This is beginning to look a lot like an adaptation system to environmental food availability. Perhaps in our pursuit to avoid experiencing any negative feelings ever, we have optimised unavailability out of our diets - but our biology is built to run on EITHER fuel A or B, not both.
Perhaps crudely speaking we are awkwardly flip-flopping, burning inefficiently all the time as the machine never quite settles into one or the other.
Yea I think that's quite literally what happens. The mitochondria hate context switching.
I'm not sure if this is genetic or "natural" or a consequence of e.g. PUFAs. The French Paradox Diet and other historical/even ancestral anecdotes seem to tell us that people used to be able to swamp pretty heavily with no downside.
I lean towards 'variable consequences of PUFAs' - the most successful weight-loss protocol i've ever tried was 'swamp taters' - 50% potatoes, 50% oil. So clearly the swamp doesn't bother some of us. But what does? Well some of us can't handle fructose or (iso)leucine/casein.
Yeah I got a selfdecode report recently, and dairy wasn't the greatest thing for me. It would explain some stuff despite my love of cheese and such and no visible allergy issues with cheese or other low carb dairy things.
That reminds me - Americans often report rapid effortless weight loss vacationing in Europe (where PUFAs are less abundant) whilst keeping a superficially similar diet and exercise level.
Yet there is still excessive and increasing obesity in Europe and there hasn't been quite the same scope of industrialised diet poisoning, though many of the companies operate in both places.
I wonder if all the stuff we talk about are triggers or exaggerating factors but there may still be more that are unknown.
Canola is quite mild on the PUFA scale: it's got relatively low total PUFA (~30%, vs sunflower at ~20%, soy at ~55%, corn at ~55%) and a relatively friendly n-6:n-3 ratio at 2:1 (vs sunflower at 128:1, soy at 7:1, corn at 58:1). But Euros also plant their fair share of "rapeseed", so maybe we're just having it at the same level to begin with. (There's also the issue of "high-oleic sunflower" being less bad on the PUFA scale, ugh.)
I do agree on the random shit front though. Mono/diglycerides, which appear to be very boring chemicals on the surface, have been linked to insulin resistance in mice, for example. Which is a shame, because they are pretty useful emulsifiers.
Worked very well: ~8 lbs down in 2.5 wks that stayed off when I returned to ad-lib, low-protein low-PUFA eating. It was a fasting-adjacent experience. Appetite largely vanished, focus shifted away from food, and I could feel that most of my energy was coming from bodily stores. Calculated calories a couple times and there were days I ate ~1000-1600 kcal. Enough carb from the potatoes for necessary glucose functions and enough fat to induce the cement truck feeling.
I expect it to work again but the difficult part is the first few days, getting into the crash-diet / fasting-adjacent mindset. What I think of as "weight loss mode."
Right now I'm eating vast amounts of protein and all the low-PUFA food I can get outside of. Post-surgery hunger is incredible.
Indeed I have, it's a good model and things could perfectly well work that way. I'd say it was more a homeostat than a reservoir, with a restoring force for deviations in either direction.
I have some thoughts (in particular, precisely because there's no place to put an explicit set point it doesn't explain why healthy men and women have different natural fat levels, or other animals for that matter), but I've just started consulting for a few months and I want to "hit the ground running", as it were, so I'm going to go dark for a bit!
I do feel I owe Amber a critique. I'll at least try to ask her some interesting questions on reddit next time I feel like staring at screens recreationally, as it were.
It's a total personality replacement experience. Every so often I go from penniless unemployed boat-pikey who only gets up for lunch, to expensive hypercompetent energetic early bird who gets taxis everywhere because it's more cost-effective, and then back.
I can never decide which one is actually me. I even used to quite like wearing a suit, but these days that just makes you look desperate so at least I don't have to buy a whole new 97kg wardrobe and can just wear my civvies.
