gene expression) regarding polydispia or a closely related thirst / fluid regulation condition. In short, I drink a lot of water (several gallons per day if not controlled). For most of my life this simply meant frequent bathroom trips, but throughout many dietary shifts in recent decades this became a multi-headed hydra.

Competitively, always being water-logged meant that cutting weight was easy, but had brutal and irrecoverable consequences if I wasn’t allowed to return to homeostasis. Day-before weigh-ins, no problem. Off-the-scale and on-the-mat, I’m dead before I started.

What this really meant, being water-logged, was that I had a ton of water on board but it was stuck between my cells (intercellualr) and not getting into the cells (intracellualr) where it needs to be to deliver nutrients and minerals (like electrolytes). So, when I sucked all the water out to make weight, no matter how fast I chugged it back I would still feel like a zombie stuck in mud. The water (and more importantly nutrients) were never going to get absorbed fast enough to be used in a match.

Despite my most diligent efforts scouring PubMed, most of the medical literature regarding diabetes insipidus (different than common diabetes mellitus) dismissively suggested either (1) get prescribed a synthetic anti-diuretic hormone, or (2) just chew gum or ice chips because “it’s all in your head.”

Unfortunately, this sort of pandering to the masses isn’t just a problem for endocrinology, but the American medical system abroad.

If I were to mention these issues to a health care provider, the entire physiological mechanism of increased blood pressure as crisis support to maintain cellular hydration would be dismissed. I would undoubtedly be chastised and reminded “that’s why salt, cholesterol, and saturated fat are bad for you!”

For the first 20+ years of my life I ate what most midwestern Americans did in the 90’s and 00’s: plenty of meat, but a ton of bread and past, “heart healthy” vegetable oils and margarine, frozen pizzas, occasional fast food, and snacks of chips, soda, etc. This was the prevailing “wisdom” of the day that still gets echoed endlessly by 3-letter agencies.

From a hydration perspective, this high carbohydrate load probably helped retain water fairly well via sodium-glucose linked transporters (SLGT proteins). Obviously though, there were harsh metabolic consequences.

In college (2006-2010) the competition went up, the weight cuts got harder, and my metabolism started to break (slow) down. As I started MMA and BJJ, I continued to run into the worsening weight-cut-paradoxes mentioned above.

Between 2012 and 2020 I had some dramatic ups and downs in life — as one does when trying to find their way in the world — and dietary practices were no exception to that. I always tried to stay close to primal / paleo way of eating. But, if you must know, yes, there was even a brief vegetarian stint around 2014.

After years of rock climbing, in 2019 I decided that I wanted to return to BJJ and needed to “get back to my fighting weight.” This lead me to the “keto” (ketogenic) rabbit hole before there were all kinds of trademarked “keto” fake-food and junk-snacks. Later, in 2020 I transitioned to a carnivore diet, just ahead of the curve before that idea took off in the general public as well.

In fact, my carnivore “experiment” was something that I expected to fail. But, as a good scientist, I needed to find out for myself. I needed to experience something if I was going to assert the authority to critique it.

To my surprise, even before outrage culture became endemic, the carnivore thing went really well, then it got better, and better still, then it didn’t, then it started to get worse.

I’m not going tot ell you it was a bad idea. In fact, that level of metabolic intervention was probably much needed to fix 25 years of bad dieting and hard partying.

However, a carb-less diet eventually left my adrenals slammed and recovery tanked. Most people are not training like competitive CrossFitters or fighters. If you’ve never seen or smelled the puke beside a boxing ring or pools of sweat on a wrestling mat, I’d urge you to listen a bit before lecturing. Go back and read my articles Carnivore and Carbs, Celebrate Differently, and River of Deceit.

In late 2022 I added fruit and honey back to my mostly meat-and-egg diet; a practice that eventually got dubbed “an animal-based-diet” — I was ahead of the trend and trademark title here too. This, ~20% carbs, put me in a metabolic gray zone. I was getting enough exogenous sugar for my adrenals to relax a little, but not enough to signal enough insulin production for my kidneys to start holding water in. I was also not low-carb enough to get the anti-inflammatory and fasting-mimicking benefits of a zero-carb diet.

Basically, my kidneys were in a constant high pressure flush because of the well documented low-carb fluid drainage (to flush urea) on top of pre-existing polydipsia. As a result my central nervous system (CNS) threw “clamps” on my arteries to try and maintain blood volume — obviously increasing blood pressure.

