Your post is very insightful. It's very hard to weed out what is good and what is bad, but it looks like you have done that. So what exactly will you keep of the Peat stuff and what will you discard?

Hi tqe,

I didn't know what to title this. Leaders isn't quite it. But, I could never follow anyone who was not what I consider healthy looking. I'm a very visible type person. That said, Ray looks healthy to me and part of that is that, as you indicate, he is not a fat man. Somehow, a leader who is fat telling others how to get healthy is weird to me.

I'm not sure how much Ray eats and drinks. I know Danny Roddy seems to drink a lot of oj and milk. I'm more moderate. At first I drank whole milk all day long with coffee in it. My oj is just about 6 - 8 oz a day with carbonated water. Not because I think it's right but that's what I do.

When I started Peat in December, I went wild. I'd already gained 10 lbs reading paleo sites ( all those recipes), and another 10 with PHD. More recipes and glucose, starches, pufas in olive oil. Those wok dishes really put on the pounds and stirred up my appetite. Then, when I found Peat, thankfully through PHD, I began to add his ideas on to it all. So, 10 more pounds.

I think some of the weight gain people experiece is due to consuming too much. My own experience was that ice cream every night put me to sleep but put on weight too. I was still using the same amount of fat that hyperlipid recommended but adding rice etc... I don't know if you know the hyperlipid site. I loved those people.

Anyway, I think Ray is on to something. I've experienced healing in several areas and want to keep it. At the same time, I'm now learning to go lower fat, mainly co, and very low starch, emphasizing low fat milk, eggs, liver once a week, fruits without pulp to raise endotoxin in my intestines. I make oj jello which I prefer to drinking loads of juice. I guess I do get more oj than I said above...I eat buffalo meat too. No fish lately.. No shell fish and I should.. Ray says apples are okay at times. Not one a day but they are good with a protein. I eat applesauce almost daily. Cooked is easier on the tummy apparatus.

I am surprised that a lot of people try to stay with this. It isn't simple and it is simple but easy to get wrong... I wonder if you go to all the other places for information. I came here first but listen to his interviews, share on FB, go to Functional Performance Systems, Danny Roddy.... And surprisingly there are a lot of other places too.

I get the feeling people on this forum don't want to study Peat so maybe move on to these other places for support too. Maybe you already do this!

orthorexic...I wasn't familiar with that term, but I suppose I could fall into that category. However, I don't think it's unsound to think that nutrition, what we choose to eat, plays a rather large role in our health, especially given alot of the food choices we have now. So, to "obsess" about diet isn't necessarily the worst compulsive behavior to have.

Hello VanGogh, I don't quite know what qualifies as "studying" Peat, but I've read most of his articles and listened to most of his radio interviews. I've read alot of the bloggers, though I'm unfamiliar with Functional Performance Systems. I have issues with the whole concept of facebook, so I haven't done that yet.

I think it can be a little hard to decipher what Dr. Peat means at times, so that perhaps plays a part in people, like myself, trying to find support or clarification outside of simply studying his writings and interviews. I don't know if that necessarily means "we don't want to study Peat"

I do continue to learn more everyday. Today, I listened to his acid vs. alkaline interview. That's an issue I've never paid any attention for whatever reason. It dawned on me that right now, for the first time ever, I'm eating an alkaline diet.

My varying diets have always had either muscle meat or nuts, beans and often grains as the central food source. For the last 3 weeks or so, I've had none of any of them. I'm sure it's been quite a shock to the system and there is an adjustment period going on. So, I'm feeling less anxious about immediate results, good or bad.

Yes, indeed, you should go to those other forums. There are a lot more people posting there, and I suspect you will get plenty of support and advice. That said, the advice you have received here is accurate. Peat's diet really isn't that complicated. Peat's writing is a bit obfuscate and therefore before the interviews and numerous readings of his articles, it was a bit difficult to draw out the crux of it all. Now it's pretty clear.

I don't, however, think it is fair to say people on this forum don't want to study Peat. I think people on THIS forum HAVE studied Peat. I began studying him three years ago and got a couple of consultations from him at that time, for example. I think that it is fair, however, that those of us who have been doing it for a reasonably long time should discuss our experiences (good and bad). That said, any one person's experience should not be accepted as absolute. The painful truth is that everybody is different. One person might do exceptionally well on the Peat diet, another do miserably. My experience will not necessarily be your experience. That's why I would tell anybody to get all the information they can and then experiment on their own. It is interesting to compare notes and serve as a counterpoint to those who would have you believe that a given diet is the cure-all for everybody.

