Do diets/protocols have a lifespan?

#1

I ask this because I’m intrigued as to why people go from one diet or protocol to another, like from Keto to Carnivore or from IF to OMAd
We all have our own justifications for doing x, y, or z, but I’m interested to know the whys. Is it because the existing program isn’t functioning for you anymore (it’s beyond its lifespan) or are you just seeking a change? Even if our responses may vary from one another, I also wonder if the actual diet or programme itself has a limited duration and the body has just said enough is enough.
My journey started with Keto, to IF to some OMAD to LCHD. Currently, I eat an LCH Monday to Friday and Ad libitum on the weekends, though still healthy (90% of the time).
I welcome all opinions on this.

(You've tried everything else; why not try bacon?) #2

Diets that require the dieter to be hungry all the time, from eating less and moving more, all tend to last about a year, according to one study I read. Then the hunger gets overwhelming and people start to eat again, and usually the body takes the precaution of enlarging the fat store a little over what it was originally, so as to have a bit of a cushion for the next famine.

Now, diets such as the government-approved high-carb, low fat diet, or a low-carb, high-fat, ketogenic diet, which are more properly thought of as eating patterns rather than “diets” in the weight-loss sense, can be maintained indefinitely.

I’m sorry, but I have to ask what OMAM and LCH stand for. They’ve got me stumped.

(Harriet) #3

It’s a new game, right? I’ll play.

OMAM has me totally stumped, best I could come up with is One Meal A Month and that can’t be right …

LCH, my best guess, Low Carbo-Hydrate???

(Geoffrey) #4

I think it may be an evolutionary process with the individual. For instance, I’ve seen where many people come to keto for health and weight loss and it does them well for a time but they hit a wall and weight loss stops or they haven’t healed the way they want too. So they take the next step looking for improvement and they go ketovore. They may stop there if they achieve their goals but if not they go straight carnivore. At that stage they find satisfaction. There are plenty of examples of this. Once we start down the path of searching for optimal nutrition it’s easy to start going down rabbit holes searching for options and fixes and some people just get bored doing the same things every day.
I don’t really think that a diet has a lifespan but I do believe they have their optimization levels.

(Doug) #5

:sunglasses: Great question! :clap:

If a diet is complete nutrition, i.e. if no demonstrable deficiencies develop, and it’s not harming the individual, then I think it’s going to involve our personal need for variety, and the applicable ratio between “eat to live,” and “live to eat.”

I’ve never stuck with one thing long enough to really find out what the lifespan is, if there is one. Previous diets - heh, 3 or 4 days was about it. Keto works, absolutely and undeniably for me, and I’ve done it enough to have made a huge beneficial difference, but I don’t think I’ve ever had even one month of totally being on the program.

#6

My diet surely ends when I die :slight_smile: But that’s it. I probably will subtly change the exact diet, even my days aren’t the same but I am not good with temporal things (except very short experiments and trials but they are my actual woe just stricter). When I change my woe, I embrace it and I don’t want to change it until I don’t feel the need.

Why did I change my woe when I do? I usually find something better or potentially find it so I am curious and try it out. I only try out surely not working things very temporarily (like, for one day) so it’s not a woe change just a short experiment. I was lucky or just followed my body but whenever I changed my woe, I was pleased with it and stuck to it for a long while.

IF wise, I do whatever I can. I have little control over it (and it needs focus and that’s just tiresome). I have more control over my food choices, of course my body need to be cooperative, I can’t follow a diet it dislikes.

I don’t think it ever happened to me.

Oh I can relate. My weekends are more relaxed especially when it’s not winter or spring so I can’t do carnivore-ish all week. Even in winter, my eating window tends to be bigger on weekends. And summer is carbier than winter due to fruits and even the few vegs I still like.
I don’t like to put much effort into my woe so I tend do whatever is easy. But not eating fruits in summer isn’t hard, it’s plain impossible. While my hope is hard to diminish and I am stable enough even if I fail every day, it’s not a nice feeling. So I don’t try the impossible often.

