Health Hacking: Food (Premium)

In Health Hacking: Diet and Nutrition, I took on a controversial topic. In this follow-up, I’m going to explain what I do about it.

That is, this article describes what I eat, and what I recommend eating (and not eating) throughout the day. But again, I am not qualified to give you advice about health, nutrition, or dieting. It is very important that you consult your doctor or other medical expert before embarking on your own journey to become healthier. This is about how I apply the science of keto and low-carb dieting in my daily life.

Also, if you haven’t done so, please do read Health Hacking: Diet and Nutrition and a follow-up in Ask Paul: December 15 before proceeding. I do repeat some themes here, but there is a lot of background in both articles that is helpful to keep in mind.

So. Eating.

I love to eat. Live to eat, in some ways. Have an uncomfortable relationship with consumption in all forms, I guess. But the key here, I think, is to enjoy what you eat. To eat when you are hungry. And to eat the right foods.

The problem is that our bodies are working to undermine us. As you may recall, we are biologically wired for feast or famine, and our bodies will try to store fat to sustain us through famines that will never come in this modern age. We still have the bodies of cavemen. And eating the wrong foods—carbs, sugars—will trigger our biological imperative to store fat and gain weight. Which is particularly dangerous when we’re sitting at a desk all day and not chasing a woolly mammoth around.

So let me step through the meals. Explain what and how I eat. And provide a few notes along the way.

Breakfast

Growing up in the 1970’s and 1980’s, I was taught that eggs, bacon, and butter were unhealthy, and that orange juice, fruit, bread, and non-sugared cereals were healthy breakfast options.

This is literally backward. It is absurd how wrong it is. Laughable.

Orange juice, most fruit, bread, and any cereal (sugared or otherwise) are all unhealthy. They are all sugars or foods that will be converted, usually very quickly, into sugars in our foods and will, in any case, be stored as fat. If you are trying to lose weight, you should avoid all of these (and similar) foods all of the time. Period.

Eggs are god’s perfect food, the perfect combination of fats, protein, and nutrients. I try to eat eggs every single day. If you do eat breakfast—and I will make the case below for why you should not, over time—eggs should be the basis of every breakfast, if possible. Eggs and some form of protein: Bacon, obviously, but any meat will do. Oily fish. Beef, pork, or poultry of any kind.

Variety is key, and that’s true of all meals, and of all eating. You can’t just eat eggs, cooked the same way, and bacon (or whatever) every single day. You will get tired of it.

So mix it up.

When I do eat breakfast (again, see below), I will mix 2 or 3 eggs with some meat, preferably sliced or diced pork belly. All of it is fried in tons of butter, salt, and pepper. (By tons, I mean “more than you would use, I bet” or “more than most Americans would be comfortable with.”)

The eggs could be poached, scrambled (optionally with cheese), or made into a flat, Julia Childs-style (e.g. “correct” or French) omelet with just a single slice (or less) of American cheese (if you must, it’s a bit high in carbs) or, preferably, other cheese. (And again, with lots of butter, salt, and pepper.) Use a different meat every day if you can.

If you can’t eat eggs, or don’t like eggs—I am so sorry—then you need to find some other form of fat you can eat regularly. Avocados are excellent. Cheese, as long as its not American cheese. Full fat Mayonnaise. Bulletproof coffee, which is coffee with butter or coconut oil in it.

Does any of that sound off, or even gross, to you? Embrace change and try it. The standard American breakfast isn’t standard elsewhere in the world, and it wasn’t standard in American until fairly recently either. Thank the food industry lobbyists for your confusion.

In the interests of diversity, you could also eat cottage cheese or Greek-style unflavored/unsugared yogurt, but not with (most) fruit. Adds some crushed mixed nuts instead if you need texture or taste.

Foods I avoid at breakfast: bread/toast of any kind (including, obviously, donuts, bagels, croissants, and anything else grain-related), cereals of any kind, fruit of any kind, juice of any kind, processed foods of any kind, potatoes of any kind (home fries, etc.), rice/starches of any kind. The obvious stuff.

