Haven't been doing food logs in a bit because I was overseas for a couple weeks and coming back taking pictures of my meals was beginning to feel a little neurotic. At this point, and it may change if I find I blow up to 300lbs not tracking it as closely, I know what I should be eating for optimal health & appearance. Fairly simple, really, despite my tendency to over research everything.
Eat: Animal Protein [meat, eggs, fish, fowl, dairy], Fruits, Vegetables, Nuts & Seeds, Tubers/Root Vegetables
Avoid: Sugar, Grains & Processed Vegetable Oils
Carb restriction & cycling for optimal fat loss/body composition. 6 days on/1 day off.
Supplements: pre-workout, multivitamin pack w/fish oil & protein powder
Supplements: pre-workout, multivitamin pack w/fish oil & protein powder
So, basically, Primal/Paleo/Ancestral Health Diet-ish. Some good summaries below, some lengthier than others, much more info at the links, if so inclined.
What’s The Paleo Diet? | Award-Winning Paleo Recipes | Nom Nom Paleo: "The Paleo tent is big enough to fit a host of different approaches, but the core tenets of ancestral eating remain the same: Eat whole, unprocessed, nutrient-dense, nourishing foods. Prioritize grass fed and pastured meats and eggs, wild-caught seafood, and vegetables. Enjoy fruit, nuts, and seeds in moderation. Avoid foods that will harm us by causing systemic inflammation, wrecking our guts, or derailing our natural metabolic processes. Abstain from toxic, pro-inflammatory foods like gluten-containing grains, legumes, sugar, and the laboratory-concocted Frankenfoods found in the middle aisles of your neighborhood supermarket."
Archevore - Archevore Diet: "The Archevore Diet - A pastoral whole foods diet that can improve your health by more closely emulating the evolutionary metabolic milieu (EM2) and avoiding the hazards of industrial foodways. This diet is a practical framework using whole foods easily available in the 21st century. It is designed to be as universal as possible. The average person who adopts it in preference to the standard american diet should be healthier in every respect, and will usually settle at a more optimal body composition spontaneously. The diet minimizes putative neolithic agents of disease (NADs) and ensures adequate micronutrition. The diet is designed to be healthy and sustainable as long as you are alive and to offer plenty of satisfaction, while minimizing food reward effects that lead to overeating. Historically, many find this diet results in spontaneous reduction in caloric intake and in health-improving fat loss, with no measuring, weighing or special supplements. I eat this way myself, of course.There is no counting, measuring, or weighing. Calories count, but why bother counting?
1. Get plenty of sleep and deal with any non- food addictions...
2. Eliminate sugar and all caloric drinks...
3. Eliminate gluten grains and wheat flour. No cake, cookies or pastries. No bread or pasta, whole grain or otherwise. This rule and rule #2 pretty much eliminate anything that comes in a box. White rice and whole meal corn products are reasonable sources of starch if tolerated, but not as nutritious as plant storage organs (root vegetables).
4. Eliminate seed oils - grain and seed derived oils (cooking oils) Eat or fry with with ghee, pastured butter, animal fats, or coconut oil. Avoid temperate plant oils like corn, soy, canola, flax, walnut, etc...
6. Whole foods from animals. Eat them for the protein, the micronutrients and the fuel. Favor grass-fed ruminants like beef and lamb for your red meat. These meats have excellent n-6/n-3 ratios and their saturated and monounsaturated fats are a great fuel source...
7. Both animal fats and starchy plant organs are time-tested fuel sources for humans. Animal fats are an excellent dietary fuel and come with lots of fat soluble vitamins. It can work very well to simply replace your sugar and wheat calories with animal fats. If you are not diabetic and you prefer it, you can eat more starch and less animal fat. A low carb diet can rely more on ruminant fat and pastured butter. Plant storage organs like potatoes and sweet potatoes are nutrient laden and well tolerated by most people. Bananas and plantains are convenient starchy fruits. The soluble fiber in all these starchy foods is very likely beneficial, unlike the insoluble fiber in bran. If you are not diabetic, there is no reason whatsoever to avoid either animal fats or starches in whole food form.
8. Make sure you are Vitamin D replete. Get daily midday sun in season or consider supplementation if you never get outside.
