How to Find the Best Diet for You
September 8th, 2005 by Steve Pavlina
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What type of diet will give you the greatest amount of energy, health, and mental clarity?
I don’t know. I’m not you. But I can tell you how to find out for yourself.
Experiment. Try different ways of eating. Use the 30 days to success method for each type of diet you want to try. 30 days is about the minimum because during the first week or two after any dietary improvement, you’re bound to experience some detox effects, which can make you feel lousy before you feel better. Headaches, back aches, and mood swings are common.
When you test each new diet, take written notes on your experiences. Note the effects on your level of energy, mental clarity, and feeling of well-being. I use my regular journal for this (on my PC), so I can do a quick keyword search to pull up my notes and observations of all the diets I’ve ever tried.
I use health books and articles to supplement my knowledge, but first and foremost I rely on my own personal experience. I mainly use books as a guide for what to try next, assuming the principles seem sound and mesh with my current level of understanding.
Health books are often contradictory, but when you read enough of them (at least 20), you begin to see patterns and learn to become better at separating the fluff from the truth. The first chapters of most commercially popular diet books are virtually identical. They tend to follow the same pattern of explaining why other diets don’t work and why this book is the one true breakthrough that will revolutionize how people eat, but there’s no substance to those chapters. It’s just marketing-speak. So you can generally skip the first chapter of any diet book without losing anything.
One very simple principle I’ve adopted is to give very little credibility to diet books with photos of fat doctors on the cover. It should be obvious why that has proven helpful.
To really define a diet to experiment with, you have to be very specific in how you define the diet if you want your experiments to produce meaningful results. As I’ve written previously, vegetarian is not a diet, nor is vegan. A vegetarian is merely someone who eats no animals (no cows, pigs, chickens, fish, etc.), and a vegan eats no animal products (no animals, dairy, eggs, etc.). But that doesn’t define what you do eat. You can be a vegan who eats french fries, candy, and soda, or you can be a raw foodist who eats only raw foods, or you can eat macrobiotically and have a diet with lots of grain dishes and soups. So terms like vegan or vegetarian are simply not specific enough to define a diet. There are countless variations of those ways of eating.
The same goes for high protein diets, high carb diets, metabolic type diets, hair-color diets, etc. Those terms are way too vague to define your real diet, especially since most people tend to eat the same foods often and settle into a pattern of eating a tiny subset of all the potential foods available to them. What are you actually eating? Are you eating cheese, beans, artificial shake powders? What about fruits and vegetables? Are they mostly raw or cooked, canned or fresh or frozen? Even a vegan who eats lots of canned and boxed foods is on a very different diet than one who eats only fresh, unprocessed foods.
How much variety is there in your diet? Does your definition of fruit consist mainly of apples, oranges, and bananas? Or do you eat 10 different types of fruit every week? What foods do you see in your grocery store that you’ve never eaten?
Do you consume any drugs like caffeine, nicotine, alcohol, etc? Simply give up coffee, and you’re on a totally different diet with a significant change in your body’s biochemistry. Remove artificial supplements from your diet, and you’ve made another significant change.
I’ve noticed that different ways of eating can have a huge effect on my energy level as well as my emotional resilience. It’s not just what you eat or don’t eat that matters. How the food is prepared makes a big difference too.
The sensitivity of dietary inputs is one reason you can’t rely solely on the advice and experiences of others. You have to see for yourself. Even if you eat identical foods to someone else, the specific effects on your physiology may be unique.
Through experimentation I found that the best diet I’ve tried so far is an all-raw, whole foods, vegan diet. No caffeine. No supplements. No sugar. No artificial or processed foods. No junk. There are some great all-raw (un)cookbooks, and there’s even a gourmet raw food restaurant near my home, so I enjoy some pretty creative dishes on this diet. I can see by my notes that this way of eating left me feeling more energetic, emotionally positive, and mentally clear than any other diet I’ve tried. But I continue to experiment and have been doing so since the early 90s. One thing I don’t like about the all-raw diet is that it can be labor intensive if you want to eat a variety of interesting dishes. Lots of chopping and mixing and blending and dehydrating and juicing. If I had my own personal chef to set to the task, this is how I’d eat all the time. But I find that adding in some denser cooked foods like brown rice is helpful. It fills me up faster and saves me time without giving up too much of the energy benefits. The nice thing about this way of eating is that I can eat as much as I want without gaining weight.
