When I began paying closer attention to what I ate and its impact on my well-being, finding a diet that would help me stay healthy became a key priority.
Before this shift, I hardly paid attention to what food I consumed. I ate healthy maybe half of the time, and I would often snack and indulge in junk food.
I didn’t consider the ingredients in my grocery items; I simply chose whatever was most budget-friendly.
My diet was OK at best.
During the peak of the pandemic, my diet became even unhealthier. I had become quite sedentary and most of what I ate was junk. So, when things opened up, I decided to change my lifestyle.
Gym Lore
When I started weightlifting, my goals were to build muscle, get stronger, and get in shape.
At first, I thought hitting the right form, following the correct movements, showing up, and eating enough protein would be sufficient to help me achieve these objectives.
However, as I got more involved, I realized that my diet required a more radical change than I initially thought.
Achieving a fit physique through gaining or losing weight is influenced by diet 80% of the time and exercise 20% of the time.
My diet needed a lot more tuning than just prioritizing protein.
Search for the Perfect Diet
How the Government is Making You Sick
The Number 1 Fast Food Ingredient Making Your Food Toxic
The Food Pyramid is a Scam
You Will Never Eat Bread Again Once You Learn This
Should You Eat Modern Fruits?
These were some of the titles of videos recommended to me on YouTube. I had been researching which diet would best help me achieve my goals.
What ended up happening, however, was me falling into a rabbit hole on food and diet, where I discovered an overwhelming amount of information.
Much of the information I encountered focused on how unhealthy common foods are. Some even went into how corporations had conspired with food regulators to deceive the public through cunning advertising and maximize profits based on this manufactured ignorance.
While some of these claims seemed reasonable and were backed with solid evidence, some seemed like wild goose chases — clickbait content designed to keep the audience hooked.
Being a newbie in this space, I was captivated by the countless testimonies from people who had changed their diets and lost weight, gotten shredded, or simply felt better.
I decided it would be worth trying one of these regimens to see which would help me achieve results.
Keto — The Promised Land?
The keto diet was the first one I tried. It is a low-carb, high-fat diet aimed at helping the body burn fat for energy, a process known as ketosis.
The diet includes foods like butter, cheese, eggs, meat, nuts, seafood, and oils. It aids in weight loss, reduces the risk of certain metabolic diseases like Type 2 Diabetes, and minimizes risk factors in suffering from heart disease.
Ketosis can also be induced through fasting, as the body taps into its fat stores for energy during periods without food.
Keto felt like a red pill moment for me.
Certain things started making sense — like feeling sluggish after a carb-heavy meal, experiencing sugar crashes, and the insatiable craving for sweets — all things I had already experienced.
Moreover, the keto community was massive with credible voices that seemed to know what they were talking about. I assumed that none of these people would make such claims if keto didn’t work — or so I thought.
Switching to keto was challenging. My previous diet was carb-heavy. Rice, bread, cakes, fries, and chips featured in some way in each meal I took. Reducing or cutting out some of these items was difficult.
In hindsight, my biggest mistake was taking an extreme approach and trying to quit carbs cold turkey.
I had bought into the belief that all modern carbs were terrible for gut health, that they were poisoning the body, and that quitting them was necessary for optimal health.
As I eased into it, it became part of my lifestyle and from trying different recipes I discovered online, low-carb meals became more enjoyable.
I perceived keto as flawless and that every single person should switch to it.
I even thought it was my duty to “unplug” others from the matrix — enlightening them on the benefits of this revolutionary diet and how the modern diet with refined carbohydrates was sabotaging their health.
Little did I know, I needed my unplugging.
Wake Up Neo
I had been following a combination of keto with either 16/8 intermittent fasting or OMAD for a while, and I started to notice a few things.
While I found it easier to manage my weight and hunger, my progress in the gym seemed to plateau. I often felt a sense of lethargy, which prevented me from reaching failure or achieving perfect reps during weightlifting sessions.