I'm currently trying to park all my current interests, shift my sleep cycle four hours earlier, and become single mindedly obsessed with my client's problem. I can't imagine I'll be writing many essays in the next few weeks. I'll make new graphs occasionally though. And it's difficult to imagine totally losing interest in 'Why the hell am I suddenly turning into a space hopper?'. See you in a few months!
"..there is an idea of a John Lawrence Aspden, some kind of abstraction, but there is no real me, only an entity, something illusory, and though I can hide my cold gaze and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable: I simply am not there."
Very interesting post. I was vegan/ vegetarian for 20 years and felt my best following the "starch solution". However, I think over time, my body needed animal protein and fats. Now I am eating lots of animal protein, fat and very low carb. I appreciated your last post too about the way all of these ways of eating become a extreme because of people getting too obsessed with them being the only way. Looking forward to reading your next post
Yea I think a lot of people on r/SaturatedFat are onto something when they take The Starch Solution and add a little bit of beef and beef fat/dairy fat back.
Most people don't need very much protein, but you do need some. And the correct fat mixture is good for hormone health etc. and I think beef is among the best protein and fat out there. (Or other ruminants, too.)
I can't really do pure vegan starch type stuff, but I've found adding eggs and such makes it far more sustainable. IMO I think the asians might be on to something.
Yea I wonder. If I go from 115g beef to 0, even with protein equivalent from protein powder, I go nuts in 4-7 days. It just doesn't feel right. Maybe something to a minimal amount of animal foods. But yea the amount might be quite small.
Jewish kugel is a traditional baked casserole-like dish popular in Ashkenazi Jewish cuisine. The dish has a few main variations: it can be sweet or savory, and it’s usually made with noodles or potatoes.
Noodle Kugel (Lokshen Kugel): This version is made with egg noodles and is often baked into a sweet dish with ingredients like eggs, sugar, cinnamon, vanilla, and sometimes even raisins or apples. The result is a slightly sweet, rich, and custardy texture with a golden top.
Potato Kugel: A savory version, this kugel resembles a potato casserole or even a dense potato pancake. It’s usually made with grated potatoes, onions, eggs, salt, and pepper, then baked until the top is crispy. It’s especially popular during Passover, when dietary restrictions limit leavened foods.
Hm I guess it would be nearly 0 on the fat side. I'm not sure how he'd split up the rice vs. sugar/fruit, which would determine if it's 0-10% protein. Do you have any detailed reports on his diet? Did he leave notes?
I"m certain that there is information of Dr Kempner's behaviors in the internet. However, you could DM Tucker Goodrich as he is the curator if a lot of that kind of information.
The Brits have it, it's called double cream. Very thick & almost solid. Mascarpone is similar. Unfortunately both are rare & expensive here, so haven't done as a staple.
Nice! Incidentally Reddit u/Sunfried says you can add more fat to the cream by introducing butter:
“Unless using the Double Cream by itself rather than in a mixture, such as pouring it over pie or cake as a kind of rich condiment (and a decent way to try to save dry cake, as cake is usually dry when it's too low in fat), you can use melted butter to make up the difference in fat.
“Many recipes that use cream do so with an eye to making a mixture, and making that mixture richer; if you spot a recipe that has a mix of cream and milk, it's a dead giveaway that they're trying to split the different in terms of overall milkfat, and you've got a recipe that can be adjusted in richness either by cranking up the cream content or dropping it down to mostly or all milk. See every cream sauce or soup ever. In those recipes, you can substitute heavy cream for double cream and just use more cream:milk than the recipe calls for, or just cope with the minor loss of milkfat. In such cases, it's generally just good enough to add some kind of milk+cream with the right liquid volume; such recipes will also work with whole milk (4% milkfat) alone at a cost of some richness. Use skim milk at your peril; the recipe has some level of milkfat in there for a reason.“
Thanks to you and the people commenting, I now know I eat at the macro-level 10% fat, roughly 60% carbs and 30% protein. Am I in the rabbit starvation area, or low-fat carbo club? I am not as smart as all of you, guys.