Even though there’s so much marketing and money involved in diets (and consequently, misinformation abounds), I found that following my own common sense helped steer me in the correct direction. In the long run, it really shouldn’t have been that big a surprise to me that I feel best eating the simple foods that nature provides instead of man-made concoctions. The more human beings tamper with the foods I eat, the worse I feel when I eat them.
As for animal foods, it’s only common sense to me now that I wouldn’t run up to a cow and try to take a bite out of its hide; nor would I bend down, shove its calf aside, and try to suckle its teats. If the process of eating becomes excessively stupid at any point (like trying to drink another species’ baby-milk after I’ve already been weaned — a species that has four stomachs and weighs almost 10x as much as me), that’s where I know I’m heading in the wrong direction. So you can read fad diet books until you’ve run yourself in circles and have grown confused enough that you want to believe anything those marketers tell you, or you can just ask yourself whether it’s more intelligent to pluck an apple off a tree or to suckle a 1400-pound cow (especially one that’s been pumped full of bovine growth hormone).
It can be hard to get the ingrained-since-childhood marketing-speak out of our brains and restore basic notions of dietary common sense, but once you start to regain and re-assert your own logic, I think you’ll find that your thinking about diets becomes a whole lot simpler and less complicated.
Shifting diets can be difficult, but once you’ve done the first 30 days, it’s much easier after that, and your new way of eating becomes routine. Every new diet looks harsh from the outside looking in. But once it’s a habit, you’ll barely even think about it. It just becomes your normal default way of eating. Just as you once learned to eat the way you do now (unless you’re still eating baby food, that is), you can learn to eat a new way whenever you choose to do so.
So to sum up…
- Conduct your own dietary experiments for at least 30 days at a time, take notes, and compare the results of different diets.
- Juice the marketing-speak out of your brain (like “milk does a body good” and “beef is for dinner”), and re-establish your own common sense.
- Put more trust in Mother Nature than in marketers.
- Call me any names you want, as long as you don’t call me a marketer. That would hurt my feelings.
September 8th, 2005 at 2:40 am
People interested in self-improvement are tinkerers. They tinker with their psyche.. and before long, they start tinkering with and fine-tuning their body.
They also tinker with PHP scripts, cars, etc.
For a huge boost of energy before starting a very tough project which requires many hours of very focused thinking, I eat about 800 g of fresh fish (well-cooked, of course). Then I am lethargic for half an hour.. after which the proteins, phosphorus and other substances in the fish get to my brain and make me able to hyper-focus.. a lot more than caffeine.
BTW - I do this very rarely, and I also drink very little coffee. I only do this when I need a mega-boost.
Other people may not experience the same mind boost when eating lots of fish.
I am curious to find out about other readers’ mega-boost tips.
September 8th, 2005 at 6:47 am
The worst thing that dairy marketers have done is they made people think that milk is not just good for their body, but is necessary to get the proper amount of calcium. What a load of BS. Some studies have been conducted showing that milk actually makes our bones more brittle.
“In one study, funded by the National Dairy Council, a group of postmenopausal women were given three 8-ounce glasses of skim milk every day for two years, and their bones were compared to those of a control group of women not given the milk. The dairy group consumed 1,400 mg of calcium per day and lost bone at twice the rate of the control group. According to the researchers, “this may have been due to the average 30 percent increase in protein intake during milk supplementation. … The adverse effect of increases in protein intake on calcium balance has been reported from several laboratories, including our own” (they then cite 10 other studies). Says McDougall, “Needless to say, this finding did not reach the six o’clock news.” This is one study that the dairy industry won’t be repeating any time soon.” source site
And here’s a quote from another site, shattering the belief that milk is our best source of calcium. It makes perfect sense though, since the cows have to get their calcium from somewhere, and they don’t do it by drinking milk.