9. Vegetables and fruits...
10. Get proper exercise - both resistance and "aerobic" exercise have benefits, including mental. Think hormesis again- the recovery periods are where you get the benefit. Lift weights every day or run marathons for "fun", but not for your health.
11. You won't get too much fructose eating reasonable quantities of fruit, but don't make it your staple...
No counting, measuring or weighing is required, nor is it encouraged. I am agnostic on macronutrient ratios outside of very broad parameters. Archevore eaters typically range from 5-35% carbohydrate, from 10-30% protein and from 50 to 80% fat (mostly from animals) but wider ranges are entirely possible if you are not dieting and you are meticulous about the quality of your animal food sources. If you are trying to lose weight, really minimizing fructose and eating 50-70g a day of carbohydrate as starch is recommended. Skipping breakfast or at least no carbs for breakfast can be very helpful. If you are at your desired weight and healthy, 20% of calories as carbs is plenty for most very active people."
And for info on how the modern US diet got amazingly off-track, here's an excerpt of a review of Denise Minger's new book "Death by Food Pyramid" - which definitely is going to get picked up and added to the ever increasing queue of books to read - which'll give you some indication of how bad science and poor political policy fucked us.
Fat Head » Review: Death by Food Pyramid: "Early in the book, Minger recounts the experience of Luise Light, who was appointed to the position of Director of Dietary Guidance and Nutrition Education Research in the late 1970s – meaning she was officially put in charge of replacing the old “Basic Four” government dietary guidelines with something new and improved. In one of the book’s many “you’ve got to be @#$%ing kidding me!” moments, we learn that Light did, in fact, develop recommendations based on actual science: Unlike previous food guides, Light’s version cracked down ruthlessly on empty calories and health-depleting junk food. The new guide’s base was a safari through the produce department – five to nine servings of fresh fruits and vegetables each day. “Protein foods” like meats, eggs, nuts and beans came in at five to seven ounces daily; for dairy, two to three servings were advised. Light’s guidelines weren’t based on fat-phobia and didn’t promote hearthealthywholegrains as health food...
The guide kept sugar well below 10 percent of total calories and strictly limited refined carbohydrates, with white-flour products like crackers, bagels, and bread rolls shoved into the guide’s no-bueno zone alongside candy and junk food. And the kicker: grains were pruned down to a maximum of two to three servings per day, always in whole form. … Satisfied that their recommendations were scientifically sound and economically feasible, Light’s team shipped the new food guide off to the Secretary of Agriculture’s office for review. And that’s when the trouble began. Well, I guess trouble is what you get when you send the Secretary of Monsanto … er, excuse me, the Secretary of Agriculture a document suggesting people limit their grain consumption. When Light received the (ahem) edited version of her guidelines back from the USDA, they were a grain-promoting perversion of what she’d originally submitted. Horrified, Light explained that “no one needs that much bread and cereal in a day unless they are longshoremen or football players” and warned that the six-to-eleven servings of grain per day recommended by the USDA could spark epidemics of obesity and diabetes. And the rest is history...
Other than the desire to sell more corn and wheat, why would the USDA ignore its own nutrition guru and promote a diet based on grains? The answer shouldn’t have surprised me, and yet it did: The only justification she’d been given was that the changes would help curb the cost of the food stamp program: fruits and vegetables were expensive, the head of Light’s division explained – and from a nutritional standpoint, the USDA considered them somewhat interchangeable with grains. Emphasizing the latter in the American diet would help food assistance programs stay within budget. How’s that for typical government logic? We have a government-subsidized food stamp program, but paying for foods that are actually good for people is too expensive, so we’ll just declare cheap grains to be a health food in our new guidelines. Later, of course, we’ll impose those guidelines on schools and other government facilities. Let’s make everyone eat survival food for poor people. Yes, I know: you really want to bang your head on your desk right now … and we’re only up to page 24 in the book...
In a later chapter, Minger examines three of the popular diets that have proven their power to help people overcome health problems – whole food plant-based, Mediterranean, and paleo/primal – and highlights their similarities. All include whole, unprocessed foods such as tubers, vegetables and low-glycemic fruits. All exclude sugar, refined grains and processed vegetable oils. In other words, all three return us to something closer to our ancestral diets – at least if our starting point is the Standard American Diet."
Eat Bacon.
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