I think it's safe to say that I have tried every kind of diet imaginable. I have done some crazy abstaining diets where I would cut out entire genres of food, to systems with complex equations that require weeks of preparation before beginning. I certainly did experience some success. I have seen my abs before. Unfortunately, it was always obviously the kind of exercising I was doing that gave me the biggest changes.
After sampling fad diets, to the Federal Government's recommended balanced meal plan, to just trusting my cravings, I came to a simple, yet depressing conclusion: I don't, nor do I know of anybody, that knows what the fuck they're doing when it comes to proper nutrition.
There were a few truths I had nailed down. 1) Being overweight is unhealthy, and therefore, unnatural. It is a warning sign of something else going wrong in your body, and more intuitively, would make survival more difficult for early humans. 2.) Doing any or all of these recommended diets and programs were making me fat, which meant they weren't natural and I should try something else.
The first few things I sampled made sense, but I was disappointed when nothing came out of them. David Zinczenco's ABS Diet was spelled out simply. The science felt good to my simple brain, for the most part, and the promises it made were stupendous. Even the acronym for the food groups you needed to eat spelled out ABSDIETPOWER. That's pretty man-tastic. But, alas, I made little to no progress in the direction I wanted to go, so I had to move on.
The South-Beach Diet had a similar philosophy, and similarly absent results.
My poor misguided mind even decided to be a vegan for a week. (Fact: there literally has NEVER been a single study that showed that the independent behavior of switching to veganism has ANY positive health benefits whatsoever. Don't do it. It's really bad for you. Seriously.)
The first glimmer of light came when I stumbled across an old book by a dude named Dr. Atkins. He was a proponent of a body process called "ketosis," in which the body is deprived of almost all carbohydrates (breads, grains, potatoes, fruits, etc.) and begins to burn on ketones instead. In the absence of carbohydrates, the body's natural source of energy, there is no excess carbohydrate energy to be stored as fat, so fat production just halts and moves rapidly in reverse to power the body's necessary functions. I didn't really understand it too well, and very few people in the world were experiencing long-lasting positive results from his diet, but I decided to try it anyway because why the hell not, I was already morbidly obese.
A miraculous thing started to happen, fat just started falling off my body. I was so excited by the changes being made that I embraced the Atkins lifestyle wholeheartedly. I abstained from entire branches of nutrition, and gorged myself on meats and cheeses, with maybe half a leaf every other day in response to my mother's pleading.
Unfortunately, over time, I started to grow unhealthy. My acne became worse, my digestion slowed down and my body began to smell very poorly. Even though I was losing fat, which was a definite good thing, something else was clearly wrong and needed to be changed immediately. I reluctantly gave up the diet, for the sake of my skin, BO, and BMs, and almost overnight, all of those pounds of unsightly, unhealthy body fat just grew right back where they were.
I wasn't there yet, but I had one piece of the puzzle. Something was different about that diet that gave me great results in a way none of the others could. I circled it for a few years, learning about that diet and similar ones. Eventually, by some magic, serendipitous twist of fate, I learned about the paleolithic lifestyle, or, the Caveman Diet.
The paleolithic diet is intended to recreate the kind of diet that humans ate during the paleolithic era. During that period of our evolution, (and every other period except for the one we live in right now, seriously 99.999% of the time humans have lived on this earth except for the last few centuries) we were taller, more muscular, had nearly perfect teeth, and stored SIGNIFICANTLY less body fat.
The line drawn was the advent of agriculture. If you eat a paleolithic diet, you can eat anything that would be available to you before agriculture, so basically meats, fish, eggs, vegetables, fruits, and (debatably) dairy. The difference between the paleolithic eating and the Atkins diet, is a complete nutrient profile. There are necessary bits for human survival and optimal living that are only present in (naturally occurring) carbohydrates.
Eating this way gave me the healthiest feeling I had in my entire life. Yes, I was getting leaner, but my skin was also becoming clearer, my mood and mental clarity was improving, everything just started getting better. I, still, unfortunately, couldn't lose those last few pounds and start to perform as intensely in the workouts and programs, that by this period of my life, I had begun to pursue zealously.
I had one more piece of the puzzle.
Then I found it, my golden ticket, the last piece that let everything fall into place for me.
... To be continued
Mwahahahaha
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