Coffee is absolutely OK. I happen to drink mine black, and we have an inexpensive espresso machine, so that is what I drink every day, usually 2-3 (double espresso-sized) cups. If you want milk, the more fat the better. Do not add sugar, obviously, and if you’re serious about losing weight, wean yourself off of non-sugar sweeteners too; there is evidence that sweetness of any kind can trigger the same response in your body as actual sugar, meaning that your body will convert the fats you’re eating into fat.

Speaking of which, I mentioned previously that the phrase “a well-balanced breakfast” was invented by food lobbyists and that this kind of thinking will derail your weight loss goals. Do not mix carbs and non-carbs in any meal when possible, but especially at breakfast. Butter or full-fat creme cheese or any fat is fine until you put it on something that is carb-rich like bread or a bagel; then it turns into a killer. You have to get over your traditional understanding of what is OK or not OK to eat.

My weight loss needs are extreme. Yours may not be. If you are going to introduce carbs at breakfast all, I would stick to whole foods, which basically means fruit or vegetables. (Never fruit juice, which is just as bad for you as cola.) That is, eat the unflavored yogurt, with or without nuts, and then add some sliced banana or apple. Not citrus or tropical fruit, though. Oranges and similar fruits are much higher in sugar. My wife eats yogurt, nuts, and banana very regularly. She’s thinner than any of us.

Lunch/dinner

Lunch and dinner are easier, I think, than breakfast. All you need to do is apply the keto/low-carb knowledge to each plate. Skips sugars, carbs, and starches. Eat fats and proteins. Fatty proteins are ideal.

The issue there, of course, is that we’ve been trained not to eat the fat on beef, or chicken skin, or any of the other bits that are, in fact, the healthiest. So skip the chicken breast and eat the skin, the thighs, and (if possible) the organs. Go for the fattiest cuts, always.

Eat breadless sandwiches or cheeseburgers at home or out in the world. This is easy, I think. (But check out the section on eating out below for a bit more info.)

Snacking

Snacking, along with alcohol (see below), is a huge problem. But you should eat when you’re hungry. Just don’t overdo it.

There is a theory of eating that suggests that you should spread out meals over the day, and have, say, five smaller meals instead of three big ones as most do today. This theory sounds logical, but it assumes you’re eating a normal diet, where the explosion of carbs and sugars at each meal would trigger an insulin spike leading to all the bad effects of a normal diet. We’re not on a normal diet, and there should be no (major) spikes since you’re not eating carbs and sugars. So this isn’t something you need to worry about as much.

That said, over-eating is still bad. And training your body to fast (see below) for more than your normal sleep cycle is a good thing, and can help. Not snacking at night would be ideal. I can’t do it. I try.

If you do have to snack, as I do, stick to the healthy stuff: Fats and even proteins if you can handle that. Mixed nuts are OK. Cheese of virtually all kinds (good cheese, not American cheese) are excellent. We usually have a mix of three cheeses: Something hard (Piave, my favorite, or well-aged Gouda), something gooey in the middle when at room temperature, and something soft (goat cheese). No bread or crackers, obviously.

My wife will often have a dusted white cheese popcorn as a snack. I don’t eat that. (But I do sometimes have “real” popcorn with tons of butter as a cheat. The cheat is the popcorn, not the butter.)

Alcohol

I stopped drinking beer on December 3, 2016. Since then, I have had the equivalent, through various isolated sips, of less than one glass of beer in the past year. Beer is bad. Beer is liquid bread, which means that it is sugar. Beer is literally the worst thing you can consume, because liquid sugars add fat to your body more easily than anything else. So just don’t drink it. (Low-carb beers suck. Just move past this.)

Wine is not strictly low-carb, but it is much lower carb than beer: 5-8 grams of carbs per glass. Stick to red wine if you can (it’s the lowest of carbs among wines) or dry white wine if you prefer that; off-dry (read: sweet) wines are much worse. All dessert wines are a no.

Most hard alcohol, including Scotch, Bourbon, Whiskey, Gin, and even Rum, has zero carbs. So these drinks are guilt-free from a carbs perspective. The issue, of course, is that you can’t just drink hard liquor every night. (Well, I can’t.) And that there are still calories to consider.

