Diet trials of 2024

The steaks look like the ones from my younger sister’s play kitchen when we were kids.

In 2024, I read 10 books about health and nutrition, which greatly influenced how I think about food and nutrition. Inspired by what I read as well as other folks on this platform and others, I tried a few different dietary regimens, to varying degrees of “strictness.” I thought it might be useful to others to share what I learned and what happened to my body, so this is a roundup of the things I tried.

“Default settings” (January - March)

As documented in an earlier post, I had a health overhaul in mid-2022 that resulted in a new “steady state” for me. I began 2024 with “what worked” in the previous 18 months.

A typical day looked like this:

• No eating until around 12pm

• Lunch: 2 cups plain kefir, fruit (berries, tangerines, or bananas), nuts (macadamias, pecans, pistachios) and 4 oz chicken breast

• Dinner: a “clean meal” of some sort, typically meat and veggies, lower on carbs (but not keto)

• Dessert: 3/4 cup of chocolate almond milk chia seed pudding and 20g 90% dark chocolate (2 squares)

• Supplements: 0.7g of fish oil capsules

• Junk food: probably 1x/day (varying: a handful of candy, a storebought baked good, a slice of pizza, etc.)

• Eating out occasionally (1x every 2 weeks?)

The general daily macros of this diet were around 2,700 kcal, 45% fat, 37% carbs, 18% protein. I didn’t know much about polyunsaturated fats (PUFAs) at this point, so I was eating lots of chicken, pork, nuts, and occasional fried foods from restaurants (as well as non-fried restaurant food that is loaded with seed oils). This macro profile is squarely in the “swamp” section of this macro visualizer by pseudonymous blogger

Experimental Fat Loss

, in the triangle to the right of “SAD” (Standard American Diet). So I guess this means I’m one of the lucky ones that can stay lean without worrying about the negative effects of “the metabolic swamp”?

My meal tracking database reports that I was consuming 7g of PUFA daily (5% of total fat) but doesn’t break out omega-3 vs. omega-6. And many database foods likely are missing PUFA details, so this is likely an underestimate.

Body weight: 150 lbs
Body fat percentage: 12.7%

Omega balance (April - Sep)

Between the beginning of February and end of April, I read Why We Get Sick, Ultra Processed People, The Queen of Fats, and Omega Balance. These collectively convinced me that I should be “omega-3 maxxing” and avoiding seed oils as much as possible. During the early summer I also read Deep Nutrition, Dark Calories, and Good Energy, which led me to want to incorporate more “ancestral foods” like fermented foods and organ meats.

Dietary Changes

This led me to make a few changes:

• Lunch:

  • Mix ground flaxseed into the kefir-and-fruit blend

  • Swap out chicken for no-junk-added grass-fed beef sticks (Chomps brand)

  • Add in a “salad” of raw cucumber and organic sauerkraut (this was phased in gradually)

  • Add in raw milk cheese (this was phased in gradually)

• Dinner:

  • Cook in beef tallow, butter or ghee as much as possible

  • Put salmon and lamb on the menu more frequently

  • Gradually phase out chicken and pork

• Dessert:

  • Swap out almond milk for high-omega-3 grass-fed cow’s milk in the chia seed pudding

  • Don’t eat the occasional junk foods

• Supplements:

  • Increase fish oil dose to 1.3g daily

• Also limit seed oil exposure by skipping restaurants as much as possible, and stop eating fried foods from restaurants, as well as store-bought baked goods. Only eat seed-oil-free sourdough bread.

My macros for this period were: 2550 kcal, 47% fat, 19% protein, 34% carbs—tiptoeing into “the swamp” while sitting on the shore of “low carb” in the swamp visualizer.

Somewhat hilariously, my data show that PUFA intake went down to 5.4g daily, which goes to show that most food tracking apps aren’t designed to measure PUFA, much less omega-3 vs. omega-6. It’s certainly the case that my omega balance (i.e. percentage of PUFA that is omega-3) went up, since I was downing 13g of ground flaxseeds and 24g of chia seeds every day, while also (gradually) phasing out chicken and pork. The flax and chia together are over 9g of PUFA (of which over 7g are omega-3) for an omega balance of over 75%.¹

Observed effects

• There was no change in my body weight

• The only thing I really noticed was an apparent uptick in my testosterone, although I never formally tested it

• A negative result was that I developed a fascial tear in my lower right leg while on this diet. It’s difficult to tell if this was caused by the omega-3 maxxing, but the injury caused issues for me throughout the rest of 2024. (At this same time, I was also getting into toe spacers and barefoot shoes, which likely contributed to, if not caused, the muscle hernia.)

Liver pills (August)

In the month of August, I decided to try these desiccated liver pills that are supposed to be grass-fed and completely clean, after having tried to get more organ meats in my diet with little success (since they taste bad). I took 6 capsules a day for 30 days while more or less keeping my omega-3 maxxing diet.

The results were not good, though there is a massive confounder here because I also took a 10-day family vacation to California where I am sure I consumed my fair share of seed oils. (Although I did my best to order groceries to keep my lunch as similar as possible while traveling.)

Body weight in Aug and Sep: 153 lbs
Body fat percentage: 13.5%

“Ex-150 lunch with fruit” (Oct - Dec 20)

Experimental Fat Loss

’s experiment with salmon caused me to re-think my omega-3 maxxing strategy. He (?) writes:

There’s a debate in the PUFA camp over omega-3 and fatty fish. Some say it’s good, cause o3 balances o6. Some say it’s bad, because double bonds gonna double bond and omega-3s have even more of them than omega-6s.