“Calcium is in every natural food that we eat. And, believe it or not, there are actually foods that are higher in calcium than our beloved milk. Little sesame seeds do not have the backing of a massive Dairy Board to advertise their nutritional quality. Yet a cup of these humble little seeds contains 2,200 mg. of calcium compared with the 280 mg. of calcium in a cup of milk.” source site
September 8th, 2005 at 7:27 am
I quit coffee for thirty days and it has made a huge difference. It’s weird no longer craving coffee anymore. Now I can look at coffee more as a drug or a supplement rather than as a daily necessity. Instead of mindlessly buying a cup of java by habit, I ask myself “Do I need to wake up and be more alert right now?” And “Do I have time to take a nap instead?” If I need to wake up and focus, but don’t have time to nap, then that’s when I’ll drink coffee. I probably drink coffee once every other week now.
September 8th, 2005 at 7:34 am
I’ve already started eating a high fiber cereal instead of the more sugary stuff I was used to. I definitely feel better and I believe I’ve lost significant weight in only a few weeks. Before that, I added fruits like apples, peaches, plums, and bananas as snacks since I notice that I don’t really eat a lot of them before then. I’ve been eating wheat bread instead of white for some time now.
The past couple of days has me thinking seriously about cutting meat and dairy from my diet as well, which would be a radical change as I am a big fan of ham and cheese sandwiches, steak, and cereal. Still, I can see myself doing it.
And obviously I can ask for a vegetarian-friendly meals at restaurants and the like, but I’m wondering what it will be like to eat at my parents’ house. They like to add lamb to pasta, and I think it is delicious. Also, BBQs usually have hamburgers and hotdogs, foods I also love.
I would think that eating something like these on the special occasions described would be one-offs and not be too detrimental. Maybe when I’ve changed my diet I might not find such meals appealing anymore so this might be a moot point, but am I right in thinking that eating meat once in a while even though my normal diet doesn’t involve it shouldn’t have too much of an adverse effect? After all, someone on the SAD diet who eats a super healthy meal one day won’t become incredibly healthy for a few hours, right?
September 8th, 2005 at 8:19 am
Arguing for experimenting is good. Dogmatically asserting that nobody anywhere could benefit from food X (e.g., dairy foods) is less so. There’s evidence that dairy foods benefited at least some northern Europeans, over a long enough time scale to induce natural selection for the ability to eat them:
“Enattah et al., 2002 … showed that the [lactase-persistent] haplotype is unusually long, considering its high frequency–a hallmark of recent selection. They estimated that strong selection occurred within the past 5,000 to 10,000 years, consistent with an advantage to lactase persistence in the setting of dairy farming. The signals of selection observed in this study were among the strongest seen to that time for any gene in the genome.”
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/dispomim.cgi?id=223100
September 8th, 2005 at 9:03 am
@GBGames: You may find that when you cut animal foods from your diet for 30 days, you simply don’t crave it anymore. It becomes a non-food, about as appetizing as a bowl of sawdust. It’s been 12 years since I had a bite of meat, but I lost all interest in its appeal within the first few months. A steak gradually ceased to look attractive to me and eventually had the opposite effect — it looked like a chunk of rotting flesh, as if I’d have to be some kind of undead zombie to even consider eating it. A slice of cheese looks like a slab of mucus. I don’t even consider those things foods anymore; it tends to make me nauseous to imagine putting them in my mouth. My Pavlovian conditioning to salivate in the presence of animal products reversed itself once I stopped eating them. However, if I don’t eat watermelon for a few months, I still find it attractive.
Alternatively, there are many vegan substitutes available. You can get vegan deli slices for sandwiches (different flavors like turkey, bologna, ham, etc.). You can get vegan cheese, including sandwich slices (American and Mozarella varieties). You can get vegan cream cheese, butter, sour cream, burgers, hot dogs, roast duck, ground beef, jerky, ice cream, donuts, etc. Not all of it is healthy, but you certainly don’t have to feel deprived from foods you’re familiar with.
You can even find gourmet vegan Belgian chocolates here:
http://www.rosecitychocolates.com/veganselection.html
When I first tried some of these products after going vegan in the 90s, I have to say that most of them tasted pretty bad. But in the past decade these products have improved tremendously, and there are multiple varieties to choose from (some taste better than others). A few years ago I went to the Natural Products Expo with my wife, and we went around gobbling up delicious free samples of all kinds of new vegan products until we were stuffed.
