So, four months of the heart attack diet (no PUFAs!, lots of salt!) has produced mixed results.
In terms of general well-being, it's a massive win, in fact my general state of health improved to the point where the deleterious effects of sulphites became obvious, which has lead to me feeling even better. No more mysterious tiredness in the afternoon, no more afternoon naps.
I'm not back to normal yet. I'm still a spoonie, but I have many more spoons. Better than I’ve felt since the year of the pandemic, certainly.
On the other hand, the reason I started getting interested in all this was a sudden alarming weight gain of 4kgs in the couple of years since the pandemic.
And that's continued, and maybe accelerated, to 3/4kg in four months. Extrapolated forwards, this is terrifying. I’m already so heavy that playing tennis has buggered up my knees. I’d like to go back to my lifetime stable weight of 80-90kg.
That said, I feel so much better on the Heart Attack Diet that I'm keeping it even if it turns me into Jabba the Hutt.
But now I'm going to actually try and lose weight deliberately.
One thing I'm not going to try is deliberate calorie restriction/extra exercise. That's a pointless highway to hell if ever I saw one. I can understand why young women do it, but I do not think it is good for them.
But hanging around on the edges of the no-PUFAs community is a gentleman whom I think very highly of:
He strikes me as the very model of careful curiosity. Reading his stuff reminds me of the early days of the Royal Society, if Robert Hooke had become interested in losing weight.
For most of his life, he's been one of those poor Americans who look like space hoppers. The ones that English people used to laugh at because they must be such lazy greedy pigs to get into that state. Before it started happening to us.
He's been trying an enormous number of weird diet experiments on himself to see what if anything makes a difference, and he's developed a method for experimenting on himself that looks to me like it would be reliable.
And he very credibly claims to have invented an insane diet that just works.
Importantly, part of his philosophy is to make no attempt at all to eat less!
In fact, to make sure that he's always satiated, in order to avoid contaminating his results with the evil effects of voluntary starvation.
Now I'm pretty sure that there's something wrong with him. And I'm pretty sure that his ex150 diet works for him (assuming he's telling the truth rather than fabricating a clever and complex lie from whole cloth).
But I'm not at all sure that whatever works for him will work for me.
But I want to try it anyway.
As much out of my own relentless curiosity as from any expectation that it will actually work.
At the very least, I can give u/ex150 an anecdote about whether his diet works on someone else! He deserves that, after all his thinking and writing.
The very model of a modern major general :D
Excited to hear how it goes for you.
Sounds like a good plan. If you're talking of knees and tennis you're probably not an amateur powerlifter already (and won't balk at the low protein content of his diet). Given that you eat meat and don't want to restrict, the high fat low protein original keto diet would be the obvious choice even for nonmadlad internet advice.