What do YOU eat?

A personal approach is the only approach I recommend to what you should eat.

I am often asked, ” So Doc, what do you eat?’

When asked this I’m often thinking in my mind – where do I start? The easiest reference I can give is Chris Kresser’s Your Personal Paleo Code now called The Paleo Cure. The ‘paleo diet’ has been challenged extensively and now as happens with many fat diets you see paleo cookies, bars, with excess of 20g of sugar but the fact that the sugar is honey makes it a ‘paleo’ choice.

Not so fast.

Although my nutrition has evolved quite a bit over the last ten years when I started to question the low fat, high ‘healthy’ grain diet that I was previously taught to recommend.

Eat like your ancestors may seem a bit confusing since how did our ancestors actually eat? Kresser’s approach is a bit more ‘doable’ than a standard ‘paleo diet’ referenced by the hundreds of other paleoesque books in the market. If your body does not respond adversely, typical things that hunter-gatherers did not have access to may still be enjoyed if you choose to do this. There is only what is right and wrong for you. Through a few simple steps you can really tease out what work and does not work for you without a dogmatic approach to your nutrition.

• The combination of keeping insulin relatively low and keeping blood sugar low seem to be the key factors in avoiding many of the common chronic health conditions of the western world.
• I avoid carbohydrates in the morning primarily and try to eat mostly fat with a bit of protein until dinner. At dinner I begin the carb backloading – thanks to John Keifer (smart guy).
• Jonathan Bailor’s The Calorie Myth is also another helpful resource that debunks many of the ideas of calorie counting and includes many practical lifestyle recommendations that I have added.
• The Perfect Health Deit by Paul Jaminet is a thoroughly scientific referenced read on how to optimize your health. This is one of the best books on nutrition and health supporting an ancestral approach to eating.

The closest I would currently describe my diet is Dave Asprey’s The Bulletproof Diet . It encompasses many of the ideas from above but is quite simplistic and practical. You begin to care about what you eat. We are built on what we eat. So it should matter what we eat have eaten. It will directly effect us.

In my paradigm of health, we get ill due to chemical, physical and mental stressor. If the products we eat are exposed to negative factors this will effect the quality of our food.

I toyed with nutritional ketosis or a ketogenic diet. Currently I use cyclical ketosis with daily intermittent fasting via bulletproof coffee and carb intake in the afternoon and evening only.

Also don’t forget about your fitness- I do Crossfit  2-3 x per week paired with a long swim, bike and run.

Find what works for you and don’t feel pigeonholed into the short-term diet approach!

Dr Dan