Also, thanks to your questions I realize what I do fat-wise is to choose food items with 3 grams of fat or less per serving, that is why I could not square off macros with my 3% now debunked proposition. Is not %, you JS idiot, is grams!
Lastly, I am wondering if the common thread among all the various areas is reducing drastically highly processed foods. From the potato diet, to low fat (if you do it right and no go crazy vegan), to keto and everything in between, there is an avoidance of highly processed stuff. I have just a non-scientific hunch that if you eat less processed foods (ingredients found at home, mostly), overall your weight management becomes easier.
But what do I know? Not much.
Thank you again! Still waiting for my Omega Quant testto arrive, I will report back once I know!
I'd call that low-fat, pretty-high-carb, high-protein. If it works depends on how well you do on protein. Presumably you don't feel on shit, which is why you keep doing it?
Symptoms that you should probably lower your protein intake include: headaches, indigestion/constipation, high fasting glucose, being bloated. (Although most of these could also come from other reasons.)
If you don't have those, great. You probably don't need as much protein and could add some more carbs, but the excess protein is just converted into glucose anyway, so it's neither here nor there.
Maybe not too different from a bodybuilder diet of chicken breast & rice with broccoli?
Highly processed foods is probably necessary to avoid, but not sufficient. When I gained 100lbs back eating pretty strict keto, I was home-cooking 99% of my own meals. Fresh ingredients like ground beef, broccoli, butter, fancy cheese.
On the other hand, plenty of people seem to have success with "processed" foods like refined flour and sugar. Now maybe these aren't ultra-processed, but certainly more processed than ground beef & broccoli?
Of course your control over food becomes much much greater when you don't eat food somebody else made for you, so your point is certainly correct that it becomes easier.
So in absence of "don't eat at the gas station" I don't find processing to be a super helpful variable.
Carnivore, which many live on for years (even though it's probably best as a curative/reset/elimination diet) is about 50/50 protein fat, zero carbs, give or take 10% on either side.
The triangle is not crystal clear to me, but looks like it would say Carnivore is either "rabbit starvation", or "too much protein". Nope, and Nope.
50/50 would be an extreme high-protein or low-carolie version of carnivore. Almost nobody can sustainably do this, which is why the guy who did it (OG carnivore Steffansson) got sick from it.
Most carnivores do 70/30 I'd say.
Of course this is skewed if you consciously restrict your carolies but keep absolute protein the same, which will make your diet look higher % in protein.
Thanks. I prolly screwed up numbers or confused gms vs. calories.
FWIW, I personally did v. well on basically a ribeye a day — per USDA numbers, 500g cut has roughly 100g protein, 100gm fat… so 400 calories protein, 900 calories fat.
Yea grams vs calories is always tricky haha. 50/50 by weight you're probably right - since the "lean" is mostly water and fat has 9carolies v.s 4 in brotien, you end up much higher.
Did you eat anything besides the ribeye? That's only 1,300kcal, which is about 1/3 of my TEE. I would have to eat 2.5-3 ribeyes unless I supplemented somehow, e.g. with butter/cream.
What are your thoughts on a diet that includes mostly fat from dairy, carbs from honey, and no protein except that found in dairy? Something on the lower end of the swamp. I assume that this isn't supposed to work, so I haven't been doing it, although it's the only diet I find sustainable. It's my understanding that the latest honey diet (anabology, not McInnes) relies on still having a low fat meal. It reminds me a lot of "raw til 4," and I failed with those kind of diets (fruit until dinner, low fat dinner) because I don't have much tolerance for fruit, it makes me very sick when eaten without fat. I also fail with carnivore because I don't do well with lots of protein. I can't really do a lean beef dinner, and no vegetables. However, I'm fine with honey, I'm fine with coconut oil, tallow, and dairy, especially cream and high fat cheeses. I can try only honey, or only cheese, but I suspect that I'll be missing something without one or the other. I don't know if doing a Randall cycle rotation between the two will work the way that switching between fruit/honey and lean beef/veggies does.