I do drink alcohol—usually wine, but sometimes whiskey or similar, always on the rocks (no soda or whatever added)—and it’s a problem. If you’re on a keto diet, where you consume very few carbs each day, you will actually “pause” ketosis—the ideal condition where your body is using stored fats for energy—for the amount of time it takes for your liver to process the alcohol. It doesn’t reverse ketosis—if it did, I would not drink any alcohol—but it also means that alcohol can lessen the positive benefits of eating keto/low-carb each day, or of fasting (see the next section). So the goal should be as little alcohol as possible and not late at night.

I could improve in this area, for sure.

Fasting

While “calories-in, calories-out” is a lie, calories still matter. The goal is to consume the correctcalories—calories from fats and proteins, not from carbs and sugars–and to eat as few calories as possible.

This is difficult.

One strategy is to fast. Since we already fast every day when we sleep, it makes sense to extend that fast by skipping breakfast. So instead of fasting from 11 pm to 8 am (or whatever), a period of, say, nine hours, you can fast until noon, a period of about 13 hours.

(The trouble with any change like this, of course, is that your body adapts to whatever diet your on an sets a lower new baseline for the amount of calories you eat. So the possibility of gaining weight gets bigger over time, since you need to eat fewer calories than before to add fat and gain weight. Short-circuiting this behavior is a great area of investigation, and the good folks at the 2 Keto Dudes podcast are a great starting point.)

Not eating breakfast sounds like a non-starter to many, I know. It did to me. Indeed, if you had told me in late 2016, that I would basically not eat breakfast for 4-5 months straight, I would have laughed in your face. And yet I did do that, in early-to-mid 2017.

Breakfast is not “the most important meal of the day” (another bit of food industry nonsense). In fact, it’s optional. And you can wean yourself off it in stages, though I didn’t need to do that last year. I just stopped eating breakfast, most likely because of the positive impact of the dietary change I made. It just happened.

One key to this: Don’t eat a lot at night. In fact, if you can do it—I cannot—don’t eat at all after dinner. I suspect many of you have noticed the same phenomenon that I have, which is that the more you eat, and the later you eat, at night, the hungrier you are in the morning.

Another strategy: Work your way towards skipping breakfast. Eat lower-calorie foods like bone or chicken (or turkey) broth for breakfast and water it down over time before cutting it out entirely. (You really need a good relationship with a butcher. Our local guy here in Pennsylvania is amazing.) Hot water with salt is zero calories; sometimes all you need is that little bit of savory taste.

On that note, I’m doing the broth thing now: I’ve dropped the egg/meat breakfast, transitioned that to a (great) lunch option, and have been drinking turkey (after Thanksgiving) and then chicken and beef broth for breakfast since.

There are longer fasts to try too, of course. But I’ve not done this yet. I may not. I’m not sure I see the need personally.

Also, while deprivation diets do not work, and are, in fact, impossible, I recommend experimenting with being hungry sometimes. We live in an age of such great plenty that I feel like many of us are out of whack: We can and do graze whenever we feel the slightest pang of huger. Try dealing with it in short bursts. Man up.

For example, this morning, I woke up at 6:30, which is a bit early for a weekend. I went through the normal morning routine, drank a few espressos, read the paper, and then sat down to write this. I figured I’d eat some bone broth—which I’ve been watering down quite a bit for the past few days—at around 9 am. As that time passed, I started feeling hungry, but I kept writing. As I write this, it’s 10 am, and I feel a bit hungry, yes, but less hungry that before. Can I make it to noon? Definitely. Will I? Probably not. But even this short of an experiment with hunger is a useful reminder. I’m not going to die from starvation. And every little bit of fast I add to last night is a net positive.

Eating out

Many will point to the difficulties of eating healthy when out in the world. This is particularly acute when traveling—see below—but the more usual issue will be eating out. What do you do when you go to Dunkin Donuts or McDonalds or other fast food restaurants? Or to a sandwich shop for lunch? Or a nicer restaurant of any kind for dinner?

Guys, this one is easy.

You can eat at fast food restaurants with abandon. You just need to eat the right foods. As always.

First, no processed foods. No bread, nothing breaded.