Without enough insulin and sodium the cellular gates stay shut and drinking all the water I could stomach just stayed in the “lobby” (interstitial) space between cells. This increases blood pressure because the water has nowhere else to go.

It’s a very common practice, and usually good advice, for low-carb athletes to heavily salt or use supplemental electrolytes like Re-Lyte or LMNT to meet their additional hydration needs. However, this is where the plot thickens.

My morphology — at 5’8”, 175-180 lbs, 7-10% body fat, high cholesterol, testosterone over 1,000, and 195 MHR — is the epitome of a lean-mass-hyper-responder (LMHR). This means that the standard “expert” health advice for a generally sedentary population is largely irrelevant. But, as we’ve discussed, the standard-non-standard low-carb / not-so-counter-culture advice also doesn’t apply.

I do have to add some additional behavioral context and admit to some folly on my part. I never drank coffee before 2010 or so. Between 2005 and 2018 I used nicotine regularly, usually in the form of smokeless tobacco. I mentioned “hard partying” above which included heavy alcohol use and recreational drug experimentation from 2007 - 2013. Alcohol use declined through 2020 when I stopped drinking altogether for about 2 years.

In 2024 my HbA1c was 5.6% which wasn’t stellar for someone eating virtually zero carbs for 2.5 years, and less than 20% for about one year on each end of that. This is sometimes called a pseudo-T1D state where cortisol is required to kick off gluconeogenesis, but in a system that is already HPA (hypothalmic-pituitary-adrenal axis) dominant over RAAS (renin-Angiotensin-Aldosterone system) insulin secretion is suppressed so the sugar just sits in your blood instead of being pushed into muscle / brain tissue.

In my specific case, without sufficient insulin signaling the kidneys don’t get the message to reabsorb sodium; leading to a massive flush of fluids. It’s possible that my body was craving external vasoconstriction (via pharmacology) to “tighten the pipes” and maintain blood volume while my adrenals let off the gas.

For last year’s ADCC Atlanta Open (a grappling competition) I started using Zyn (nicotine) again to tamp down my appetite. For the rest of the year (2025) usage increased and I admittedly played a little too lose and fast with cheat meals. After a couple regular blood donations the Red Cross flagged my blood pressure at 174 / 97. My BP has always been slightly elevated (~140 / 80), but this sent off major red flags and alarm bells in my mind.

I tried to ignore the alarm for a while, but then started to get short of breath while teaching BJJ. Obviously, it’s difficult to breathe and talk “normally” when demonstrating; but this was different — it felt like a 2-minute scramble.

Where this gets even more complicated is that stopping all nicotine use, cold turkey, in December 2025 alleviated the shortness of breath but did not change my blood pressure. This points back to the earlier HPA-RAAS problem and the likelihood of mild non-amphetamine stimulants acting as structural crutches.

I realize this is a very atypical puzzle and I’m not writing any of this to claim expertise or give advice. I’m simply documenting a process of exploration. The “ancestral health” space writ large used to pride itself on nuance, bucking the establishment system, being anti-dogmatic, and challenging conventional narratives, but ironically has become exactly what it loathes.

I want to do the opposite and stay true to the principles of investigative science from the bottom up; not from trying to prove assumptions and ideologies from the top down.

I still have to collect a couple more weeks of data and crunch the numbers, but I’m reminded to reflect on health and “biohacking” books that were ahead of their time; or at least ahead of the iPhone and Hollywood writer's’ strike whence all creativity seemingly died.

In 2010 Robb Wolf published “The Paleo Solution.” At that time, “target ketogenic” and “cyclic ketogenic” diets, as well as “protein fasting” (50% protein diets for cutting) were quite trendy on Bodybuilding.com forums. That same year Tim Ferris published “The 4-Hour Body” which featured a “slow carb diet” — not something I totally agree with, but also not far off from what I’m finding 15 years later.

To sum up for today, Mark Sission’s 2009 “The Primal Blueprint” offers some immortal advice to chew on via “Primal Laws:”

• Eat lots of plants and animals (things that grow).

• Avoid poisonous things (things that don’t grow).

• Move frequently at a slow pace.

• Lift heavy things.

• Sprint once in a while.

• Get adequate sleep.

• Play.

• Get adequate sunlight.

• Avoid stupid mistakes.

• Use your brain.

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