Incidentally, my spouse did a mostly heavy cream diet for a few years prior to 2020, and liked it. He just drank coffee with pure heavy cream (no thickeners) all day, and had one meal with a little fatty steak. He didn't realize this was anything special, just doing what he found palatable on keto. He lost a lot of weight (>100#), but never really got "thin" doing it (still around 250).
Haha your spouse could be me ;) That's pretty much exactly my diet.
Re. the dairy diet, would you be eating the dairy throughout the day with the honey, or as a replacement for the lean beef meal at dinner?
I'd say it could definitely work with the dinner variety, because you'd still have a 12-18h "honey (moon heh) phase" at night and into the morning.
If you mix the dairy in during the day, I'm not so sure, it might depend on the amount of dairy though.
I say, try it, be very strict, take lots of notes. Worst case it didn't work & you wasted a month, but now you know. If you do try it, please let me know how it goes :)
Absolutely love this and appreciate it. This is my space. The world loves neat and tidy, absolutes. Black-and-white. But it never is! This is truly beautiful and it reminds me of a rare gem that I saw presented at a conference on behavior change where the speaker created a Venn diagram with all the behavioral change theories. Truly splendid. It speaks to our complexity and originates from N=1.
Fascinating as ever.
This is beginning to look a lot like an adaptation system to environmental food availability. Perhaps in our pursuit to avoid experiencing any negative feelings ever, we have optimised unavailability out of our diets - but our biology is built to run on EITHER fuel A or B, not both.
Perhaps crudely speaking we are awkwardly flip-flopping, burning inefficiently all the time as the machine never quite settles into one or the other.
Yea I think that's quite literally what happens. The mitochondria hate context switching.
I'm not sure if this is genetic or "natural" or a consequence of e.g. PUFAs. The French Paradox Diet and other historical/even ancestral anecdotes seem to tell us that people used to be able to swamp pretty heavily with no downside.
But not entirely certain either way.
I lean towards 'variable consequences of PUFAs' - the most successful weight-loss protocol i've ever tried was 'swamp taters' - 50% potatoes, 50% oil. So clearly the swamp doesn't bother some of us. But what does? Well some of us can't handle fructose or (iso)leucine/casein.
Maybe "0% protein, 50% carbs/fat each" is actually out of the swamp. Open question to me as I haven't tried it, and not many others have either.
Strange thing is, though, that not only do potatoes have protein in them, I also used a little bone broth in (and cheese on) the au gratin.
Meanwhile I struggled to have any positive effect from the dairy version(s) of ex150. Doing great on butter, tallow, beef, and beef broth so far.
Yea dairy might just be a thing that some people can't do in large quantities :( Anecdotally it sure seems that way.
Yeah I got a selfdecode report recently, and dairy wasn't the greatest thing for me. It would explain some stuff despite my love of cheese and such and no visible allergy issues with cheese or other low carb dairy things.
Hash Browns Diet sounds delicious!
That reminds me - Americans often report rapid effortless weight loss vacationing in Europe (where PUFAs are less abundant) whilst keeping a superficially similar diet and exercise level.
Yet there is still excessive and increasing obesity in Europe and there hasn't been quite the same scope of industrialised diet poisoning, though many of the companies operate in both places.
I wonder if all the stuff we talk about are triggers or exaggerating factors but there may still be more that are unknown.
It could be because the US defaults to soybean and corn oil, whereas Europe seems to prefer sunflower oil?
I guess we also have canola here, which is rapeseed.
I do also think we put more random shit into our food in general, so if one of the random shits is bad, we'll have more of it, more widely spread.