Wow. It couldn’t last a day in my case :smiley: Even my SO couldn’t do that and he is good at being hungry every day (he can’t avoid it even when active). But only for hours (and not to a great extent), not all the time! Who can handle THAT? I doubt most people can do it for weeks…

That’s what I thought too :smiley: I know some weird people may do OMAW sometimes, that’s already quite bad… Even OMEOD sounds not good but maybe it works for some for a short while…

(Pete A) #7

They’re not really that different.

(Alec) #8

Over a lifelong weight battle, I have been on about every weight loss plan there is… and all of them worked, until they didn’t (for me). Recently, I lost a lot of weight fasting, but when I stopped fasting, surprise surprise, the weight came back. I could not keep fasting 2 days per week like I had been.

After that I did a good bout of keto, and I lost weight, but my clean keto turned to lazy keto to dirty keto, and then probably low carb at best… loads of fruit… guess what? The weight came back and I guzzled chocolate (carb-addict talking!)

2 years ago, I knew that keto was right for me, so I started keto again. Within a few days I found that I felt best and I was losing bodyfat best by eating only animal foods… so I kept doing that. I haven’t eaten a plant since and I have the best health I have had for decades (if not ever… I was a heavy kid!). Will I fall off carnivore? Possibly… but it hasn’t happened yet, and I am feeling so good and I find sticking to carnivore so easy that I think I have found the right long term diet for me.

I am convinced by the science, I feel great, I am close to ideal bodyweight, I have no cravings, and I leave each meal comfortably stuffed having enjoyed what I ate. Not sure I can think of anything else I need diet-wise!

#9

I suppose we all arrive here in different ways, for different reasons, but my story started with the revelation that food had the power to change how I felt and how my body functioned. Physically AND emotionally.

I started with eliminating gluten and dairy when I realised they were causing autoimmune conditions. This then led to a natural evolution into AIP, which led to primal, then keto and now carnivore…

My body thanks me, my Ulcerative Colitis, Proctitis and Lychen Planus are all currently in remission. However, I do have to be very careful as it doesn’t seem to take much to tip my immune system back into reactionary territory!

I’ve only been carnivore for 30 days but have already seen a huge improvement in energy levels, a significant drop in weight and a complete lack of cravings for carbs AND alcohol (this is huge for me!).

So, long story short, my protocols have been led by an instinctual healing pathway. I hope to be keto/carnivore for a long while now, it’s my favourite way of eating so far!

#10

I think the longer we stay the more we learn.

The more we learn the more we can see.

The more we can see see the more we go and explore.

Until we find it.

(KM) #11

I am curious where this all leads in the next decade of my life. I’ve gradually gone keto for weight loss, then embraced the idea that it was really more about healthy eating, cut out a lot of additives and extras that are technically “keto friendly”, dropped the part of my protocol that insisted vegetables were necessary, and now flirt with carnivore some days and keto with vegs on most others. Currently a little less stringent about alcohol and the whatever-might-be-in-this I face when eating out - it simply isn’t possible to walk into a restaurant, anywhere, at any price point, and ask for a grass fed organic steak or regenerative pastured eggs. It could happen with enough detective work, but if I sought that out I’d probably go three weeks without a meal.

The fact that I’m no longer doing keto for weight loss makes a big difference. On one hand there’s no linear motivation to do it any more, but on the other, there’s no end point - at present it just seems like the normal behavior that will follow me through my life.

(You've tried everything else; why not try bacon?) #12

Yes. Despite what they say, most of the time the destination is more important than the journey.

(You've tried everything else; why not try bacon?) #13

As Andreas Eeenfeldt likes to say, keto is like showering, in that if you stop doing it, you stop getting the benefits. He says life is so unfair like that.

#14

Sorry to all. OMAD and LCHD - Low Carb Diet

#15

What is the definition of complete nutrition? Here is where I have some concerns. How do we know if we have any deficiencies, and by extension, how do we know if these potential deficiencies are important? Would it not depend on the time frame as well? Short-term vs. long-term? Dr. Fung uses IF and Keto on a short-term (6-12 month average) basis for his patients but does not continue with Keto once the results are achieved.
Heart rate risk is generally based on a 10-year risk model. What if doctors started to look at 20 or even 30-year risk? This would make sense for an individual who may have a small 10-year risk, but if looked at over a longer period of time, that small risk could be much larger. Doctors should be looking at being proactive vs. reactive.

