This Skeptic's Diet Evolution

Just like clockwork, a new post here every 6 months!  This time I have been dragged out of my slumber because I thought it might be beneficial to some to discuss my diet history and how and why I did a 180 shift on what I eat during the past few years.

As a hardcore skeptic and fan of science it took me a long time to believe that the nutritional information that is promoted by practically all the mainstream medical associations, govt health organizations and most writers in scientific journalism is total nonsense, not supported by the evidence and often is making people sicker.

The story of my journey from tofu to bacon is a long one, but please give it a chance and please follow up with your own research, hopefully I can motivate you to figure out a healthy diet that will work for you and that you can stick to for life.

Growing up as a kid my parents were not far removed from vegetarian,  they were into chicken, seafood on occasion, but virtually no red meat, occasional chili or hamburger.  Can't remember ever having steak or bacon, they were not fans of eating eggs at all.  Started everyday with a bowl of cereal, usually had a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for lunch.  But I wasn't allowed cereal in which sugar was listed in the first three ingredients and my sandwich was made from whole wheat bread, so it could have been worse.

So as a kid it seems you can handle quite a bit of crap in your system and I went along just fine, I was always a bit overweight however.  When I got to be a teen I was a hippie in training and began to hang out in circles where vegetarianism was the only way to go.  So while I was still at home I didn't want to make my own food so I didn't go veg 100% but I was already sowing the seeds.  When I went off to college and started making my own food I cut out meat completely.  I did it for a few reasons I suppose, I thought it would help me with my weight, it was pretty cheap, and I thought it would get me in with the hippie chicks.

So at about 20 years old I started a vegetarian diet.  Now I was by no means one of these health-food co-op type vegetarians eating wheatgerm and whole grains and cooking up fresh vegetable dishes and so forth.  Starches became the mainstay for me for the next several years.  My dinner might be a box of macaroni and cheese, top ramen, hamburger helper without the hamburger.  Tons of pasta, frozen dinners, nachos, pizza, just lots of stuff that I now wouldn't touch with a barge poll.

Looking back on it now I don't know what the hell I was thinking. I never got thin, but I didn't get that much fatter either for many years.  I never had any real big health problems, just kind of lacked energy most of the time.  Maybe it was because I loved cheese so much and that I ate it with everything is what saved me from collapsing on a daily basis.  I sputtered along, I figured I was healthy because when I wasn't a veg, the only meat I ever really ate was red meat anyway.  I was never a huge fan of chicken and still to this day chemicals in seafood make me sick to my stomach, I've always hated it.

So fast forward 10 years or so, when I got to be 30 my weight slowly but surely started to creep up.  I didn't want to admit it for many years though.  My diet hadn't really changed much, it perhaps even got worse.  When I lived in AZ, nearly 10 years ago now, everyday when I got home from work I had the same thing, nachos.  I would throw a bunch of corn chips on a pan, throw some cheese on it, threw some beans on it, topped it off with some Jalapenos.  Breakfast would be Grape-Nuts, frozen bean burritos for lunch and maybe I would have rigatoni with tomato sauce to top it all off as a midnight snack.

So when I got a checkup probably in 2004 the doctor said I was obese which was my first wakeup call.  At that time the Atkins Diet was sort of sweeping the nation.  I had friends on it, but I thought it sounded nuts and just paid it no mind.  I did however decide that since one of my goals of the vegetarian diet, to keep my weight down, wasn't working, it might be time to reconsider what I'm eating.

So after about 15 years of being a veg I started introducing a little meat back into my diet about 2005.  But other than that it was still a starch based diet.  Now sweets and sugar were never really my vice and I never ate that much of those at any point but I did intentionally try to cut them back. I always drank a fair amount of beer as well through my 20s and early 30s and I decided that should be restricted as well. But even after a few years of my new diet I was still huge and getting huger.  I have never really cared too much about my looks but the health issue was just really starting to nag at me.

Moving forward again to 2009.  The changes I made and continue with today all started with watching the film Fathead by Tom Naughton.  I literally completely changed my diet the next day before I had even read anything further on the benefits of a low-carb diet.  At first it was sort of baby steps, I ate all that sort of fake low-carb junk food like Dreamfields pasta and so forth.  Sort of like when I first became a veg I ate lots of fake hamburgers and crap like that.  But once I committed fully to just eating real food and going cold turkey on sugars and starches, probably about two years ago now, the weight just began to melt away.

I started to do tons of research, reading books by Gary Taubes, Michael Eades, Jonathon Bailor, to name a few and tons of online blogs and research analysis.  I learned that irrespective of the weight issue that some of us face when we eat sugars and starches, health-wise they are terrible for us. The foods like meat, eggs, butter that we have been told are bad for us are perfectly healthy.  There is no one size fits all diet for everybody, and people react differently to different foods, but for those of us who have a tendency to get fat, by and large we got there because of eating sugars and starches.  I don't want to summarize all the evidence, that is something for you to look at on your own, start with Taubes book perhaps and see what you think.  As a skeptic I was shocked by some of the things that pass for science in the nutrition field.  It caused me to re-evaluate my love affair with science a bit when I saw how easily money and politics can manipulate the outcomes.

Start with cutting out sugar since it is the worst offender.  After a few months a piece of fruit will taste really sweet to you. After a short while sweets will not only not tempt you, they will just not taste good to you at all.  You have to settle into something that you can stick with forever, if you can go as extreme as me and completely cut out sugars and starches, except for the occasional fruit, you will get there faster.  But if you can't maintain it and you just end up quitting there is no point to have started it in the first place.  Since I still puke whenever I so much as look at seafood, I supplement with Salmon Oil, Fish Oil and Kelp vitamins since I think that is helpful if you are eating only red meat and chicken.  But I'm still learning all the time as well, and while I won't rule out further evolution of my diet, I know so much more information now that I can't ever see a possible reason to go back on the diet I grew up on.

I'm on this campaign because I really am pissed off that so many people are fat and are getting sick who don't need to be, simply because they are getting the wrong advice.  Once you get the right advice, it's all on you and it's out of my hands, but I wasn't able to sleep tonight until I at least got this all off my chest.  Good Luck.