A PHD or proper human diet for me.
One of the main things iv’e yet to work out is what to do long term for my diet after I fall off the end of my experiments with differing eating regimes in my OMAD (one meal per day) and TWOMAD (two meal days) experiments. while useful for speeding up my weight loss i’m not sure that either are viable as long term solutions – i’m thinking in terms of what would work for the next 5 years or so.
My dietary changes so far :
I joked when I gave up biscuits that McVities management board must have had a crisis meeting when their profits suddenly declined overnight – from what iv’e learned biscuits are the big player when it comes to snacks and comfort food. What isn’t a joke is that alongside my high biscuit consumption i’d become the fat poster boy for the standard English/American diet as I was not only at the point of being overweight where overweight becomes actual obesity but I was hypertensive and had suffered a series of minor strokes as a consequence. I would add now that I was already experiencing the effects of visceral fat signalling with an uncomfortable bout of prostatitis and had an earlier brush with inflammatory arthritis in my hands. The new arthritis in my hands, which literally crippled my grip, seems to have been directly related to seed oil spreads such as sunseed oil, rapeseed soil and others that end up in commercial spreads claiming to be butter replacements because they are healthier – yeah right.
I made my first significant dietary changes after experiencing the depression and weight gain following my minor strokes ; the first part of that was the simple act of removing most extraneous sugar from my diet – mainly in the form of the obvious suspects (biscuits and cakes). Within the first few weeks i’d also learned enough to ditch the sweet fruit bread I tended to have as an evening snack and later on most toasted bread. These small changes plus restarting my walking routine got me from my highest weight ever (110 Kg) all the way down to 95 Kg but then the weight loss suddenly stopped and I wavered around the 93.5 to 95 for several months while I tried to work out what was happening.
The only other thing I tried and which I find it valuable to mention in a blog is the practice of fasting and intermittent fasting. With what I now think of now as a full fast was usually around 36 hours in duration and I was up to the point of fasting once a week most weeks. Intermittent fasting in the form of time limited eating – I used a 16/8 pattern – I tried for several weeks until I realized that my stalled weight loss might have been due to having more snacks during that eating window and that realization made me have a complete rethink about my weight loss diet and my conclusion was that I needed to do one thing in the short term to break my weight loss stall and then something maybe entirely different in the long term.
The two fast fixes ; OMAD and TWOMAD.
For October and November I experimented with the two most radical forms of intermittent fasting, starting with a one meal per day routine, and no snacks, then a 2 meals per day routine and once again with no snacks. I went into the first month with a starting weight of around 95 Kg give or take some water retention and continued with my walking routine of 7500 steps per day. As I write i’m only in the first few days of my experiment with one meal per day and it’s effects look promising already.
When I look around the internet and come across the strange views about what OMAD and TWOMAD actually mean I find it best to explain what I do with either so :
My OMAD routine is what it says on the tin – one meal only – but that meal will include one extra dish, for example either a light starter or a dessert and never both. It also means that I do that eating within a 1 hour window and spend the next 23 hours in a fasted state. Today for example my partner could smell that my breath was already ketotic at around 15 hours in and that’s the same as what happens during a longer ( 24 + hour) fast.
My experiments with those two forms of intermittent fasting seem to need a separate post – in fact I already have one up on the blocks as a draft right now. In this post I want to focus more on working towards long term solutions as OMAD certainly isn’t but something close to TWOMAD might be…..
The rocks and shoals of long term dietary changes.
My long term solution to diet and nutrition seems at first to be more about working out what i’m not going to do, avoiding the various diet tribes nonsense and somehow navigating the narrow way ahead. At times it feels a lot like what Dr Peterson said about making meaningful progress in any endeavor : that it’s almost never a straight and linear course but is likely to have lots of bouncing off the corners and veering from side to side.
Having been giving the subject so much thinking time during my daily walks I first came up with terms for each of the many and various dietary traps that are out there – like the rocks and shoals of an inshore sailing passage around western Brittany – as with that part of the sailing world though most of the rocks and shoals are well marked enough to allow safe passage :
Trap 1 : The commercial food trap – starting with the idea of breakfast.
In my weak analogy of comparing my health journey with my last significant journey under sail I would compare the dangerous rocks and reefs covered by the huge lighthouse at Ile Vierge as the huge and obvious pile of sugar and sugray snacks that even the ideologically captured dietitians warn us about. It’s the main one that was clearly making me sick and overweight and led directly to the series of strokes I had due to my sugar/carb addiction and it’s immediate result – hypertension.
Probably the best place to start is with the very idea and content of a breakfast in the UK and I guess much of the western world. I don’t know what a normal breakfast consisted of before 1894 but in that year a certain Mr Kellog released a toasted corn cereal onto the market and the product was rapidly joined by competing ones and quickly gained the addition of sugar to make it more appealing and palatable. The problem, or at least one problem, with those kinds of cereals is that the high sugar load plus their own carbohydrate content causes a huge Insulin spike just at the time our bodies don’t need it and in most people the consumption of cereals causes hunger which is usually assuaged by buying and consuming purpose made more high carbohydrate snacks – nice one Kelloggs !
