I enjoy experimenting with my diet, as my umpteen posts on the subject illustrate. I learnt the term ‘bio-hacking’ recently, and I suppose I am low level doing that in my quest to feel the best I can feel. What I like the most, is seeing the variety of ways my body responds to different foods, positive and negative. I wish more people would do it: figuring out the best clean diet for yourself, plus adequate exercise, is simple preventative healthcare. The more you read about nutrition, the more you realise how shaky the foundations of this field are. For starters, most nutritional studies are observational studies, rather than interventional ones. This means that they rely on people self-reporting what they eat, and also cannot properly account for other factors in a person’s life which may be impacting on the results. So when they say ‘eat your leafy greens’, they aren’t
Despite my earlier commitment to stick with the carnivore diet for a full three months, I reluctantly started adding plants back in to my diet a few weeks ago. I got a spot/zit, and as that is a novel experience for me (I rarely get them, not even when I was a teen), I behaved like I was twelve and picked it. This resulted in a strange hypertrophic scar which persisted for a couple of weeks, something I have never experienced before. This suggested to me that I was deficient in something, likely the vitamins E and/or C. So, I reluctantly started adding in some plants to my diet. I genuinely felt incredible eating only animal-based foods. To recap, my mood was significantly improved (to the point that people asked me if I was high, to which I replied: HIGH ON MEAT!), my tendonitis, joint stiffness, and muscle tension went away
It has now been one month since I started this carnivore diet experiment to see if I could resolve all the histamine related issues I was experiencing and improve my overall health. So I thought I would continue with my dietary oversharing in case someone finds this experiment useful and needs encouragement to try. To start with the downsides, I still haven’t resolved the part where I am obsessively meal planning, but I am definitely getting better at knowing how much to eat. My main problem was breakfast as, other than fry ups at the weekend, I have only had smoothies or amaranth porridge for breakfast for years. Given that I can’t eat egg whites and don’t seem to tolerate huge amounts of pork, I was really stuck for breakfast ideas until I a) discovered bresaola, and b) decided to just be wasteful with egg whites. So, now I have 3
It has now been 18 days since I ate any fruit or vegetables, except for the occasional use of olive oil and some experimentation with seasonings (e.g. thyme or paprika). Everything about this experiment has been delicious and my only regret is blueberries. As I said a couple of posts ago, I started on this experiment because I was sick of feeling sick all the time: heartburn, indigestion, stuffy sinuses (and corresponding face puffiness), insomnia, low mood, eczema, and asthma. I wanted to see if this ultimate of elimination diets would help, and it has! The indigestion and asthma cleared up the minute I stopped eating fruit and vegetables, and the eczema soon after. The heartburn was markedly better immediately, but it took about ten days to fully dissipate. My sleeping and mood have mainly been good, and my nails are significantly stronger. Finally, my blood pressure and resting heart rate are
I have written previously about my dietary changes in response to a borderline insulin resistance test result, so I thought I would post an update on where I am on this journey. As you can see from that graph, my weight kept dropping until I hit 52.5kg, at which point I got scared. That put me in the underweight category in terms of my BMI; more importantly, my sleep became affected and I was definitely losing muscle mass in my quads. The theory of low carb diets (by which I mean eradicating cereals, grains, sugars, and starches from your diet), is that by replacing them with nutritionally dense foods we will eat less. The reason being that we get more bang for our buck with every egg, steak, and chicken drumstick we eat. Our bodies need less food because everything we put in it has a lot of what it needs,