So, a year or so ago, I was training for another job in another office, which I was in for a year before I left and got the one I am in. I was seated next to a boxer, who was about 20 and presumably flyweight. We got on reasonably well before he decided to interrupt me to tell me how a low carb diet was anti inflammatory, at which point I decided to stop bothering with him.
As someone who has lost 150 lb on both of the above, I am probably in an unusual position. I could have told him that the Inuits are the shortest lived population on the planet. I could also have shown him pictures of why Raw Food won. I didn’t bother with either of those things, because he was so smug about the smackdown during the conversation and I didn’t want to bother telling him that at his age, I probably weighed less than he did and ran for four hours a day whilst drinking very heavily.
Anyway, I continued to low carb my way throughout my raw food phase, and achieved an unusually speedy weight loss of 70lb in the initial ten weeks followed by about a pound a day until I discovered cacao, at which point the weight loss stopped, an ex returned to demand my attention and all hell broke loose.
I can remember the day this happened. He came into the house with three beautifully made coffee cakes and presented one to my mother and one to me. It was a war of politeness which turned ugly quite quickly since I was frightened of him. I remember standing crying in the kitchen because in order to avoid this situation I would have had to physically eject a person with brain damage from my home in front of my mother, who was rather delicate by that time.
There followed another 7 years of cooking for the pair of them and imagining I was somewhere else, because I clearly had no control over anything anymore so I might as well give up trying. On the plus side he was very helpful with my mother, on the minus the ending was inevitable when he also died.
Out of everything I have done over the years, low carbing and raw food were the two most useful things I learned about. The principle of low carbing is excellent. Your brain does love fat, you get to eat fifty percent more than on a standard calorie restriction diet, and as long as you do plenty of physical activity, you burn fat quite readily. Excessive meat, however, is not great for your digestion, and given the choice between the face I had after low carbing on a high fat meat based diet and the face I had after a raw food diet, there is no contest.
Then there is the issue of when you do not particularly want to participate in physical activity, whether that is because you don’t want to deal with people or whether you are just busy. Low carbing is not great for your health if you do not want to move around. I can attest to this as I have never returned to the consumption of sugar and starches of any kind and I do not find it difficult to put on weight low carbing as I apparently do not process maltitol at all well. Protein bars, theoretically fine on a low carb diet, have felt like they were killing me three or four times now. My liver has been deranged on a low carb diet much the same way it would be deranged if I was eating giant cakes, possibly due to the maltitol issue.
I have not seen many pictures of people on a low carb diet in old age, I am not sure why this would be. Whether at a certain point people are eating so little in old age that they are put back on carbs, or whether they literally live like inuits I do not know. All I can see online is a lot of American men who like going to the gym ramming their habits down everyone else’s throats as usual.
For aging well, raw food wins, because it is a high fibre, high hydration diet which accounts for a lot more variety of mineralisation and does not supply the same heavy proteins as a low carb diet. The number of poops per day are very important once you are over forty or so, and it wins from this perspective as well. I can almost eradicate the naso labial crease entirely, whereas with low carbing with meat, this was quite pronounced, as most people only ever see your face, you can imagine this is fairly important. There are also more ways of modifying the fat deposits for the perfectionist.
Finally, I call it raw foodism rather than raw veganism because having done this before, there is absolutely no advantage to being 100 percent raw vegan. Pescatarians live longer, and towards the end of my raw foodism, before being gifted with the responsibility for two sick people, I was using a lot of smoked salmon, seaweed and other maceration options rather than going down the route of fish oil. Raw food lends itself very well to the use of herbal medicine and superfood options, so this suited me far better.
All this I would have bothered telling the boxer if he wasnt a rude smug little shit, but as it was I got about as far as mentioning 8 calorie shirataki noodles before deciding that he wasn’t worth sharing information with.
He is still in the job I was in last year, probably. I hope he hasn’t got more head injuries, head injuries are not fun to be around.
For those tuning in to see how the health is progressing, no headaches, woot and my liver is definitely functional again, I am managing about 2 litres of fibrous and for the moment fruity supermix, although we know this is likely to subside and become low carby flax/seaweed/raw vegetable based over time as I start with the next phase after the garlic and dark fruit phase. I’m not terribly worried about weight loss so much as functionality for the moment, although we are about at the 2 stone mark now.