September 8th, 2005 at 9:15 am
Steve, i m very impressed from what you wrote the past 2 days and forwarded your site to some friends of mine.
I wanted to ask your opinion on an argument of one of these friends.The argument is that we re not vegans by nature cause our intenstines are longer than animals that dont eat meat, like ship for example.
His opinion is that we must have a balance eating rarely meat, but still, the idea of totally excluding meat from our diet is can be dangerous cause it’s against our nature.
It sounds logical, isnt it?
be safe
Vasilis
September 8th, 2005 at 9:28 am
It seems that Steve Jobs, the CEO of Apple, is vegetarian.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/worlds_most_powerful/3284811.stm
September 8th, 2005 at 9:39 am
Vasilis: I would think that humans eating meat sounds natural, but mostly just because of how our teeth look. We have meat-eating teeth, right? Nature wouldn’t give us those if meat-eating was truly that unhealthy, right? It seems to make sense, especially if you believe that what nature does is much better than what humans engineer.
It might make for good science fiction. A planet of otherwise normal humans who have teeth geared towards eating plants only.
Of course, maybe meat was probably healthier back in the day. The only hormones in them were naturally occurring.
September 8th, 2005 at 10:01 am
@Thisisthesea2002: Your friend is utterly mistaken — humans have much longer intestines than carnivorous animals. I’ll have a new blog post appearing on this topic on Friday.
September 8th, 2005 at 10:25 am
Hmm…. As a molecular biologist, I find Erich Schwarz’s comment very interesting. I wonder what the advantage dairy provided Northern Europeans. Calcium? Protein? Phosphorus?
Of course this is something everyone has to deceide for themselves. And therefore I find arguments based on whether or not humans are “natural” vegetarians, carnivores, etc. quite tireing.
The lifestyle of many humans is dramatically different from what it was a couple of hundred years ago, which is quite too short a time to for example significantly change the structure of our digestive systems. What matters is not evolutionary past but what is convenient for us now in our current environment.
September 8th, 2005 at 11:05 am
These are interesting articles and I want to improve my diet, but (just being a devil’s advocate here) …
Your logic and common sense about dairy products doesn’t entirely make sense to me. Milk’s entire purpose is to deliver calories and nutrition to offspring. Does that make another species’ baby-milk harmful? You are vegan and eat a lot of fruit. Fruits/nuts are basically the sperm/eggs of an entirely different biological kingdom. Yuck! The whole purpose of fruit is to trick plant-eaters into scattering seeds around.
Look at our closest ancestors - monkeys and apes. They eat a varied diet including plants, bugs, worms, grubs, and insects. I’ve seen documentaries where monkeys catch and eat other mammals. Our digestive system evolved to handle a wide variety of food. We convert bio-material to energy just like many other species. Plant and animal matter differ in some respects, but ultimately both are primarily sugar chains that we convert into energy.
Modern man’s diet probably sucks. But I think it is misleading to try classifying foods as unnatural and natural. Poison ivy, rhubarb leaves, poisonous mushrooms, and many other dangerous foods can all be found naturally. That doesn’t mean we should eat them.
I’m a little nervous about the advantage of eating large amounts of calories. Some preliminary research has shown reduced calories may increase lifespan:
http://www.infoaging.org/b-ami-4-calrestrict.html
I think the key to a healthy diet is variety as you have already written. I eat a lot of fruits and vegetables (and a little meat/junk food sometimes).
September 8th, 2005 at 11:34 am
@GBGames: Our teeth are like those of natural herbivores, not like those of carnivores. Take a look at a cat’s teeth and compare them to yours. I’d love to see you try to take down a deer with your teeth — I doubt you’d even be able to penetrate its hide. Humans eat meat by chewing it with their flat molars just like they chew plants. Carnivores dont have flat molars.
I laugh at your puny fangs, unless of course you’re a vampire or werewolf.