If you want a breakfast sandwich at Dunkin Donuts or similar, order a version with sausage (not bacon; it’s easier to eat) and without any bread. So many people do this these days that virtually every restaurants will know what to do: Which is to put the bread-less sandwich in a little bag or container and give you a fork and knife. Perfect. (Well, nearly perfect: American cheese isn’t particularly low-carb, but one or two slices is fine.)

At lunch, in a McDonalds, Arby’s, Wendy’s, or whatever, I will order a double cheeseburger of whatever kind with everything but ketchup (and often adding mayonnaise) or sometimes a non-batterered/fried chicken sandwich. You can order these without the bun. But you can also just get the bun and not eat it; be sure to get a fork and knife. Avoid anything deep-fried, not because of the oil (which is healthy) but because those items are always breaded. Avoid sauces of dubious content (all McNugget sauces.) Avoid low-fat dressing if you get a salad. (This can be hard. Demand to inspect the dressing packets so you can find a full-fat or non-low-fat version.) Be sure to get some meat with that salad.

There is almost no such thing as a restaurant that doesn’t have low-carb choices. Ask about sides and reject or ignore potatoes and other starches/sugars/carbs. Or give them to a table mate.

Consider some of the potential trouble spots.

I go to a lot of sandwich shops. I just ask for a fork and eat between the buns. No worries there. But beware of soups that use flour or similar as a thickener. Broth-type soups are best.

Italian restaurants always have at least one great steak option, and I will typically order a caprese salad (sliced fresh mozzarella cheese, sliced tomato, balsamic vinegar, and basil), which is common at such places. It’s also a bit of an indulgence because tomato is a fruit and balsamic is often sugary, depending on the place. Choose olive oil instead. Or better still, choose burrata, which is mozzarella cheese and cream, another version of the perfect food. It’s amazing. (We eat both at home, too.)

Sushi? When I lived in Dedham, I was a regular at Bamboo, and the lead chef there, Lou, knew me and my preferences. (These relationships are important; there’s no need to explain myself every time I walk in.) So he would serve me what I think of as “Paul’s omakase,” meaning a sequence of daily specials and specially-made dishes without rice. Don’t have a Lou? Just order sashimi, or dishes that do not involve rice or other carbs or sugary sauces. As I noted previously, this is one of my cheat areas: I do eat rice with sushi (nigiri, and so on) from time to time.

Anyway, being “good” on a low-carb diet isn’t hard. Even when you’re eating out. In fact, in some ways, it’s less stressful because of the variety of choices at most restaurants: Everyone you’re with can get what they want, and if the people you’re with want carbs, they can go to town, and you can do the right thing.

Eating while traveling

Traveling is another story. When you’re away from home, it works like it does for any restaurant eating. The trick is the transition. For example, when you’re on a plane.

And in this one case, you will need to plan ahead because most airlines, in particular, do not offer enough food choices that include options that are good for you.

One thing I do not recommend, because my family has experience with this (my daughter is a vegetarian), is ordering a special vegetarian or vegan meal. Aside from being horrific, taste-wise, these meals are often very high in carbs because of course they are: Vegetarian/vegan diets are not healthy, especially if they’re strict. (My daughter at least eats eggs.)

So plan ahead. This could involve bringing healthy snacks in your carry-on, like mixed nuts, diced cheese, or whatever. Or just scheduling enough time so that you will eat at the airport and do the restaurant thing. I’ve had a few uncomfortable cross-country flights in the past year because I was running late or didn’t plan ahead. It’s a good idea to be ready with snacks.

The other issue I’ve had with traveling is that it ruined my “no breakfast” schedule. There’s something about traveling—you move around more, are stressed more, etc.—that just makes you hungrier. And given the schedule on most work trips, one can easily justify eating breakfast while away, even if you’re skipping back at home. I do eat “properly” (no carbs) when I do this, but it’s still more calories, and when I get home, my body still wants to eat breakfast. It’s a roller coaster.

When you combine this reality with the upheaval of my mid-year—during which we moved to Pennsylvania, a massive undertaking—it’s not hard to imagine why or how I was derailed. But it’s still something I want to fix. And I’m working on that.

