No starch I had 4 plain smokies in a baguette
Where can I buy grain-free baguettes?
Good point. I'm over simplifying a tad to paint a picture. A bit more detail:
I cut out all sugars and starches about 12 months ago but I found out that I could not keep up meat + green veg only because I couldn't cook. Basically, I couldn't make meat + green veg taste good or interesting.
At the same time I cut out all sugar and I tried drinking nothing but water (12 months ago). I found out that not only can I not stand drinking water all the time I had sugar withdrawals. I tried drinking all of the sugar free stuff like coke zero, zevia and things like that. This worked for a bit but I slipped back to drinking regular coke.
There two critical discoveries that happened around that time:
I found out there were A LOT of sugar zero cal zero impact on your hormone levels replacements. Stevia is the big one but that stuff is cut with a lot of different things so its hard to get the effect. I settled on monkfruit sweetener which is zero cal and can be found in this product: https://www.lakanto.com/collections/shop-products/products/lakanto-golden-sugar-free-sweetener
The other thing that I found out was that TEA, of all things, makes water taste more "ROUND". I cannot explain it, but I cannot drink just plain water unless I am really thirsty. These days I make a giant pot of tea, have it sit on the counter at room temp and I can drink it. Sweetening with monkfruit zero cal means you can drink as much as you want all day long. So that replaced all commercial drinks.
The third thing that I found out was that I had to learn to cook and cooking is not about ingredients its about two dozen techniques that you use to mix and match sauce + meat + a filler (usually a starch like rice or potatoes). Once I learned to cook I was able to eat once a day because it was delicious and interesting but while it would be mostly asian style stir fries without a starch, I did cook a bunch of italian and that is mostly starch.
The exact current state of breakdown of meat vs green veg vs starch is as follows:
Mostly meat
Not too many green veg, but they do make it in to sauces and stir fries
I will occasionally make a side of rice or boiled / fried potato just to fill out a meal, but not often. So maybe a 1/4 of meal or less is starch in a given week?
I don't really make much italian any longer, that craving has gone away, recently i have just been stir frying / cooking up meats and making up sandwiches and adding sauces + veg toppings to change it up a bit. I'm not really craving that much these days.
Technically I haven't cut out starches 100%. They mostly just went away by accident and I eat so little of them that it probably doesn't even matter much any longer.
Also, I no longer use monkfruit to sweeten the tea that I drink at all. I think I have accidentally aclimatized to just drinking unsweetened tea and now I am down to that.
The whole thing has been a slow downregulation of the hormonal response cycles to eating.
As for cheating, Over the last two months I had McDonald cheezeburger meal I think twice and it was kind of gross, I remember it being a lot tastier. I did get a bunch of sushi two weeks ago because I haven't had it for 6 months, but that too wasn't as interesting as I remember it.
Weird.
// EDIT: What I am trying to get at is that I don't think it is super important to be too rigid about no starch no sugar all meat + veg. I think you want to probably eventually to get as low as possible, but having a bit of bread, pasta or maybe drinking a can of pop once a month or two is probably fine. You just want to get to a point where you are always satisfied and aren't craving stuff because the hormone levels are oscillating back and forth off the hook trying to get your body to consume stuff.
When I was a kid, McDonalds was a treat you had with your family once every 3 months or so? I have no idea I upregulated McDs consumption as an adult where it became normal part of weekly consumption. Same with all restaurants and highly processed food.
For anyone that bothered to read this far, I'm writing this to be read but also they are notes for my self. it's not interesting writing this down if someone doesn't prompt it with a question aor a challenge somehow.
think I have accidentally aclimatized to just drinking unsweetened tea
i did this on purpose just for curiousity sake and the first time i got dragged to a resturaunt after normalising unsweet tea/water i got so nauseous from drinking the sugar water i could barely finish my food. shiet was weird.
also hot earl gray is the fucking shiznit; did your diet influence you into drinking room temperature tea or do naturally dont care enough to heat it?
My experience is exactly the same. A couple of points:
1) I don't think of this as a diet any longer.
a) What I was eating before was crazy. No cooked food, all processed food or restaurant food with a sugar soda (usually coke).
In retrospect, this is an INSANE way to eat. All this does is push your hormone feedback loops to crazy levels the way cocaine must because your body is going crazy from the high sugar and high starch levels at each meal.
b) Eating home cooked food once a day with little to no sugars and starches now seems like a normal way to live.
I cannot even fathom this being something i am trying. It's just the way I eat.
2) One exception, I'm stuck behind a computer all day long. I have no idea what I will crave if I start excercising. So, I could be full of shit and lying to my self.
3) The tea thing is pure lazyness. I used to have it hot with monkfruit sweetener.
