Two Years of *Two Meals A Day*

Grading my sustainability predictions

A little more than two years ago, I finished I finished reading Mark Sisson’s and Brad Kearns’ book, Two Meals a Day: The Simple, Sustainable Strategy to Lose Fat, Reverse Aging, and Break Free from Diet Frustration Forever. At the time, it felt like a life-changing book that would stick with me for the rest of my life.

I’ve since published two posts about the lifestyle changes I made and whether they’ve stuck. This post continues the installment. Past posts are available below for 1-month and 1-year follow-ups:

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This post serves to recap changes in my body weight, blood results, and behaviors in hopes of providing more information to whoever might be interested. For quantitative measures, I’ll be plotting a 5-year history with a vertical red dashed line to indicate when I began Two Meals A Day in earnest.

Body composition (monthly frequency)

Weight

I’ve been able to largely maintain the initial weight loss.

I haven’t changed height at all, so the same graph of my BMI would look identical.

Blood tests (annual frequency)

Lipids (Cholesterol and Triglycerides)

Overall, an increase in the past year, but no cause for alarm by any conventional metric. I wish I could get more detailed LDL counts (like Oxidized LDL or LDL Type B).

Sugars

My fasting glucose is a bit high, but otherwise things appear to be OK.

Behaviors (monthly frequency)

Steps

My goal is to walk at least 7,000 steps (roughly 5km or 3 miles) every day. I’ve been able to keep at that, except for a few months ago when I was nursing a lower leg injury:

Sleep

Mostly there’s nothing to see here; I guess a lot more variance since July 2022?

Fasting duration

The spikes are when I did 3+ day fasts (typically around New Year’s).

Sustainability of practices

In my 1-month follow-up post, I laid out a set of practices that I thought would be sustainable. In my 1-year follow-up, I wrote about how I have mostly kept with this. My two-year follow-up is largely identical to my 1-year follow-up. I don’t eat “nose to tail,” don’t worry too much about electrolytes, and don’t worry about cold/heat exposure.

Overall, I’d say I’m more or less doing the same things I was doing 1+ years ago, with largely the same results on a variety of measures.

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New goals

Physical

At my 1-year follow-up, I mentioned focusing on flexibility and muscle building. Those are still my goals, as I’d like to add muscle to my currently thin frame. This has proven much harder than I initially thought. It’s probably because, deep down, I don’t want to make time to really hit the gym hard, and I don’t really want to do the work required to add 10 pounds of pure muscle.

Diet

I’ve experimented a bit this year with upping my plant-based omega-3 intake (after reading Anthony Hulbert’s book Omega Balance). I didn’t notice too much one way or the other, so now I’m moving on to a more animal-based diet to see where that leads me.

I’ve closely followed

Experimental Fat Loss

’s journey and am aggressively avoiding seed oils and other omega-6 PUFA at the moment. I’m also playing around with his “Ex-150” diet which consists of eating 150g meat + green veggies + pasta sauce and then filling in the rest with butter, heavy cream, and beef tallow. (I’m not doing this full-fledged, though, so it probably won’t do me any good. Still, I really enjoy the taste of meat+veggies+marinara, and whipped cream is one of my all-time favorite foods.

Measurements

I’ve been wearing a Continuous Glucose Monitor (CGM) for the past few weeks. I haven’t learned a ton, other than whipped cream + sugar is the perfect recipe for a slow rise and long elevation of blood sugar. But the Ex-150 meal does nothing to my blood sugar.

Beyond a CGM, I will likely do an OmegaQuant test to see what my Linoleic Acid percentage is. I suspect it’s quite high, even though I’m pretty low body fat percentage (13.5%).

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Overall Evaluation

I’ve found this lifestyle to be quite sustainable, and I’d definitely recommend it to others!