What I eat every day

So what does a typical day look like for me, circa December 2017?

Breakfast: 2-3 cups of espresso, followed by bone or chicken broth, which I try to eat as late as possible to extend the previous night’s fast. I’m working towards dropping the broth, too, and may move to salted water soon and then, hopefully, just skip breakfast again as I did for most of the first half of 2017. But bone/chicken broth is still way better than eating real food, because it is lower in calories. But still very satiating: I’m always full until lunch.

Lunch: My wife and I work from home and we eat lunch together at noon every single day. Typical lunches include two cheeseburgers with mayonnaise and mustard (plus two dill pickle spears, a little bit of carbs), leftover meat from the night before (chicken in various forms, pork, steak, whatever), fried beef liver or chicken livers, shrimp with bacon and/or avocado, avocado salad (yes, with some tomato), fast food (including non-breaded chicken wings with light or no sauce), sandwiches (no bread), and the like. I don’t typically add vegetables; my wife does. But again, variety is key.

Dinner: The dark meat and skin from a whole (small) roasted chicken or other types of chicken (legs and thighs, etc.), fatty steak, fatty pork chops or loin, fish of any kind (more in summer), seafood of any kind, and so on. I do eat vegetables and salad at dinner, but not every day: Asparagus, green beans, snow peas, onions (not red), mushrooms, wedge or spinach salad, and so on. I cheat in the summer/fall months with corn on the cob. I love corn with butter.

Snack: This is a tough one for me. I am often hungry at around 9:00 pm, and night eating is not ideal on a number of levels. I try to stick to mixed nuts (which are lower in carbs than some specific nuts, like peanuts) but will sometimes indulge with trail mix (which has some raisins and other small sugars) or even popcorn (with tons of butter), a favorite cheat. I try to minimize that. Movie night, or whatever.

Alcohol: I probably drink about 3 glasses of dry wine a night, and this is my primary source of cabs each day. If you figure 5-6 net grams of carbs per glass, that’s under 20 for the day, which is my goal. Hard liquor provides no carbs, but you can’t “drink” liquor, you sip it. It’s not the same thing. Looking at my diet now, this is the one obvious area where I could make deep cuts to improve my weight.

The past year

2017 was interesting, food-wise, for me.

I didn’t drink a beer all year, not once. But I did sip my wife’s beer from time to time if it was something new to both of us. Possibly a dozen times. And I obviously had plenty of other alcohol.

I didn’t eat potatoes in any form all year, to my memory. I don’t miss it at all. In fact, I don’t like most root vegetables anyway, so this one was easy.

I didn’t eat bread for the most part. I think I tasted bread in various restaurants less than six times all year, and only the one bite each time. I did, however, eat stuffing on Thanksgiving and for two days in leftovers afterward. I’m not running for Jesus here, folks.

I ate a minimal amount of rice in 2017, and in the first half of the year, I bet I ate no rice at all. Since then, we’ve moved, and the sushi place I go to now (also named Bamboo, go figure) doesn’t have as many non-rice choices as I was used to. I am accepting this as a cheat, since sashimi can be boring, but we don’t have sushi as much as we used to, either. Once a month or less.

I don’t eat processed food, almost at all. I can’t think of any, aside from the occasional Chinese food (no breading, but a lot of that stuff is thick sauces and questionable ingredients). Aside from alcohol, I bet most of my non-measurable carb intake in 2017 came from sauces or whatever with meals. The peanut sauce on a chicken satay stick, perhaps, or the dark, suspiciously sweet sauces you sometimes see with sushi. Carbs are sneaky because they are everywhere. You have to be vigilant.

Basically, the first half of 2017 was exceptional for me. The second half, not so much. There are reasons beyond my control—travel, moving—but this also provides me with a clear path forward with regards to the changes I can now make. For those who have not yet taken the keto/low-carb plunge, of course, these choices are even more obvious. But I have a narrower field from which to choose. The key is sticking with it. Even in my less successful second half of the year, I ate much “better” than most Americans. I absolutely did.

It’s a process. The key is to keep going and not give up. I still have a long way to go. And I’m sure I left out something here, too. It’s just a big topic, sorry.