In this phase, I abandoned my lunch from the prior months and decided to mimic

Experimental Fat Loss

’s “Ex-150” diet, which consists of 150g of ground beef, some marinara sauce, and heavy whipping cream to satiety. My “riff” was to only eat this meal for lunch and then fill in with my usual dinners.

Macros: 2,586 kcal, 53% fat, 30% carbs, 17% protein. Right on the boundary of the “low carb” zone in the swamp visualizer.

• Lunch:

  • 2-3 medium-sized meatballs [roughly 130g-200g of ground beef]

    • the meatballs were filled with panko, eggs and parmesan cheese

  • 1/2 cup of Rao’s marinara sauce

  • 1 Tbsp of Parmesan cheese

  • raw cucumbers and organic sauerkraut

  • 3/4 cup of heavy whipping cream

  • usually some fruit and/or macadamia nuts

• dinner was the same rotation as previously

• I ate “Ice Cream for Bears” and similar honey-sweetened homemade ice cream on a frequent basis (particularly in November)

Body weight in (Oct, Nov, Dec): 151.5, 152.8, 154.5
Body fat percentage: 13.2%, 13.5%, 13.8%

I think this can be taken as further evidence that the Randle cycle is real. I also felt like I was overeating at times on this diet, although that’s not the case on average (since my calorie intake went down slightly). I just recall times when I felt … heavy, for lack of a better description.

Continuous Glucose Monitor (Sep - Oct)

Inspired by Glucose Revolution and Outlive (which I read in 2023)—both of which discuss the power of real-time glucose feedback for informing your behaviors—I decided to get an over-the-counter CGM (recently released as the Dexcom Stelo) since my doctor wouldn’t prescribe me one.

Here are some random things I learned:

• Eating keto is definitely the best way to keep blood sugar levels down

• Whip cream plus sugar results in a steady rise (+55 points over 4 hours)—another manifestation of the Randle cycle

  • But eating honey-sweetened Ice Cream for Bears didn’t spike it much at all … maybe there’s something to the carnivore folks’ defense of honey over table sugar / HFCS.

• Glucose also spikes when:

  • Taking a hot shower

  • Sitting in a sauna

• Glucose remains elevated if I am working at my desk or am slightly cold—this seems to be evidence in favor of “microworkouts” as advocated by Mark Sisson and Brad Kearns in their book Two Meals A Day.

• Eating bread seems to cause glucose “waves” for 6-12 hours after eating, where glucose goes up and down

• Just because I am feeling tired or hungry doesn’t necessarily mean that I am in a blood sugar crash

I’m still not sure if glucose is the end-all-be-all of health as Glucose Revolution author Jessie Inchauspé claims it to be. But it was fun to wear one of these for 30 days and see what shifted it.

Honey diet (Dec 21-28)

The Honey diet is proposed by

anabology

and

Noah Ryan

(based on principles from Ray Peat) as a way to up-regulate metabolism. The basic rule is to eat nothing but simple carbs in the morning and early afternoon, then eat a low-carb dinner several hours after finishing the carb window. People who espouse this dietary lifestyle affectionately call themselves “Peaters” and they claim to effortlessly lose weight as their body’s metabolism gets upregulated.

Dietary Changes

This was a drastic change from my long-run steady state; for one, I had to start eating breakfast, which I haven’t really done in 6 years. Second, I have generally kept to a lower-sugar diet for the past 12 years after receiving a liver diagnosis.

Breakfast:

• 16 oz orange juice

• 4oz - 8oz of medjool dates

• 4 tangerines

• 1/4 cup of raw honey

Lunch:

• grapes

• tangerines

• frozen cherries

• more honey

Dinner:

• mushrooms sauteed in beef tallow

• other roasted vegetables

• meat, eggs

This was not a very pleasant diet to eat (at least, not until dinnertime); I just can’t eat that much honey. I eventually found a palatable solution in the form of mixing the honey and frozen blueberries/cherries together in my Blendtec blender. The resulting product tasted a lot like sorbet and was much more palatable.

Macros: 2,976 kcal, 25% fat, 65% carbs, 14% protein. That’s in the center of the purple tile right next to “low-fat” on the swamp visualizer.

What I was expecting to happen

• Increased body temperature

• Weight loss

• Energy increase

What actually happened

• No change in temperature

• No extra energy

• Occasional feelings of lightheadedness and dizziness and brain fog from sugar overload (especially after eating grapes)

• No change in weight

• Frequently feeling gassy

• I seemed to sleep better (though that could be confounded by the fact that it was the week of Christmas and I wasn’t trying to do any work)

Main verdict

I cut the diet short since it really didn’t seem to be doing well and it was laborious to adhere to. I never heard other complain about the brain fog or feelings of sugar overload. Perhaps this doesn’t work well for me because I have a particular liver condition that (I was told) makes it difficult for my body to process sugar

However, one thing I was really surprised by was not being hungry at all on the day after ending the diet.

Where to next?

Now that it’s early 2025, I’m going back to omega-3 maxxing. I felt lighter and generally better on that diet. I may play around with a more comfortable riff on the Honey Diet, but we’ll see.

1. It’s worth noting that [my understanding is] there is debate about the extent to which plant-based omega-3 (i.e. 18-chain alpha-linolenic acid [ALA]) gets converted into the omega-3’s that are shown to be beneficial (i.e. 20- and 22- length EPA and DHA). I’m not sure if consuming 9g of ALA is the same as consuming 3g of EPA/DHA.