I honestly don't see how you can say he means "fruit sugar". He does mean fruit sugar, but he also means "refined white sugar". He has said so in interviews. He told me this when I asked him point blank over the telephone during a consultation. I am not criticizing him on this point. The sugar has done me no harm.

Yes, he does cite a lot of articles. So do other people. The rubber meets the road,however, in your own body.

TQE, I do not mean to discourage you. I have benefited from the diet, and some people do even better than I have. Give it a shot. You have to have your own experience with it to see what works. However, any diet misses something. Some people are turning Ray Peat into a god, but he is just a human being. Despite all of the studies he has done, he will miss things. We might as well accept that as a given on any diet. He will tend to view the world through his lens and miss other important facts. It's like that Chinese story of the elephant and the 8 blind monks who are asked to describe the elephant, each touching only one part of the beast.

No, I don't think they were placebo effects based on my experience that when I do have a placebo effect, it only lasts a very short time. Maybe a week or so at the very most.



I do yearly blood tests at a "health fair" that I am able to participate in. Fairly comprehensive, and extremely cheap.



Thanks. I do believe that insomnia probably has a number of etiologies.

thomas,
You asked about why I'm stopping all supplements and not just stopping T3? (If that is indeed what you meant?)



Because I really don't know what is causing my current muscle/joint problems, and I got into a panic because of the level of pain and disability I was experiencing.
Yesterday I required no pain meds or muscle relaxants, though legs were still tight and contracted to some extent. Pain much improved also. Today isn't quite as good, so it seems like perhaps I stopped something I should have kept up with..........this is very frustrating.
sol

Perhaps I should add that I stopped aspirin because I found some info online that says that aspirin and other NSAIDS impair healing after athletic joint/tendon injuries. The weakness in the "healed" tendons/muscles persisted a long time, too. Don't know if NSAIDS were by then stopped or not, I've forgotten that part.

Anyway, jumping to conclusions as I usually do, I began to wonder if taking aspirin could possibly weaken non-injured tendons and muscles.......my thinking is that I had gone way over a year without any joint injuries, muscle pulls, tendon overuse injuries........then I started taking aspirin, and suddenly I have two tendon injuries in my left knee a couple weeks apart, I stopped aspirin for a short time and knee seemed to heal and feel normal. I re-started aspirin and shortly experienced terrible muscle contractions in my legs and extreme knee pain. It may not be connected, but it seems suspicious. Other things I started about the same time as originally starting the aspirin were niacinamide and K1. Plus I also read that both hypo and hyper thyroid can cause muscle cramps. I need to go back and check my notes but I think the same is true of potassium, both excess and deficiency can cause muscle cramps........I don't know if the contracted muscles in my legs are "cramps" exactly, but maybe related.

Sorry for so many posts, I kept forgetting things I thought I should have included.
sol

No, not giving up. I guess I was just venting a little, as I was hoping to see something more than staggering weight gain by this point. Especially considering I'm eating hardly any solid food at all. Then again, my metabolism has always been slower than the dead.

Dairy, for me, has always been an inhibitor to weight lose at the very least. Could never lose any weight on Atkin's diet, for example, while eating cheese. In fact, I've never been able to lose or even maintain weight without severely restricting, even eliminating, either carbs or fat. So, it's kind of foolish for me to be surprised about my rapid weight gain on this plan.

My experimentation with aspirin was very short. I had stomach discomfort even at 125 mg at a time with milk. Also, I had these strange sensations going on in my leg and knee, which kind of freaked me out.

If I remember correctly, RP does believe that a calorie is a calorie.
Keeping that in mind; milk and juice are just liquid calories regardless of other nutrient content.

I tend to use whole milk. A quart must be 600. Even reduced fat milk adds up to quite a few cals when you consume_______.

Liquid calories are just easier to absorb since the body doesn't have to chew it's way through fiber.

I don't think I'll ever really enjoy a fully liquid diet.
I've had to endure it on plenty of occasions and was more than ready to chew w/in a few days.

Peat certainly does not do that.

Hmm, I've never heard Peat address this directly.

But after hearing him say many times that he for years drank a gallon of milk a day, liters of orange juice, meat once or twice daily (150 g. of protein a day), coconut oil, coffee and coca-cola-- all while living what he admits is an almost completely sedentary lifestyle, if a calorie is a calorie, I would think he'd be a fat man.

TQE, I know that Ray reads and cites a lot of studies, but a lot of stuff of his is anecdotal, too. Like, in that interview on Milk, he said that he was travelling in parts of Russia (I believe, maybe I am confusing countries here) and noticed a lot of fat people among people not drinking milk and then went to Finland (again, I may be mixing up the countries here) and saw that thin people were drinking lots of dairy. I suspect that a lot of what he thinks is based upon what has worked for him (just a suspicion). Also remember that there is such a thing as skinny-fat (people who are thin but who have a relatively high proportion of fat to muscle nonetheless). So each one has to use his body as the laboratory. Obviously it is not fair to try something for a couple of weeks and come to conclusions (unless the experience was particularly bad). As for myself, definitely going to cut back on the dairy. I have been drinking 1 and 2 percent (which he says should remedy the weight gain). I haven't seen that much improvement. Mind you, I am not hugely overweight, but I now have about 10 or 15 pounds I need to get rid of.

