My (kinda silly) nutritional disk of five.

This is just a bit of fun resulting from a quite (I'm sure) accidental (and possibly likely temporary) caloric split between different groups of foods. Untill not that long ago my sources of protein followed a 1 2 split. Two gram of plant sourced protein for each gram of animal sourced protein. After non protein related nutrient compsition led me to add aditional protein sources (mostly liver) to my diet, this ratio swapped, and after some more fine tuning, I suddenly noticed a pattern in my macro intake that I thought was kind of interesting.

So I'm not going to make this more than the fluke cooincidence it most likely is by attempting to rationalize why all of this makes sense. It is just where I ended up for now and it just happened to be a funny yet interesting fit of close to equal parts.

I'm always doing control-feedback theory based experiments with my diet and workout routines, so the below is likely a very temporary, and the fact that the numbers add up so close to perfectly is just a probablistic fluke, but as it took me years to get where I am today, the split I'm showing here, thoigh accidental could be an interesting starting point for others going on a similar journey to better personal health.

There are different ways to group food intake. Dietary guidelines such as the dutch Schijf van Vijf (disk of five) use what seems to be a grams of food based division, putting food into different food groups. There are different groupings possible for the food. Different measurements for visualisation. Many degrees of freedom for writing up something like the disk of five.

Turns out the current snapshot of my diet not only fits to its own interesting disk of five that highlights the macro nutrient that seems most promenent, protein, but the partitions of the disk as defined this way are actualy (pretty close to) the same size.

If I divide my caloric intake today into five almost completely equal parts, one ot the parts, the low protein part, filled with veggies, veggie juice and fruit (mostly berries) while voluminous in grams, actually is small enough to take up just a tiny bit more than 20% of the callories. The other four, close to equal sized segments are filled by foods that are relatively high in protein. I have taken quite some trouble phasing out protein powder and swapping it for whole food protein sources.

To summarize, I now have five food groups, not the standard food groups you may know from your dietary guidelines, but still five food groups:

1. Micronutrient dense low protein plant foods. Mostly veggie/berry juice end veggies.
2. High protein and/or high fat plant foods. Mostly nuts, beans, seeds, and oils.
3. Vertebrae parts. Fish, poultry, offal and muscle meat.
4. Invertebrae. Things like crab, shrimps, escargot, mussels and yes, I also still eat insects.
5. Eggs & Dairy: For me, eggs and mostly goat and sheep milk.

I know this division is a bit silly and all, but not actually more silly than the food disks used in dietary guidelines.