Canola is quite mild on the PUFA scale: it's got relatively low total PUFA (~30%, vs sunflower at ~20%, soy at ~55%, corn at ~55%) and a relatively friendly n-6:n-3 ratio at 2:1 (vs sunflower at 128:1, soy at 7:1, corn at 58:1). But Euros also plant their fair share of "rapeseed", so maybe we're just having it at the same level to begin with. (There's also the issue of "high-oleic sunflower" being less bad on the PUFA scale, ugh.)
I do agree on the random shit front though. Mono/diglycerides, which appear to be very boring chemicals on the surface, have been linked to insulin resistance in mice, for example. Which is a shame, because they are pretty useful emulsifiers.
Exactly as I've been visualizing it all this time! Never got around to drawing it up so it's nice to actually see in writing.
My latest round of rapid weight loss was swamp taters also: potatoes + butter + chocolate, roughly even caloric split between carb and fat.
Planning another trial after I recover from surgery, and if it works a second time I'll do a write-up.
Oh, and that worked? So low-protein swamp is not "in the swamp?"
That's very interesting. Looking forward to the writeup.
Worked very well: ~8 lbs down in 2.5 wks that stayed off when I returned to ad-lib, low-protein low-PUFA eating. It was a fasting-adjacent experience. Appetite largely vanished, focus shifted away from food, and I could feel that most of my energy was coming from bodily stores. Calculated calories a couple times and there were days I ate ~1000-1600 kcal. Enough carb from the potatoes for necessary glucose functions and enough fat to induce the cement truck feeling.
I expect it to work again but the difficult part is the first few days, getting into the crash-diet / fasting-adjacent mindset. What I think of as "weight loss mode."
Right now I'm eating vast amounts of protein and all the low-PUFA food I can get outside of. Post-surgery hunger is incredible.
Hope you recover quickly!
Tangential, but I'm curious: Why limit the visualisation to the gridpoints? You could show the exact place of your diet if you go off it.
Honestly, not really a reason, that's just how I did it. Good point.
A very nice way to visualize it all!
Thanks!
PS: Have you read Amber's latest post at https://www.mostly-fat.com/2024/10/spontaneous-fat-loss-vs-caloric-restriction-2/ ?
Explains setpoint vs. settling point well.
Indeed I have, it's a good model and things could perfectly well work that way. I'd say it was more a homeostat than a reservoir, with a restoring force for deviations in either direction.
I have some thoughts (in particular, precisely because there's no place to put an explicit set point it doesn't explain why healthy men and women have different natural fat levels, or other animals for that matter), but I've just started consulting for a few months and I want to "hit the ground running", as it were, so I'm going to go dark for a bit!
I do feel I owe Amber a critique. I'll at least try to ask her some interesting questions on reddit next time I feel like staring at screens recreationally, as it were.
Ah, consulting! Don't forget your consulting face.
Did years of it.
It's a total personality replacement experience. Every so often I go from penniless unemployed boat-pikey who only gets up for lunch, to expensive hypercompetent energetic early bird who gets taxis everywhere because it's more cost-effective, and then back.
I can never decide which one is actually me. I even used to quite like wearing a suit, but these days that just makes you look desperate so at least I don't have to buy a whole new 97kg wardrobe and can just wear my civvies.
I'm currently trying to park all my current interests, shift my sleep cycle four hours earlier, and become single mindedly obsessed with my client's problem. I can't imagine I'll be writing many essays in the next few weeks. I'll make new graphs occasionally though. And it's difficult to imagine totally losing interest in 'Why the hell am I suddenly turning into a space hopper?'. See you in a few months!
"..there is an idea of a John Lawrence Aspden, some kind of abstraction, but there is no real me, only an entity, something illusory, and though I can hide my cold gaze and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable: I simply am not there."
Very interesting post. I was vegan/ vegetarian for 20 years and felt my best following the "starch solution". However, I think over time, my body needed animal protein and fats. Now I am eating lots of animal protein, fat and very low carb. I appreciated your last post too about the way all of these ways of eating become a extreme because of people getting too obsessed with them being the only way. Looking forward to reading your next post
Thanks!