Commercial capture of food like product accounts for about 80% of what our local supermarkets sell : most supermarket aisles we can simply ignore once we’ve browsed the vegetable and meat aisles – even then I prefer the greengrocer and butcher in town.
Trap 2 ; ideological capture of the diet and nutrition narrative.
The next major rock in the fairway is what I call the ideological capture of thought and acceptable (correct) opinion about foods and most notably about meat and saturated fat. i joke about low fat supermarket karen because that is such a tired cliche that is fundamentally wrong. What I found less funny was when one of the TV channels used a whole load of metabolically sick individuals to show us how bad were ultra processed food and how good a green low fat plant based diet would be : I’m looking at you Tim Spector. There was a complete sneer implicit in those programms and the hard wired assumption that saturated fat in diet automatically equated to arterial disease – I think it’s the carbs that does that in most cases. I agree wholeheartedly that ultra processed food like product is a huge problem and is making a lot of people metabolically sick and overweight but please oh please Channel 4 please quote the actual science.
The small rock right next to the huge one of ideological capture is the psuedo religious moral grandstanding of the Vogons (Vegans). Veganism has very little to do with a proper human diet and/or human nutrition but has always seemed to be a kind of middle class moral pose by highly neurotic people – sad to say mainly women-people. Some of you will know that my last healhcare job was in Endoscopy ; I only joke that half our patients were arseholes – what I mean is that half of our workload was Colonoscopies. I once asked our senior gastro consultant what he thought about a Vegan diet and the summary of what he said was that it isn’t a proper human diet because we don’t come already set up with a Vegan gut ; our gut structure is simply not long enough which is why we are mostly opportunistic omnivores – or should be.
The rock marked tribes and personal bias.
The last rock at this end of the fairway looks similar to the one marked ideological capture only this one is marked with tribal symbols and I refer to it as tribal capture of our thinking when it comes to food. The first tribe I have to mention is the Vogon tribe and the second is the Carnivores : of the two I would rather try to argue with the latter. In my experience the Vegans are somewhere beyond being able to have sensible discussions and their beliefs are expressed more in terms of quasi religious moralistic grandstanding rather than anything to do with nutrition.
So, I don’t think I need to eat Corn Flakes ever again (my preference was Rice Crispies !), nor do I need to start the day with toasted fruit bread : in fact it’s looking like I don’t need breakfast at all. It’s possible that the very idea of a modern breakfast is a form of ideological or cultural capture : very freeing to just dump the whole idea in the bin alongside the packs of high sugar breakfast cereal. I’m gradually moving away from the need to eat at all in the morning, iv’e been experimenting with eating just one meal per day (OMAD) and when I do a similar experiment with TWOMAD the first meal of two won’t be until around mid day and it won’t be sugar enhanced carbs although I haven’t quite decided what it will be.
When I do start experimenting with a two meal routine iv’e already worked out that the first meal of the day is one that allows me to stay in ketosis thus a meal with very low or no carbohydrates. At the moment i’m thinking simple ommelette with cheese and bacon. Meal two will still be the main one, taken with my partner as a normal evening meal as I think it essential that we share meals – it’s also a lot easier to cook that way. Again, what that will be I don’t know but it’s likely to start out as the normal kind of evening meal I usually prepare ; not specifically keto or low carb although mindful of both.
It seems wise also, to acknowledge what has worked so far and see if there is anything of what I do now that I can point to as definitely having an effect. The first ‘take’ from everything that iv’e done thus far is that it’s either reducing in my diet or taking things away that has worked ; subtraction rather than addition of anything new. I’m coming around to the idea that it’s the daily chunk of time that I have no insulin signalling going on that I can metabolize visceral fat and as I can get several hours a day doing that with a one meal routine that’s good reason to run with an OMAD routine for longer : if it proves effective than I would run with it until such a time as I feel that I need a break and then…..take a break.
The final obvious hazard in the fairway is the rock that sits there all round,smooth,smug and arrogant ; if it has a name then it would be named quite simply dietary perfection although I happen to believe that any attempt to achieve such a thing is self defining as next to impossible. It’s a slow frustration of mine that there isn’t a single way of knowledge about diet and nutrition that isn’t hotly contested by the tribe that you haven’t become a part of just by having slightly different beliefs and I hope knowledge. Every tribe now can turn to some internet expert that can back up your story so you can almost always rely on confirmation bias to bolster your view even if that view doesn’t make any form of sense to someone else or their tribe.
Human nutrition should be relatively easy to work out – after all we’ve had about a quarter of a million years to get to grips with it – but we obviously haven’t. It might be as keto Psychiatrist Georgia Ede says basically simple in broad terms of all humans needing the same few things from nutrition but then a lot more difficult when it comes to dealing with the effects of food (or food like products) on human health. This was even true in the simple world of normative human health and gut health as seen through the lens of an endoscope. When I worked in that department, especially when I took my turn in the recovery department where one of our tasks was to talk through patients endoscopy reports the answer was so often that we couldn’t detect a problem visually and yet the patient was definitely experiencing a gut or digestion related problem.
On that note i’ll sign off and go have a nice biscuit !
My best wishes to Y’all.
