John, Author at The Progressing Pilgrim

The 10 Most Important Strategies I Used To Beat Chronic Fatigue Syndrome: Part 2

November 12, 2018 By John 3 Comments

For part one of this series click here.

I’m writing this post from my new home office in Raleigh, North Carolina. My family and I are almost finished moving in, and so far we’re absolutely loving Raleigh. The new home we’re renting is magnificent, the area is beautiful, and Raleigh has so many activities to enjoy.

Over the weekend I finished setting up my home gym. That meant I was finally able to get back to pulling some decent weight. I deadlifted 250 lbs x 4 at 158 lbs body weight. Since I hadn’t deadlifted since August 4, that wasn’t too bad. And more importantly, following my workout I experienced no signs of severe fatigue associated with myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS). [Read more…]

The 10 Most Important Strategies I Used To Beat Chronic Fatigue Syndrome: Part 1

October 29, 2018 By John Leave a Comment

I did it! I beat CFS! After suffering from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) for 28 years, I believe I’m finally healed. I know, I should be a little cautious about saying that because when a person with CFS starts feeling better, the crushing fatigue usually rushes right back upon them.

However, for a year now, I haven’t experienced the debilitating fatigue peculiar to CFS, and I haven’t suffered from any of the many symptoms associated with it. During the last year, I’ve strength trained 5 days a week, power walked most days, engaged in some high-intensity training, and moved my family to another state while experiencing no downtime because of fatigue. [Read more…]

One Scientifically Proven Way To Reverse The Aging Process

August 20, 2018 By John Leave a Comment

I remember when I was 15 years old thinking to myself, “If I live to be 65 years old, that means I’ll be around for 50 more years. Wow, that’s a long time!” When you were 15, 50 years seemed like forever, didn’t it?

We’ve all had these kinds of thoughts when we were young. Our bodies were strong and vital and we thought we’d never grow old. But years sneak up on us, don’t they?

At 40, you start to notice that you don’t recover from exercise like you used to. The aches and pains that disappeared after a few days now linger for months.

At 50, you realize that your body has definitely seen better days. Fifty-five brings a medicine cabinet that is starting to get populated with prescription meds for what our society calls lifestyle diseases. You know what they are: high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, high cholesterol, and even heart disease.

At 60, aging starts to become a concern. Maybe you notice it’s a little bit of a struggle getting up the stairs, maybe at times you forget where you put your car keys, maybe you hesitate to pick up your grandkids because your back isn’t as strong as it was 20 years ago.

Wow, isn’t this all kind of depressing? Is the best we have to look forward to a continuous descent into ever worsening physical decline? I mean, is a walker or a wheelchair or the assistance from a stranger just to go to the bathroom what we’re destined for?

No! It doesn’t have to be. In this post, I’m going to show you that it’s scientifically and empirically proven that we can delay the aging process or even, possibly, make our bodies young again. [Read more…]

Could Your Dish Towels Make You Sick?

July 30, 2018 By John Leave a Comment

If you’re a regular visitor to our site, you’re probably someone who wants your diet to be dominated by healthy, clean food. You want to eat food to be nutrient dense and free from plant toxins (gluten, lectins, etc.), free from poisonous chemicals (glyphosate), and free from nasty bacteria.

Sometimes, though, our efforts can be thwarted by something simple and completely unnoticed. For instance, since Barbara and I have a big family, are home often, and run a cooking blog, our kitchen gets really messy on a daily basis. That means we do a lot of cleaning up. [Read more…]

How To Use The MyFitnessPal App On Your Mobile Device

June 25, 2018 By John Leave a Comment

Disclosure: We received no compensation from MyFitnessPal or Under Armour for this post.

In a previous post, I showed you how to use the MyFitnessPal app to calculate your daily food consumption for a ketogenic diet. For Barbara and me, this app has been absolutely essential to our keto diet success story.

However, shortly after publishing that post, I realized that most of our friends probably use their mobile devices a lot more than a laptop. Unfortunately, the screenshots I used in that tutorial were from my laptop.

So, in order for you to experience the same keto diet success that Barbara and I have had, I thought it would be helpful if I put together a tutorial on how to use the MyFitnessPal (MFP) app on your handheld device too. [Read more…]

Our Keto Journey Part 5: Important Tweaks We Made For Keto Success

June 11, 2018 By John Leave a Comment

In previous posts, Barbara and I have talked about our goals and successes with the ketogenic diet. In my last post, I showed you the simple strategy we use to configure our macros for the diet.