Yea I think a lot of people on r/SaturatedFat are onto something when they take The Starch Solution and add a little bit of beef and beef fat/dairy fat back.
Most people don't need very much protein, but you do need some. And the correct fat mixture is good for hormone health etc. and I think beef is among the best protein and fat out there. (Or other ruminants, too.)
Yes, eating beef has really helped me!
I can't really do pure vegan starch type stuff, but I've found adding eggs and such makes it far more sustainable. IMO I think the asians might be on to something.
Yea I wonder. If I go from 115g beef to 0, even with protein equivalent from protein powder, I go nuts in 4-7 days. It just doesn't feel right. Maybe something to a minimal amount of animal foods. But yea the amount might be quite small.
YOu don't sneak a bissell of kugel once in a while?
Ha, ha….Not really. What about you?
it's not on my menu these days. Maybe I should consider savory ones as opposed to sugary ones. either way....verboten.
HEres one that might move into the low carb category.
https://www.bing.com/images/search?view=detailv2&iss=sbi&FORM=recidp&sbisrc=ImgDropper&q=Rezept%20Zitronen-Nougat-Kugeln%20a%20la%20Mozart%20lowcarb%20glutenfrei%20keto&imgurl=https://th.bing.com/th?id=OSK.25342457b8f45bd6f199d02c2f4d98b4&w=459&h=459&c=7&rs=1&qlt=80&o=6&cdv=1&pid=16.1&idpbck=1&sim=4&pageurl=72dfde2414250bdb056020d674dcb03f&idpp=recipe&ajaxhist=0&ajaxserp=0
lol what is that I googled it but didn't find anything.. a cake?
https://themom100.com/recipe/noodle-kugel/ this may help.
So sort of a... sweet noodle casserole..cake?
yes
Jewish kugel is a traditional baked casserole-like dish popular in Ashkenazi Jewish cuisine. The dish has a few main variations: it can be sweet or savory, and it’s usually made with noodles or potatoes.
Noodle Kugel (Lokshen Kugel): This version is made with egg noodles and is often baked into a sweet dish with ingredients like eggs, sugar, cinnamon, vanilla, and sometimes even raisins or apples. The result is a slightly sweet, rich, and custardy texture with a golden top.
Potato Kugel: A savory version, this kugel resembles a potato casserole or even a dense potato pancake. It’s usually made with grated potatoes, onions, eggs, salt, and pepper, then baked until the top is crispy. It’s especially popular during Passover, when dietary restrictions limit leavened foods.
CARBO!
Dominatrix diet. thank you Dr Kempner.
I was wondering anyone might think how DR Kempner in place.
Hm I guess it would be nearly 0 on the fat side. I'm not sure how he'd split up the rice vs. sugar/fruit, which would determine if it's 0-10% protein. Do you have any detailed reports on his diet? Did he leave notes?
I"m certain that there is information of Dr Kempner's behaviors in the internet. However, you could DM Tucker Goodrich as he is the curator if a lot of that kind of information.
Turns out there's a book on him and the diet! I've ordered that. Also a bunch of studies I'll have to check out. He's an interesting guy for sure.
GO FOR IT!
in any non hardcore keto diet, it is hard to get less than 30% of kcal from fat
running my numbers.... I just don't see it
Yea pretty much by definition, if you eat <30%kcal from fat it's not gonna be keto?
Or maybe I'm missing the point?
Have you attempted a substitution of EAAs as your only protein source with high fat?
Yes: https://www.exfatloss.com/i/146262151/experiment-exilervalr
Great visualization. Isn't your diet high in cream and thus high in casein? Or is there a cream with it removed?
High in cream yes, but not so much casein. Cream only has about 2-3% total protein, including the whey and casein.
Honestly I wish there were a way to create a “super cream” that had double the fat content of normal cream.
