Greetings, fellow Steemers and Steemettes!

Tell me if this does sound familiar to you: Thanks to how cheap and readily available food is these days in all sorts of shapes and tastes, most of them considered unhealthy, you managed to find a couple extra pounds on your waste. Where did that come from?! And now you are hellbeant on losing them.

I think most of you have experienced something like that or know someone who can share the feeling. So do I, actually. Seems like this is a common problem these days, especially in America and Europe. With food being available in abundance and moving our bodies isn't encouraged because comfort and coziness are pretty much preferred and just as readily available, this comes to no suprise.

So you want to lose some weight, but how are you gonna go about that? I asked myself the same once. Back in 2013 was the first time where I stepped onto a scale and found that my weight went past the tripple digits. 100 kilogram was a bit too much weight for my taste and I really preferred to see those double digits.

I did the most logical thing me as a novice when it came to this topic could have been doing at the time:

OFF TO THE INTERNET I GO!

As I said, this happened back in 2013, it was late summer if memory serves. Back then, the general consensus was to get that caloric defizit, train your muscles, but not more often than once every 48 to 72 hours, that long resting period is important and when you eat, make sure it's high carb, high protein, low fat. Ideally, spread over 4-7 meals a day.

That sounded.....interesting. And tiresome. But those people knew what they were talking about, looked the part and had all these interesting studies to back up their claims, so they must be right, right?

So I designed my own eating plan based on the information I absorbed and started to follow it while doing exercises. Overall, it did work out pretty well for me and I actually saw results. Early 2014, I was actually slightly below 80 kilograms, which was a good weight for me to have. Still not perfectly in shape, but I was getting there. Or at least, I would have, if it weren't for my father dying at the time I got there which threw me out of this grind somewhat fiercly.

So what were my eating habits at the time?

My breakfast consisted of some Oatmeal and Eggs. Some vegetables too fruit as well. I really wanted to kick off my day with a big healthy breakfast. For lunch, I usually ate rice or noodles, with some kind of vegetable and turkey. Before and after training, I would have protein shakes. A couple hours before going to sleep, I would stove a huge load of lowfat quark into my mouth.

This eating plan was, for the most part, actually quite nice to follow because except for the quark, I really enjoyed everything that I ate, which really helped me to stick with the plan for that long. What started to become somewhat tedious and tiresome was having to prepare all these different meals and/or carry stuff around in order to have them available when in need, but these can be taken care of by good planning and not being a whiny sod about it.

So, my father died and all my efforts went down the drain.

Moving forward to 2016, I managed to find a lot of the weight I lost again. What a joy. I was struggling a bit with my motivation back at the time because starting over is hard. More by accident, it was about this time that I stumbled about a word for the first time that some people will recognize because these days, it is much more commonly used than it was before.

"Autophagy"

I did not read this word in anything scientific or factual the first time I stumbled over it. I actually read it in a Manga. In said manga, the idea was that once your body is down to the very last bits of energy and nutrition, it starts tearing into your cells in order to give you one last energy boost. That sounded horrifying! But interesting nevertheless, so I took to the internet because I was interested in whether or not that actually exists and if so, how much truth there is to all that.

Turned out that it actually does exist, but not necessarily in the way used in said work of fiction I consumed at a time. And yet what I found was very interesting because of me doing this research, I actually got in touch with the topic of fasting.

Fasting and the ketogenic diet

Now remember, this was back in 2016, so anyone who talked about fasting was either doing so because of religious reasons or he was considered a madman. And yet, again, there were lots of interesting scientific findings about the topic even though it was still somewhat fresh back at the time. I won't bore you with the details, but a lot of the things I found that came with the topic where just fascinating. The idea of fasting not only helping with getting and keeping your body in shape but also having other benefits like aiding longevity were very appealing. This was also the first time that I came across the topic of ketogenic dieting.

I gave both of them a try, simultaneously and it wasn't too bad. It was actually kind of enjoyable, except for the part where sugarcravings were a bitch and people in my surroundings were super intolerant about it and trying to tempt me into forgoing these. But that is another topic for another time.

So I was fasting and living and eating ketogenic to the best of my ability and actually found it quite enjoyable. Especially because it made my life so much simpler. Instead of having to prepare a huge breakfast, I was able to sleep a while longer. I liked that a lot. I felt well, energetic, had no kind of deficiencies and was overall doing great. I even attempted dryfasting and when I felt like it, I even dryfasted for three days when I felt up for it. Again, this was back when people were super skeptical about these topics and were just starting to slowly get into the idea of these being good and healthy practises.

Nowadays, all the fitness youtube channels are all over the topics and bring out videos on these on a daily basis.