You’re now familiar with what a keto diet is and how ketosis affects your body. You’ve established why you want to go keto (e.g.. weight loss, help in treating a specific health condition, or enhanced physical performance). And you’ve solved the mystery of macro calculation.

So now you’re ready to dive right into the keto diet, right? Well, not so fast. Slow down a bit.

You’re not going to just jump into a lake without knowing something about the depth of the water or its temperature. So it is with the keto diet. Even after knowing what your daily macronutrients should be, there are still several other important things about the Keto diet that you need to know.

You might have heard some of the horror stories from people who’ve tried keto. Some report that they experienced the dreaded “keto flu”. Others complain that their strength training suffered horribly, some are hungry all the time, and others complain that they just can’t find good keto recipes.

In this post, I’ll show you how Barbara and I avoided most of the problems associated with the ketogenic diet and how we quickly corrected a very annoying unexpected problem. [Read more…]

Our Keto Journey Part 4: How We Calculate Our Keto Diet Macros

May 28, 2018 By John Leave a Comment

In this fourth post in our series Our Ketogenic Diet Journey, I’ll give you a behind the curtains peek at how Barbara and I configured our ketogenic diet.

The keto diet with its amazing health benefits is finally becoming mainstream. More and more people are turning to the diet as an effective weight loss strategy and as an important means to help in the management of a variety of health problems.

However, a common criticism of the diet is that it’s extremely hard to configure and follow. I read on forums all the time people asking questions like: how many carbs can I eat? What should my maximum protein intake be? I’m eating a high-fat diet so why am I not losing weight?

People want to follow the diet. And they want the health benefits it confers, but they think it’s too complicated to follow and get right. But it doesn’t have to be. In this post, I’ll show you why. [Read more…]

Our Keto Journey Part 3: Defeating A Skinny Fat Body And Healing Chronic Fatigue Syndrome

May 14, 2018 By John Leave a Comment

This is part 3 of our series Our Keto Journey. In our last post, Barbara highlighted how a ketogenic diet helped her shed fat and is helping her guard against Alzheimer’s Disease. However, as I mentioned in this post here, not everyone goes keto for the same reasons. Remember, a keto diet is high in healthy fat, moderate in protein, and very low in carbs (<30 net grams /day).

In my case, I wasn’t overweight, but I did have a metabolically dangerous visceral fat issue that required I go keto. Also, since the keto diet has potent anti-inflammatory effects, I wanted to see if it was possible for the diet to get me over the last hurdle of recovering from chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS).

Let’s first take a look at my use of a ketogenic diet for my fat problem.

A recent report found that the obesity epidemic in the United States is continuing to grow to unhealthy proportions. This means that tens of millions of Americans will continue to be at a high risk for diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, metabolic syndrome, Alzheimer’s disease, and many types of cancer.

But did you know that there are millions of individuals who don’t look obese, who are technically not overweight, but who are metabolically obese? [Read more…]

Our Ketogenic Diet Journey Part 1: Keto Is Red Hot! Here’s Why

April 16, 2018 By John Leave a Comment

PURE study Barbara and I have been on a ketogenic diet for about eight months, and we’re absolutely amazed at the results. So far, I’ve lost 4 inches off my waist, I’m full of energy and I haven’t lost any muscle mass or strength. Barbara is also experiencing excellent results.

Now throw into the mix that we’re never hungry and it sounds like the perfect diet, doesn’t it? Well, no diet is perfect because we are all individuals with different needs. But if you need to lose weight, want to heal from a particular illness, or are an athlete looking to fuel your body in a more efficient way, the keto diet might be for you.

Barbara and I have similar but also different reasons for going “keto”. In this series of posts, I’ll tell you why we’re following a keto diet and how we’re doing it. [Read more…]

The Dangerous Definition Of Life In Star Trek: The Next Generation

January 30, 2018 By John 1 Comment

This week I watched another stellar (pun intended) episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation (TNG). I’m still new to TNG so most of these episodes are first timers for me.

Once again, I was stunned by the willingness of the writers to delve into questions that probe the very basics of humanity and morality. That’s something few movies or shows attempt to do today.

This particular episode (The Quality of Life), examined two important philosophical questions: how do we define life and is all life equally valuable? It may seem that these questions are better left to be discussed in the halls of academia. However, how you answer them can have crucial consequences in the real world.

Throughout history, the way societies have answered these questions have influenced views on slavery, civil rights, the equality of genders, and whether you’re pro-life or pro-choice.

Bravo to TNG for raising these questions for consideration. However, the way in which they answered them raises more questions than even they were prepared to deal with.

What is life and are all lives equally valuable? TNG answered both incorrectly. Let’s take a look. [Read more…]