September 8th, 2005 at 12:09 pm
Here’s some information from a taxonomic perspective of whether humans are designed to be carnivores, herbivores or omnivores.
http://www.vegsource.com/veg_faq/comparative.htm
September 8th, 2005 at 1:22 pm
Teeth are a generally poor indicator of dietary adaptation. The primates with the largest incisors (Gorilla and Baboon) eat vegetarian diets where primates with small incisors (Human and Chimpanzee) eat meat on a regular basis. The morphology of teeth is more related to evolutionary changes in jaw structure and cranium sizes. The thought of a human taking down a deer with his/her teeth is a ridiculous scenario. Humans have advanced opposable thumbs and big brains which are far more deadly than any set of claws or teeth. Humans are perfect omnivores and it’s a powerful trait because it allows our species to essentially eat everything in sight. Early nomadic tribes in Siberia and other frozen lands didn’t have to succumb to famine as long as they could happily and healthily survive by eating Caribou and other furry creatures. It’s a biological and historical fact that meat eating was an important and advantageous event in the evolution of our species. Anyone who wants to fight this claim will be running up against a huge wall of evidence. What most interesting than the past is the fact that Humans seem to be one of the few, if not the only, species capable of consciously excluding animal products from their diets. I say we frame the discussion about veganism in terms of the health, environmental, ethical, or even spiritual benefits of the choice. The debate over wether humans are “designed” or “evolved” to eat meat adds no value to the discussion. All it does is give those who are insecure about their choice to be a vegetarian or a vegan a warm fuzzy feeling.
September 8th, 2005 at 1:28 pm
Wow, that article from Vegsource.com is absolutely riddled with inaccuracies and clearly the author has gone far beyond his area of expertise (hate to be blunt, but pseudo-science just boils my blood). For a more sound explanation along the same lines written by a vegetarian who actually has expertise in the area (as an anatomist and primatologist) check out this link.
http://www.vrg.org/nutshell/omni.htm
September 8th, 2005 at 2:04 pm
@Joel D: That link you posted is about the opportunistic feeder theory, which is both false and unscientific. I’ll include a link to a site that debunks that theory in tomorrow’s blog post.
September 8th, 2005 at 2:57 pm
Humans can certainly digest meat and animal products, I can vouch for that since I used to eat them.
For me the question is more do we need to eat them? And my answer is no, we don’t. The flaw with using evidence of early humans eating meat to show that we should be eating meat is that those humans lived in a very different environment with very inferior technology and agriculture (or lack thereof). They couldn’t go to the supermarket and buy fruits and vegetables year round. Most of them didn’t even live in climates where these grew year round. Naturally, being able to digest meat is an evolutionary advantage. But there’s a difference between doing something out of desperation and because it’s the best food for your body.
In 1972, Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 crashed in the mounitans forming the border between Chile and Argentina. Survivors had to resort to cannibalism (of those who died in the crash) to survive because it was only two months after the crash that they were finally rescued. The point is that even though we can eat meat to survive when necessary, given our current level of technological and agricultural advancement we really don’t need to.
September 8th, 2005 at 3:26 pm
Steve,
Can you honestly say that a carrot and some brocoli taste better than KFC?
September 8th, 2005 at 3:49 pm
@Paul: Heavens yes! No contest.
September 8th, 2005 at 9:02 pm
@Paul: I second Steve’s opinion. (OK, I have been vegetarian all my life;
so I may be biased!)
For about three straight weeks last month this was my diet:
Breakfast — organic oatmeal (boiled; nothing added)
Lunch — Boiled veggies w/ brown rice, with fresh juice
Dinner — Fresh fruits or salad
And about 1 liter of water, everyday.
Boy, that gave me a lot of mental clarity — I was able to
meditate for lot longer and with much greater ease.
But then I have slipped back to my vegetarian style
with junk food…. Oh well, gotta start over again.
BTW, in Indian tradition, the person preparing the
food also makes a whole lotta difference. The theory
is that our thoughts are nothing more that subtle
vibrations. And a person can transfer these vibrations
to other objects. So a negative person can transfer
their “negative vibratons” to the food they are cooking — and when
you eat it, the vibrations affect you in subtle ways.
Of course there is a whole science behind this.
[By “science” I don’t mean modern science which
is limited by what it can observe — probably these
subtle vibrations can’t be measured by today’s tools.]
And this is one reason that some people from my
tradition won’t even go to resturants. But I can’t
say that I am that sensitive!!