Refining the plan

It's been said that you learn more from your failures than you learn from your successes. My recent failure to adhere to my dietary plan has taught me a lot.

First, societal pressure is evil. An individual should never be forced to alter their desires to please the masses. I'm fairly certain people hold parades to make this exact point.

Second, diet is far more important than people imagine. I realize there are countless books, scientific papers, websites, and other sources proclaiming the importance of diet. But I don't think they go quite far enough. Diet is everything. It is the foundation of your entire life. It is far too important to be politicized, commercialized, or subjected to the whims of mass hysteria.

Third, "N=1" experiments are the only valid source of information. This comment contradicts scientific protocol which says a good experiment should have a broad database rather than a single instance. But diet does not work that way. For example, oysters are a good source of several valuable nutrients. But any dietary plan that recommended eating plenty of oysters would be deadly to many people. The only way to find what diet works for you is to experiment on yourself. Throw away the books. Turn off the internet. Try something different. If you are fat, lethargic, even if you are physically healthy and just feel your psyche isn't working right; change your diet. Experiment on yourself because no book can tell you what will work for you. Try going full carnivore. Try getting all your food in one or two big, closely-spaced meals rather than several small meals throughout the day. Try something new. And stick with it for at least a month.*

Fourth, small changes won't tell you anything. "Cutting back" on sweets won't make enough of an improvement to tell you if sweets are your problem. You have to go to the extreme. Completely eliminate everything you think might be a problem. Even eliminate things you don't think are a problem. I thought for years that my body tolerated dairy fairly well. Until I cut milk from my diet completely. Now the only dairy I seem to tolerate is aged cheese. Even yogurt upsets my system. Going to the extreme was the main motivation for my carnivore plan. And it worked.

The fifth thing I've learned is specific to the carnivore lifestyle. Variety is the key. I absolutely love meat. So being a carnivore isn't a big change. But even I have difficulty eating a sufficient quantity of a single meat. Plus a single source may not give you all the nutrients you need. When I started I was eating beef, poultry, and fish at each meal. But I have a hard time finding fish I like. So I've dropped fish from the plan, Each meal includes a pound of beef. I never get tired of it. Sometimes I make a meatloaf which ends up being more than a pound. The meatloaf always contains something else with the beef. Typically I use ground pork. But I have used ground lamb with good results. That's part of the variety. My meal last night included twenty ounces of turkey breast to go with the pound of beef. I did have a banana and some raw almonds as well. So it wasn't a fully carnivorous meal. But close enough for now. The point here is that eating two pounds of beef is not the same as eating a pound of beef and a pound of turkey.

Most of these lessons just reinforced what I already knew. But sometimes we need to be reminded of things. So now I have a renewed sense of purpose and a new drive to follow through with the plan. We'll see where I go from here.

*The recommendation to try something new comes with a caveat. Learn to recognize when your body is happy. And take it seriously when it tells you it is unhappy. The internet is full of people who have stuck with goofy diets even while their health continued to decline. Your body does not get worse when you start eating right. There is no "detox" period or withdrawl symptoms. If you make a change and start to feel worse then the change you made was wrong.

Carnivore update

Well, I strayed from the path. I dropped all the way down to 293. That's the first time in a decade I've been below 300. And it was more than a thirty-pound change. That's a huge improvement for such a short span. But I let cockiness and social pressure ruin me.

The cockiness came in the form of me deciding that I had started something magical. I began thinking that the weight would keep coming off even if I cheated a bit here and there. Of course, one bad food choice won't ruin a good diet. And that's the problem. You make one bad choice, suffer no ill consequences, and decide the choice wasn't so bad after all. So that choice gets repeated. Before long you are right back eating what you were before. Neanderthals did not eat Doritos or ice cream.

The social pressure is the same as ever. We went to a couple parties with friends. It is rude to go to a friend's house and not eat what they've prepared. And when there's beer and various "treats" laid out for consumption it becomes nearly impossible to avoid it. Especially when combined with the cockiness I just mentioned.

So now I'm back up to 303. I've been sleeping poorly. I've had no energy. And my psyche has been nihilistic. The amazing part, to me at least, is that even with everything I know about the effects of grains I still chalked up my issues to everything but my diet. I started to believe it was just "getting old". Or maybe I had caught some sort of bug. I actually believed that I was still eating "good enough" to at least maintain what I had achieved. I ignored my own advice about the stupidity of the "80/20 rule".

The good news is that I finally snapped out of it. I'm back to nearly full-carnivore. The only non-meat I've eaten the past two days is a couple bananas and some raw almonds. Just two days back on track and I'm already feeling better and sleeping better. Assuming I can stay on the path this time, I expect to be below 290 within a month.