(B Creighton) #16

This is my 3rd year of my new WOE… I do keto in the late fall and winter, and reasonably low carb the rest of the year. Why? Keto def has a more dramatic weight loss effect, and I believe doing it in the winter encourages my mitochondria to make more brown fat… It is cheaper to keep my house in the 60s in the winter, and helps my body make more BAT and lose weight. It is more like the natural cycle I believe hunter-gatherers went and still go through. And let’s face it, I never seem to see any overweight hunter-gatherers… I believe though that the temporary adjustment to ketosis is useful, and healthful to encourage autophagy, more BAT, and good to promote flexibility to be able to burn fat. I just add more fruit and some other protein rich plant foods the rest of the year… mostly. That way I don’t feel deprived… I love fruit and many vegetable foods that are just too carby to maintain keto.

(You've tried everything else; why not try bacon?) #17

The medical definition of a deficiency is that the lack of something causes symptoms. Lack of niacin causes pellagra, for example. Lack of fresh meat combined with lack of Vitamin C causes scurvy. Lack of the essential fatty acids causes hair loss, skin conditions, poor wound healing. Lack of essential amino acids causes kwashiorkor. And so forth. The effects of a deficiency show up in fairly short order.

The problem with defining deficiency as being below the “normal” range is that as a population gets sicker or healthier, the normal range shifts. So much of the research has now been done on a carb-laden population that it is impossible to know what the body truly needs on keto. (We don’t need any Vitamin C if we are getting fresh meat, for example. But that’s the only one there’s research about.) Also, the “normal” range in lab tests often consists of the range of the first thousand ostensibly healthy people who got tested at that lab this year.

If you want to worry about long-term consequences, bear in mind that McGovern’s committee published the dietary guidelines on the basis of no research whatsoever. Fifty years later, the population’s health has drastically declined, and about 80% of the U.S. population now has symptoms of metabolic disease. Since the U.S. diet was a lot closer to keto before the guidelines, and Americans were considered the healthiest people on the planet (attributed to the amount of meat we ate), I daresay that worrying about keto is pointless, because the pre-guidelines diet was demonstrated to be healthy over the course of centuries.

(B Creighton) #18

Actually, they were published against the recommendations of an advisory dietician who warned all the carbs would give the population diabetes. When she complained of the departure from her recommendtions, she was told it would save money on the food stamp program…(and cause huge expenditures in the medicare program…but who’s paying attention?)

(Doug) #19

If we have no reason to suspect deficiencies, no symptoms or bad conditions, and tests all show decent levels of things, then that’s a good start. We can say that we can never be totally sure, because we can’t see the future, but that’s going to be the case regardless.

Definitely - the long term is unknown for almost all of us. However, removing the known problems, like “too many carbs” or perhaps carbs + seed oils + processed foods (and whatever the individual has a bad time with) looms overwhelmingly large, compared to any subsequent worry about undiscovered deficiencies (in my opinion, anyway).

Once we have a decent amount of data on people who’ve been keto for decades, maybe we can refine things - perhaps some problems will have come to light. But so many of us here currently are/were in our 50s/60s when metabolic/hormonal stuff really caught up with us that looking 20 or 30 years into the future puts us at or near the end anyway.

I agree, but that’s a tall order. Seems to me that for keto, it really hit its stride in 2015-2020. Some people were doing it before that, but ‘the masses’ really got going more recently. So by 2035 and later there ought to be large cohorts of long-term ketoers who could be studied.

However, finding a doctor who doesn’t mainly rely on “the standard of care,” and who is truly proactive - it sounds great but I’m pretty cynical that many will appear.

(Geoffrey) #20

According to Judy Cho in The Carnivore Cure, nobody has actually determined what “normal “ is. The dietary guidelines for vitamins and minerals have, for the most part, just been guesswork.