Like half and half, but the inverse.
Cream is just so, so, so delicious
The Brits have it, it's called double cream. Very thick & almost solid. Mascarpone is similar. Unfortunately both are rare & expensive here, so haven't done as a staple.
Nice! Incidentally Reddit u/Sunfried says you can add more fat to the cream by introducing butter:
“Unless using the Double Cream by itself rather than in a mixture, such as pouring it over pie or cake as a kind of rich condiment (and a decent way to try to save dry cake, as cake is usually dry when it's too low in fat), you can use melted butter to make up the difference in fat.
“Many recipes that use cream do so with an eye to making a mixture, and making that mixture richer; if you spot a recipe that has a mix of cream and milk, it's a dead giveaway that they're trying to split the different in terms of overall milkfat, and you've got a recipe that can be adjusted in richness either by cranking up the cream content or dropping it down to mostly or all milk. See every cream sauce or soup ever. In those recipes, you can substitute heavy cream for double cream and just use more cream:milk than the recipe calls for, or just cope with the minor loss of milkfat. In such cases, it's generally just good enough to add some kind of milk+cream with the right liquid volume; such recipes will also work with whole milk (4% milkfat) alone at a cost of some richness. Use skim milk at your peril; the recipe has some level of milkfat in there for a reason.“
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskCulinary/comments/8z78ue/what_is_the_us_equivalent_of_double_cream_where/
I've actually bought milkfat powder (=dehydrated cream) before but it tasted disgusting and burned, like UHP milk.
This is excellent, thank you very much. There is no one size fit all, and there are many ways of achieving metabolic health.
I used your handy-dandy visualizer and came up with this (https://drive.google.com/file/d/1CK234bozuLC09Uihebygme6RdMhS19vy/view?usp=sharing), and I am not quite sure what to make of it.
Thanks to you and the people commenting, I now know I eat at the macro-level 10% fat, roughly 60% carbs and 30% protein. Am I in the rabbit starvation area, or low-fat carbo club? I am not as smart as all of you, guys.
Also, thanks to your questions I realize what I do fat-wise is to choose food items with 3 grams of fat or less per serving, that is why I could not square off macros with my 3% now debunked proposition. Is not %, you JS idiot, is grams!
Lastly, I am wondering if the common thread among all the various areas is reducing drastically highly processed foods. From the potato diet, to low fat (if you do it right and no go crazy vegan), to keto and everything in between, there is an avoidance of highly processed stuff. I have just a non-scientific hunch that if you eat less processed foods (ingredients found at home, mostly), overall your weight management becomes easier.
But what do I know? Not much.
Thank you again! Still waiting for my Omega Quant testto arrive, I will report back once I know!
I'd call that low-fat, pretty-high-carb, high-protein. If it works depends on how well you do on protein. Presumably you don't feel on shit, which is why you keep doing it?
Symptoms that you should probably lower your protein intake include: headaches, indigestion/constipation, high fasting glucose, being bloated. (Although most of these could also come from other reasons.)
If you don't have those, great. You probably don't need as much protein and could add some more carbs, but the excess protein is just converted into glucose anyway, so it's neither here nor there.
Maybe not too different from a bodybuilder diet of chicken breast & rice with broccoli?
Highly processed foods is probably necessary to avoid, but not sufficient. When I gained 100lbs back eating pretty strict keto, I was home-cooking 99% of my own meals. Fresh ingredients like ground beef, broccoli, butter, fancy cheese.
On the other hand, plenty of people seem to have success with "processed" foods like refined flour and sugar. Now maybe these aren't ultra-processed, but certainly more processed than ground beef & broccoli?
Of course your control over food becomes much much greater when you don't eat food somebody else made for you, so your point is certainly correct that it becomes easier.
So in absence of "don't eat at the gas station" I don't find processing to be a super helpful variable.
Very nice visualization.
Thanks!