So I was living and I was living good, but I did so in an entirely different way that I did before. So far, so good.

Is sugar really the devil?

Because these topics really did interest me a lot, I noticed that there appears to be another shift to the machination coming. Over the last couple of years, people have pretty much come to the realization that sugar is the devil and an addictive drug in the worst way. Sugar is heavily linked to insulin and insulin makes us fat and sick, something along those lines is probably what most youtubers would say in a nutshell. Which in itself is a heavy shift compared to what we had a couple of decades ago.

But now I actually see discussions on the topic of sugar not being as damaging as we thought and/or, in some cases, even actually beneficial for health and weight loss. I did not expect that to happen, but yet it did. I intend to keep an eye on this topic, but right now, it actually leaves me wondering how I should treat this topic. I have lived and lived good following two very different dieting plans and now there may be something on the horizon that shakes these up. What will that mean for me, what will that do to my dieting plan, what implications will that have for my future, looking at my health and longevity.

And thinking about these topics, I came to some conclusions, which I believe to hold value no matter what nutritional science is going to tell me in the future.

1. I ain't trusting you, you're being played!

We humans are beings of habit and very easy to influence in our behaviours. Over the last couple decades, our lives have become very simple, comfortable and easy and this shows, as I have described in the beginning. Usually, following your gut is a decent piece of advise, but one has to keep in mind that our gut has been conditioned by the food industry to crave unhealthy food in unhealthy portions and patterns. So as anything, I take every message my body sends me with a grain of salt.

2. Skip the middleman

Processed food is the worst! And it is pretty much everywhere. And there is so much junk in it that we either don't need or are actually harmful for us. And some of it is just plain stupid! Just take a look at this.

Hardboiled peeled prepackaged eggs. And people actually pay money for this sin to human intelligence! Ridiculous.

So no matter what I eat, what diet I follow, what my goals are, I always aim for eating food that is as unprocessed and fresh as possible. Which is especially interesting when it comes to the topic of sugar again. I haven't had refined sugar in it's purest form in my household since forever and I avoid it like crazy. When I am eating healthy, of course, I'm not perfect. I experimented with sweeteners and found them not even all that enjoyable to be honest and healthwise, they aren't exactly the best suggestion either.

On the other hand, I do love me some fruit and berries. And there are a lot of super healthy options to choose from here that are also simply delicious. I enjoy blackberries and blueberries the most, but of course, even these should be enjoyed in moderation.

3. Calories mean nothing to me!

When I started with my first diet back in 2013, I did so under the premise that I do not want to count calories. For the simple reason that it is a hassle which would suck the fun out of the whole thing for me. I don't know if I was hitting any caloric deficit or not and back then, I really didn't care. Which is good because I can quite easily find myself obsessing over these kind of numbers. Some distance is good every now and then. I grew some muscles while losing bodyfat so there was some value to what I did there and that is all that mattered to me.

These days, there are a lot of discussions about how calories apparently aren't mattering at all and how hormones are the actual interesting thing to look at. Others may take closer looks at healthy gut bacteria, others at cells and there probably is some value and truth in all of that.

For me, being the lazy bum that I am, it doesn't really matter. I still ain't monitoiring my caloric intake and I probably won't ever start doing so.

4. Are you dense?!

Back when keto was on the rise to popularity, I actually read some things on the topic of nutrient density that I actually found quite appealing. The idea was rather appealing to me and is yet again a concept that goes against what most fitness and nutrition gurus would say. The idea of nutrient dense food is that you center your entire diet around foods that have the most amount of healthy nutrients while having the least amount of calories. Things like healthy leafy greens, spinach and cale but also berries were very high on the list while things like meat were pretty far gone. I really do like this concept and there is a lot of value to this and I personally find that combining the pros of this kind of living go well with a ketogenic diet.

It also made me eat much more vegetables than I have ever done before, so that is one of the best pros about having learned this.

5. Where's the fun in this!?

No matter what you do, how you eat or what your goals are, it is of the utmost importance that you design your diet in a way that you find it enjoyable. A healthy diet is supposed to make your life better, not being a punishment. A healthy diet is supposed to be something you stick around longterm, not only for 4-12 weeks after which you return to bad eating habits again. Failing to plan is a plan for failure, so unless you plan for the long haul, you will always find yourself being thrown back eventually.

And that is the big take away for you. The scene around the topic of nutritional science sometimes feels as volatile as the crypto market. Never get flustered about it. Keep a calm head, go through the information you receive with a cool and calm head and consider how much these things make sense to you, based on your own, previous experienced. Also, keep in mind where you want to go with your body and life.

Thank you all for reading and look forward to my next post! I have no idea yet what it will be about, so, I should probably write about how failing to plan is a plan for failure.