Through some research, I discovered that on a keto diet — especially early on — it takes time for the body to adapt to using fat as a primary fuel source for training.
As I dug deeper, I found information suggesting that low-carb diets might negatively impact exercise performance. Carbohydrates, after all, are your body’s preferred energy source.
This corroborated with what I was experiencing at the time, and I started questioning whether keto was really ideal for the goals I sought to accomplish.
Having been deeply invested in keto and fasting, I realized I had developed a bias toward content supporting that lifestyle. My biggest mistake was overestimating keto, believing it was a perfect solution for everything.
Even when I encountered well-supported arguments highlighting some downsides of keto, I struggled to accept that it had its flaws.
I realized I had become somewhat dogmatic in my views, convinced that keto and fasting were infallible.
I had even started to vilify foods like bread, rice, and cakes, even though entire generations of people have thrived on these foods and lived relatively healthy lives.
I overlooked the principle that “the dose makes the poison.” Although modern carbohydrates are often refined and nutritionally lacking, they only pose a significant health risk when consumed excessively.
I thought I had escaped the matrix, only to realize I had stepped into another one.
Memes
I recently finished reading “The Ape That Understood the Universe” by Steve-Stewart Williams, and this paragraph struck me as particularly insightful:
Much of the history of the 20th century consisted of Marxist memes, fascist memes, and the memes of capitalist democracy slugging it out through our bodies, our voices, and our communication technologies. These historical skirmishes were, in essence, battles of ideas, and the people caught up in them merely vessels through which these ideas fought for supremacy…
Thus, it’s almost as if the ideas themselves were fighting each other through whichever humans they happened to infest…
In evolutionary terms, a meme is a unit of culture. The author hypothesizes that cultural evolution favors the survival of the fittest memes.
Memes are selected to the extent that they’re good for themselves, regardless of whether they are good for their hosts or their hosts’ groups.
Food is a major aspect of culture, spawning countless memes. From this memecomplex different concepts are born, each vying for mainstream acceptance or dominance by inhabiting the minds of people.
Diet is one such concept within the food memecomplex.
You’ve likely encountered a flood of ideas on social media when it comes to diet. Each claims to be “the best” or “the healthiest”, from carnivore and keto to veganism and everything in between.
From the lens of evolution, these ideas all attempt to take root in your mind through those who have already adopted them.
While some claims have merit and are backed by testimonials, many present an overly optimistic view of a diet or weight-loss regimen, potentially misleading people into thinking it’s a universal solution.
Often, individuals become so committed to these ideas that they continue supporting them, even to their detriment. People form communities and even shape their identities around certain lifestyles, becoming rigid and hesitant to change.
When such folks are presented with information that criticizes the subsequent lifestyle they have built from that meme, they are bound to reject it, even when the criticism might be valid.
It’s as if the meme’s survival depends on the host rejecting any conflicting information through any means even if it is illogical.
Back to Basics
I tend to be an absolutist, which makes it difficult to backtrack on ideas I have a strong opinion on.
I had an overwhelmingly positive albeit unbalanced view of keto making it difficult to reconcile some of its downsides.
It took a while to view it for what it is, and to adopt a more measured approach with it.
In the end, nothing is perfect. Every human-borne idea has its flaws and is unlikely ideal for all circumstances. The biggest mistake we can ever make is becoming vehicles for these ideas, and shaping our lives around them, instead of using them to shape our lifestyles.
If you find yourself dogmatically clinging to something, ignoring logical counterarguments, it may be that the idea — or the matrix — has you, and this limits your ability to be flexible and open-minded.
The perfect diet is that which works for you.
Obsessing over which diet to follow is ultimately unproductive. Set your priorities and goals then choose a diet that would best help you get there.
The basic principles of a healthy lifestyle are simple: eat whole foods, move often, and get good sleep. Anything more should complement this foundation without overcomplicating things.