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@ vlada
2023-07-26 19:37:56A year and a half ago, I started noticing my belly was getting out of control. I then stepped on a scale and it showed 113 kg (250 lbs). I felt contempt for myself, I had never let myself go this much before. I was always struggling with my weight, but looking back, I think a lot of people were just projecting their own self-hatred onto me, which lead me to thinking of myself as just the fat guy, but that's a different topic altogether.
So I decided to do something. I pulled myself up by my bootstraps, got out my notebook (a physical one, call me old fashioned) and started weighing every food article I intended to eat like a maniac.
This is the CICO (Calories In, Calories Out) method. I had once lost 15 kg (33 lbs) back when I was younger with this method, in a span of 3 months or so. It was pure agony, and I immediately went back to eating crap once I reached my target weight. Now I figured it was time to do the same thing again... for like the 10th time in the last 5-6 years. Every time I attempted to lose weight with CICO, I ended up losing a couple kilos, only to quit the diet and return to not counting calories, and even gaining weight. I would feel hunger, tiredness, and just weird counting calories of every food I wanted to eat. I completely disregarded the qualitative properties of food, I genuinely believed 200 calories of a sandwich was equal to 200 calories of cooked pork. Anyway, this time, I was good enough at guesstimations and battling hunger to lose 8 kilos (18 lbs) in a year, eating ice cream, sandwiches, breakfast cereal and (a lot of) pizza.
In April 2023 I was just about to give up. I did not want to live like this. Imagine eating cereal before work, getting hungry at 10 AM and rushing to the bakery to buy a calzone. A calzone is 1000 calories, and my breakfast usually had 300 calories (of cereal or a sandwich). Add cups of coffee to this (around 50 kcal each) and you get to 1450 - 1500 kcal by noon, which meant that I could eat one small meal for the rest of the day, which meant that I would go to bed feeling hunger pangs.
On top of the sheer ineffectiveness of the approach, I started feeling very tired during the day, my libido was low, and I felt a kind of brain fog for months. I had to drink 3-4 cups of coffee just to function normally. Since I actually am a doctor, I decided to do some blood tests, and they turned out fine, aside from a vitamin D defficiency which did not explain my symptoms. Thyroid was fine, kidney function was fine, no diabetes, no signs of infection or any reason of concern for something more serious. I accepted to just feel like crap for months, justifying the exchange of fatigue for (moderate) weight loss.
By April I had read the book 'Wheat Belly' by William Davis, and realized that grains, and wheat especially, was basically poison. I knew the food pyramid was ridiculous, and no kind of grain should be a part of any human meal. I decided to cut out grain products from my diet. This did not go too well because I still believed animal fat and meat was unhealthy because it causes heart disease, colon cancer, hypertension, gout, chronic kidney disease and kidney stones... right? Right? This is Physiology 101, Biochem 202, Internal medicine, this is what we were taught. So, if I couldn't eat fat, and I couldn't eat grains, what could I eat? The answer was not much, so I failed and basically ate croissants and sandwiches regularly.
I then read Paul Saladino's book 'The Carnivore Code,' which I recommend everyone should read, even though the author reversed his position somewhat since then, and is incorrect in recommending people eat honey. After reading the book, I felt skeptical, but decided to try it out out of sheer desperation. I then just couldn't stop losing weight, and had lost 15 kg (33 lbs) in 2 months. I couldn't believe it. I had no issues of hunger. The biggest issue was the carb cravings, diarrhoea and great thirst, which all went away the first week of going carnivore. I still get the occasional carb craving, but I feel better than ever before - I am no longer fatigued, libido is great, I have no hunger issues. I am simply not interested in giving up the diet, and I have developed a serious dose of skepticism about all the things I was taught in medical school about nutrition, which was not much anyway.
So, if you are struggling with weight loss, I can strongly recommend the Carnivore diet. Hell, I started this blog on nostr of all places, because I feel like I need to shout it from the rooftops. I would have never discovered this without bitcoin, which has completely changed me as a person. As bitcoiners, remember :"Don't trust, verify." Read the literature and come to your own conclusions. Once you do, I am confident you will come to the same conclusion as I.