[Kingston]

Hi Holistic,

I appreciate your help. I intuit I miss something important about diet experiments in general, not just about the specific complexities of a particular diet. I hope to reach some workable conclusion.

Originally Posted by Holistic Star

e.g. if you were eating veggy burgers when you were veggy that might leave you feeling sluggish if they had wheat in for example.

Yes, it complicates things when you cut out only one or two things. In this example, I did not eat veggie burgers, so that could not have caused a sluggish feeling to counter the energy. But if I remember correctly, Steve did eat veggy burgers when he was a vegetarian, and reported a significant energy increase. So why am I not feeling it?

Originally Posted by Holistic Star

it might just be that you cut out things without ensuring that you were replacing the nutrients you were losing e.g. by drinking green smoothies or almond milk etc.

I have a varied diet and take supplaments on a day I eat not so varied (which is not often). So I don't think that I miss any nutrient. I'm sure the nutrients in meat are covered by nuts, seeds, veggies like broccoli, and even the B-complexes in beer. Whole civilizations are vegatiarian without a problem. And I think broccoli also replaces the calcium deficiency when you cut out milk. BTW, I never drink milk anyway, and have gone without yoghurt or cheese before, without noticible drawbacks. So going without these could not have countered the energy increase, as far as I can tell...

Originally Posted by Holistic Star

when you say you didn't eat processed food, do you mean you prepared everything yourself from scratch?

With "processed foods" I mean factory produced complete meals or sauces, like canned soup, microwavable meals, and instant sauces. I did buy meat which contains some conservants, and drank beer or whine, which technically are processed. Do you think that is enough to counter all of the energy increase I got from going without dairy and factory food? Seems unlikely to me, I you consider that Steve attributes 80% of his energy increase from vegan to the fact that he doesn't take dairy.

I am very curious about these energy increases that Steve reports, but I am also a bit skeptical. In general there could be a placebo effect explaining some of the increase. But that does not explain all I think, since I belief some diets are better than others, which means that there are subjective and objective energy level differences.

But how different are human bodies from each other? If there is such a wide variety of "good" possible diets, what does that mean for an individual? Take meat for instance. According to some theories man switched to meat when the forest (with nuts and tubers) could not harbor the growing population, and man expanded into the savanna, where hunting made him so mobile he populated entire Africa in no time. The body evolved to handle meat.

If we believe this, than I have a hard time believing that meat is a bad for you. Then, when you try for yourself, and find no energy increase, this confirms for me personally that meat is not bad. But Steve has an energy increase by going vegetarian!! So either Steve is deluding himself, or I am deluding myself, or his body is very different from mine. But we have the same ancestors which roamed Africa long ago, hunting for meat...

This is just an example of me trying to get my head around this. Steve keeps on having these big energy increases from every diet change, even the current one that leaves out cooked foods. If his changes are "real and objective", than the best diet is all-raw foods, like the people ate in the forest before they conquered the savannah. That would mean that meat is only needed when there is nothing else around...

So in short, if we have basically the same body, then why do we have different results?

Sorry this is such a long post, but I really wanted to get this down..