Then I started making a huge pot of it because I got tired of making it 8 times a day and let it sit on the counter so I can refill all day long and make it only a few times a day. Again, sweetened with monkfruit for my tastes, but I found out that I CANNOT drink water at room temperature at all. I don't know what it is, water has to be dead cold. Sweetened tea at room temp? No problem, it tastes "round" to me, cold water tastes "sharp".
Then I ran out of Lakonta monkfruit sweetener and I have been drinking just plain room temp tea without sweetener the last month or so because I was too lazyto buysome.
I now only make like one bigger pot of tea for the whole day, I don't even drink much all day long.
I literally stumbled into this by accident after I discovered cooking as a replacement for fast food and tea as a replacement for pop.
I applaud you for your valiant effort. I would like add a few advices, but I'll leave it up to you to take it or leave it.
Sweet potatoes are amazing. They have complex carbohydrates which helps you feel fuller and they can also help with your sweetness cravings. There are other root vegetables that you could experiment with like yucca, taro, jicama, and so on, but I am not an expert in experimenting with them. What you're craving from coke products may be carbonation, so you may want to try experimenting with Soda Stream to add carbonation in your water. As for flavoring, just add citrus, berries, or cucumber in it. I hope you're getting some fruits in your system once in a while, otherwise you're fighting your own instinct to revert back to your old lifestyle.
The real enemy of your diet is anything that has been highly refined with machine that are based on carbohydrates. They sit in your gut and the bacteria that crave those carbohydrates will be flourishing, making you crave for them. The slower you cut out the better it will be and longer your will stay off of them. The main examples are flour, sugar, corn syrup, and any derivatives of them. There's dozens of different names for sugar and corn syrup, so be sure to look at the nutrition labels to avoid them as much as you can.
And I'm sure you might know this already, but crash diets don't work. Also, your goal should be a permanent breakaway from your old diet habit. You'll crave your old eating habits. But the key is to have less and less of them and eventually cutting them out completely. You seem like you can put in some dedication to this diet journey, so I just wanted to help out. Take it with a grain of salt of courses, but I wish you good luck.
Noted on the root veg stuff, will look into it.
Agreed with everything here.
// EDIT: just to add a couple of points here:
There are documented cases of making huge dietary changes and being able to stick with them. The most notable ones are the morbidly obese cases that fasted on rice or even just water for 6 to 12 months and managed to have zero issues afterward and remained a healthy size (skinny).
I think I know the reason why huge dietary are really difficult: you hormones are what control how much you eat not you.
Basically, if you just eat different over a long period of time your hormone feedback loops will eventually re-regulate them selves to match the enviornmental conditions.
So, for example, I mentioned that I don't know how I upregulated McD consumption to a weekly meal. Well, I kind of know I just don't remember the process because it happened soooo slowly over a long period of time. But upregulation of consumption has usually the following patterns for me:
a) Sugar - I always had a coke with McD meals. Sugar makes everything taste good. Ever try eating pizza without a coke? I don't think it's possible to eat pizza without a coke.
Sugar not only makes everything taste good, sugar makes you eat MORE than you would normally. There is a phenomenon known to scientists that sugar HAS NO UPPER LIMIT TO CONSUMPTION. All foods known to man have a natural satiation point. You cannot overeat potatoes, meat, fish, rice or anything, eventually you just get sick of it. But add sugar to any of these foods (where it makes sense) and all of a sudden you can eat an infinite amount of it. This is a real testable property of sugar.
On top of that, coke has salt in it. So, not only does sugar upregulate what you eat, the salt in the coke makes you more thirsty making you drink larger and larger sizes of coke.
b) Starches - as posted by others, a starch is a sugar. All sugars spike your insulin, insuling upregulates how much fat you store but insulin also control a lot of other processes and upgregulates other hormones ... kind of throwing your hormone response into a high state of chaos as if you had ah it of heroin or something.
I think french fries being fried and super salted and being a pure starch really does a number on the system. Your hormone leves basically go,holy shit this is the good stuff, more please.
c) Salt. Salt can make any boring food tasteinteresting. McDs salts their food liberally.
Anyway, most people say that if you slowly increase how much you eat you will eventually aclimatize. This is true but what I think is happening is one layer below that: If the food is rich in sugars, starches, veg oil (nicely made tasty with salt too), what you are really doing is upregulating your hormone response loops and strengthening them over time. Every time the hormone feedback loop is upregulated to a new higher default you are going to create withdrawal symptoms if you try to downregulate.
Which would explain why we have documented cases of EXTENDED FASTING / extended severe dietary changes working: If you fast or change your diet and can commit to 6 to 12 months of change, your hormone feedback loop will downregulated into a new normal feedback loop and you will remain skinny.
The problem with the severe change is that you have to absolutely commit to a long term dietary change like that and you will have to do real work including dealing with severe withdrawal symptoms.
NOTE: Again, these are notes for me, the post was super intersting, thanks!
(post is archived)