I am being Captain Obvious here, but let me say it anyway. Try things for a while and see what happens. Don't be influenced by the crowd, because, as I said before, in these groups at some point "group think" takes over and people just start saying how well they are doing, when in fact, it's just hype. Sounds like you know that already. I will share my experience, but of course, we are different, and you may thrive on certain aspects of this diet that are deleterious for me (and others).

Ray has mentioned that he drinks low fat milk. The Eluv interview with RP has good info... And it's a short interview... In one place, at least, Ray does say fruit first and only sucrose in emergencies.

He uses the word sugar to include fruit. He does use sucrose in coffee and in making ice cream... But he says sugar in fruit has many valuable minerals in it that help for weight loss etc...

I find I need to listen to his interviews daily and read his newsletters online too. Otherwise I can get caught up with my own ideas that evolve in my mind into Peat's ideas, if you know what I mean.

Happy Mothers' Day.

Yes, I understand it's too early to draw conclusions. I'll stop my whining. It's very reasonable to expect that when your hormones are all out of whack that it's going to take some time. Perhaps alot of time. It's what, 4 years, to get rid of the PUFA's floating around the body.

The only recommendation Dr. Peat made to me was to begin with T3, find your level and then add thyroxine. So, I need to get that added to the mix, if I can find it, before expecting benefits.

Thomas said

I think you are almost certainly correct. In addition, I have found over my dieting lifetime (over 50 years now) that if I dug deep enough into what ANY diet or nutritional "authority" believes to be good foods, or dangerous foods or foods that should never be eaten by any human, etc. it has nearly invariably turned out that they personally enjoy the foods they recommend as good, and healthful to eat, and dislike or even hate the foods they think are harmful. And though it amazes me, once or twice I have come across people who simply don't care much about food or eating telling people to grossly restrict total calories, or avoid whole classes of foods.

I don't want to be disrespectful of Dr. Peat, but it would not surprise me to find that, for example, he doesn't like apples. There are lots of unconscious totally internalized food likes and dislikes that all of us have, and I seriously doubt Dr. Peat would not have them too.

A lot of what works for Peat himself and a lot of what other "Peatatarians" do that works for them just doesn't and probably never will work for ME.
sol

You are probably to some extent right about this, but do you have any examples to share of cases in which you knew the person LIKED the foods and built a diet around them?

You know. I did not like the term "orthorexia" when it first appeared (probably because I am myself orthorexic...sort of like an alcoholic that doesn't like to be called such), but now I see it as a useful term. There is a very fine line between being interested in eating healthfully and thinking that there is a perfect diet that will fix all of your problems. My thought is that almost EVERYBODY who takes up the search for a healthy diet is orthorexic at one time or the other. It goes with the territory. Part of the process, as they say. Worst of all is to be a "diet guru". Then your identity is wed to your diet. Look at the ER4YT diet. Despite the fact that the so-called science behind it has been thoroughly debunked, Peter D'Adamo clings to it like a drowning man to a raft. Of course, the same could be said-to one extent or another-of all of these diets. I am not just picking on Peter D'Adamo.

What makes it very slippery is that there is often some or a lot of truth in these diets. The devil is in the details. In this case, I am not using that idiomatic expression as it usually is. What I mean is that usually these diets become problematic when you take the rules too literally, i.e. you apply them too rigorously, apply them to the letter as the Guru says you should. If you get bogged down in the details, the devil is there and he kicks your ass Usually in the details you start to abandon listening to your body and replace your voice with the dogma of whatever the diet guru says.

Fundamentalism, that is to say "literalism", of all types (not just religious) seems to be a contemporary plague. It's a product of fear. I understand why people who have been ill for a long time are tired and afraid. I, too, would like
somebody to just give me five rules on how to eat and be well and be done with it. That, as it were, does not appear to be in the stars... for most of us anyway.

[QUOTE=ThomasSeay]

No, unfortunately I do not. All I have is remembering "AHA!" moments that happened to me several times as I ran across personal food preferences of various diet gurus.



I absolutely agree.



That sure fits me. I've done that with every diet or food plan I've ever been on........But, couple weeks ago or more I just hit a wall, and can't do it anymore. I started going back to an idea I've encountered many times before, even as long ago as over 30 years ago. It is that being overweight or obese is not unhealthy in itself. Obese and overweight DIETERS are unhealthy. People who are overweight and obese who have never dieted tend to actually outlive everyone else, even naturally thin people. I've tried before to learn to listen to my body, to get back into touch with appetite, hunger, satiation, but invariably the overwhelming constant bombardment of messages that thinner is always better would send me back into dieting. I'd lose some weight but always gain back more. I now absolutely believe dieting has made me much fatter than I would otherwise have been.

I don't know what will happen if I gain weight, but I hope I have abandoned dieting for good. I'm 66 years old, went on my first medically approved diet at 12 or 13 years old, but I had been starvation dieting before that. I'm just sick and tired of it.

I will still be doing all the Peatish ideas that suit my body. That is what attracted me to Peat in the first place, his hormone info fit me to a T, when what I read and heard everywhere else did not. I resisted his eating ideas for at least 2 years before deciding to give them a try. I really am glad to have found Peat, because I'm no longer afraid of sugar. And because I no longer fear becoming full on diabetic because my blood sugars have stabilized so very well, when they didn't on low carb, no sugar. I had been afraid of sugar and fruit for way too many years. Then trying to be Peatatarian, I felt I HAD to eat fruit, whether I really wanted it or not, LOL. (I get orthorexic too)......
sol

I am curious Cathy. Did you do the RBTI refractometer test?