Diet
I've been on a keto/carnivore diet for the last 4 months where I eat high fat and very low carb. I have to say this diet is working great for me so far. I eat mainly fatty meat (e.g. ribeye), eggs, and cheese. I don't count calories and eat as much of them as I want.
I've lost around 25lbs so far (from 185 to 160) on this diet. I'm pretty much at my ideal weight currently and I now just need to maintain it. It's worth noting that I lost all this weight without any changes to my activities. I didn't exercise more.
The first 20lbs I lost within the first 10 weeks quite effortlessly. It's pretty amazing that a diet like this works so well. I never get tired of eating fatty food and I find myself having more consistent energy throughout the day and I feel much more alert.
I also don't get hungry as much. Most days, I only eat 2 meals a day. When I used to eat a lot more carbs, I'd sometimes get headaches due to low glucose so I had to snack, probably because my brain and body were used to using glucose for energy. On a keto diet, the fat gets used as fuel instead and I have plenty of fat stored. When I'm hungry, I now crave fat and salt instead of carbs and sugar.
I also avoid seed oils (aka "vegetable oils") as much as possible as they're supposed to be quite toxic. The book Deep Nutrition is what made me take this very seriously. It was really surprising to find out how seed oils are pretty much everywhere. Anything that's processed/packaged likely contains them. Even packages of roasted almonds that you'd think to be pretty healthy contain them (I look for raw almonds instead).
The main things I follow are basically these:
- Avoid seed oils as much as possible (e.g. canola oil, sunflower oil, corn oil). I use mainly grass-fed butter or tallow for cooking. This also means I avoid eating most processed/packaged foods as most will contain them.
- Eat very low carbs and sugar.
- Eat lots of fats and protein (eggs, cheese, meat).
- Eat bone broths (lots of collagen, I make my own most of the time with a pressure cooker and have some Kettle and Fire bone broths stocked up as well when I can't make them).
- Try to get some sun every day (no sunscreen) and/or take vitamin D3 supplements.
- Intermittent fasting at least every other day (16-hour fast + 2 meals within an 8-hour window) to increase insulin sensitivity and fat burning.
One thing that I want to improve is the quality of the food that I eat. Organic eggs are quite easy to find in my supermarket but it's harder to find grass-fed/finished beef which is supposed to be healthier and contains more nutrients. I might have to order these online to make sure my beef came from a reliable source. I recently found out about the website beefinitiave.com which I plan to try out.
As I get older, health is something I think a lot more about now. I used to not care about the quality of food I ate at all. I thought it was silly that people would pay more for organic stuff when the non-organic stuff tastes just as good or better. But as I learned more about nutrition, I started to really care. I'm now mindful of everything I put in my body.
There's still a lot to learn. I'm constantly doing research and reading books. It seems to me that a lot of health problems can be fixed by diet. If you take a lot of medications, chances are you can get rid of most of them if you fix your diet. Even if you have to pay more for high-quality, nutrient-dense food, you'd probably end up saving more long-term from medical bills. Not to mention that you'll have a more enjoyable life when you're healthy as you'll just feel better. Fixing your diet could easily be the most important decision you'll ever make in your life.