What's a bodybuilder to do? Powerlifter? Velocity diet? Stan Efferding -- all are either too much protein or swamp.
This doesn't work prima facie.
What?
+1 for "carbo" :-)
+1 for "ketard" :-)
-1 for absence of explicit carnivore mapping. :-(
Carnivore, which many live on for years (even though it's probably best as a curative/reset/elimination diet) is about 50/50 protein fat, zero carbs, give or take 10% on either side.
The triangle is not crystal clear to me, but looks like it would say Carnivore is either "rabbit starvation", or "too much protein". Nope, and Nope.
Final Score: +1.
50/50 would be an extreme high-protein or low-carolie version of carnivore. Almost nobody can sustainably do this, which is why the guy who did it (OG carnivore Steffansson) got sick from it.
Most carnivores do 70/30 I'd say.
Of course this is skewed if you consciously restrict your carolies but keep absolute protein the same, which will make your diet look higher % in protein.
Thanks. I prolly screwed up numbers or confused gms vs. calories.
FWIW, I personally did v. well on basically a ribeye a day — per USDA numbers, 500g cut has roughly 100g protein, 100gm fat… so 400 calories protein, 900 calories fat.
Yea grams vs calories is always tricky haha. 50/50 by weight you're probably right - since the "lean" is mostly water and fat has 9carolies v.s 4 in brotien, you end up much higher.
Did you eat anything besides the ribeye? That's only 1,300kcal, which is about 1/3 of my TEE. I would have to eat 2.5-3 ribeyes unless I supplemented somehow, e.g. with butter/cream.
What are your thoughts on a diet that includes mostly fat from dairy, carbs from honey, and no protein except that found in dairy? Something on the lower end of the swamp. I assume that this isn't supposed to work, so I haven't been doing it, although it's the only diet I find sustainable. It's my understanding that the latest honey diet (anabology, not McInnes) relies on still having a low fat meal. It reminds me a lot of "raw til 4," and I failed with those kind of diets (fruit until dinner, low fat dinner) because I don't have much tolerance for fruit, it makes me very sick when eaten without fat. I also fail with carnivore because I don't do well with lots of protein. I can't really do a lean beef dinner, and no vegetables. However, I'm fine with honey, I'm fine with coconut oil, tallow, and dairy, especially cream and high fat cheeses. I can try only honey, or only cheese, but I suspect that I'll be missing something without one or the other. I don't know if doing a Randall cycle rotation between the two will work the way that switching between fruit/honey and lean beef/veggies does.
Incidentally, my spouse did a mostly heavy cream diet for a few years prior to 2020, and liked it. He just drank coffee with pure heavy cream (no thickeners) all day, and had one meal with a little fatty steak. He didn't realize this was anything special, just doing what he found palatable on keto. He lost a lot of weight (>100#), but never really got "thin" doing it (still around 250).
Haha your spouse could be me ;) That's pretty much exactly my diet.
Re. the dairy diet, would you be eating the dairy throughout the day with the honey, or as a replacement for the lean beef meal at dinner?
I'd say it could definitely work with the dinner variety, because you'd still have a 12-18h "honey (moon heh) phase" at night and into the morning.
If you mix the dairy in during the day, I'm not so sure, it might depend on the amount of dairy though.
I say, try it, be very strict, take lots of notes. Worst case it didn't work & you wasted a month, but now you know. If you do try it, please let me know how it goes :)
Absolutely love this and appreciate it. This is my space. The world loves neat and tidy, absolutes. Black-and-white. But it never is! This is truly beautiful and it reminds me of a rare gem that I saw presented at a conference on behavior change where the speaker created a Venn diagram with all the behavioral change theories. Truly splendid. It speaks to our complexity and originates from N=1.
How have I never heard the term “ketard” 😂😂😂😂😂😂
I can say that cause I am one :D
I used to be! I just don’t know how I’ve never heard that lol, it’s hilarious! 😆