Here is a caveat that I think is worth keeping in mind (at least, I have to keep it in mind, because I have fallen into this trap a number of times myself). Obviously, in order to give any diet a fair evaluation, you want to, at first, follow it to the letter. However, don't doubt yourself too much. It is my opinion that once one has studied the diet and applied it and found that it's really not working (given a fair amount of time, which I believe is 3 months or so), you should be at least wary of "TRUE BELIEVERS" who inform you that your problems must be "BECAUSE YOU ARE NOT DOING SOMETHING CORRECT AS REGARDS THE DIET." I have seen this trick time and time again. Now it is possible that you are doing something wrong. However, it is entirely possible that there is something in the diet that is just not working.

You're right. It's not problematic to want to put healthy food in your body. I don't think that that, in itself, constitutes orthorexia. Some people interpret "orthorexic" to mean "having any interest in alternative nutrition." That is not how I view the term. I do have a working definition of the term:

1) A person who holds a utopian view of diet, thinks that somewhere there is a perfect diet (Perfect Health Diet!), thinking it will solve all ills.

2) A person obsessed by diet, who spends an inordinate amount of time reading, thinking and pursuing (shopping) diet. Diet becomes the center of their life.

3) A person who suffers from cognitive dissonance as regards diet. Such people can start suffering from the diet and will continue to hold it up as a model despite evidence to the contrary. In fact, the more evidence that piles up against the diet, the more tenacious they will become in advocating it. By evidence, I don't mean "studies" (any denizen of the Internet should know that there is a study to support and dispel any belief). I am talking about evidence from the dieter's health and from the health of his "diet comrades".

4) Anxiety over diet. Paranoia that deviation from the diet will have dire consequences.


5) Diet disrupts social life.They become a pain-in-the-ass at social gatherings, bitching at other people about how to eat (Food fascists), refusing to eat what is presented, and hauling along their special foods. Now, I know there are times when people are really allergic to foods. I am not talking about that. An example from Peat world would be finding yourself in a social situation and refusing to eat food because it's been cooked in canola oil (and boring everyone present with a diatribe about the evils of canola oil) or eating salad (uncooked vegetables). God forbid if their host should offer up a pasta dish! Of course, they will now eat sugar (the guru says they can), even though I am sure that these same people would previously (prior to discovering Peat) have been the ones to protest loudest and the most if somebody had served sugar. Sometimes such people will, in the end, start avoiding all together social settings where food might be offered. What is most interesting is that these people so full of "sound and fury" over their diet usually don't really understand deeply the ideas to which they are attached. They will parrot off what the guru has to say. Now we can't all be nutritional scientists. Sometimes we just give things a try, even if we don't have have the scientific background to understand it. Fair enough. However, an ortherixic will assume the mantle of expertise when preaching to other people how they should eat.
If the audience would stick around long enough to ask the simple question, "why", they would soon discover the high priest's dearth of knowledge.

Now, "orthorexia" is just a word, and this is how I define it. Certainly there are degrees of the above, some more extreme, others more moderate. One needn't satisfy all of the above rules to be orthorexic. Orthorexia is just "fanatacism" applied to healthy eating. That does not mean healthy eating is necessarily "orthorexia". Just as exercise is in general healthy, there are people who, nonetheless, develop a neurotic relationship with exercise. For example, I have seen people get EXTREMELY anxious if they miss a day of jogging (like, number 4). I have seen people start to waste away from too much long-distance running (like number 3) and yet will continue to cite studies about how healthy it is and boast about their robust health. Just as this doesn't apply to all exercisers, so is it that not all people who seek to eat health foods are orthorexic.

Thomas:
Mainly keep PUFA as low as I can. Gelatin. Pregnenolone. Progesterone. Avoid estrogens and estrogen promoters and also continue to avoid tryptophan and other serotonin boosters. Keep eating liver. Eat fruit as and when desired.
I guess basically what I will discard is what I have already discarded because I can't have it for allergy reasons........fish, seafood, oysters, and all high iodine foods of any kind. Plus foods I dislike for any reason. I don't like veggies that much, don't really like fruit that much either. I'm conflicted about broth......if I'm honest, I don't like it much either. Sometimes it is appealing, but if I only had broth when I wanted it, that would be a very few times a year.
HMM, maybe what I'm actually doing doesn't consist so much in what I will be eating, but in how I approach eating in general. I'm eating way too much grain right now, and have been for many weeks (fell off the wagon into a barrel of bread and rolls). Not sure how that is going to work out. But in keeping with the decision to NOT forbid any foods I'm not actually allergic to, I'm trying not to put them back into guilt land.
It will be interesting to see how long I can do this without freaking out over weight gain.........however, I decided to stop dieting BECAUSE after losing 14 lbs a few months ago, I had gained back 7 and was planning another restrictive diet, and I just couldn't do it. If I can learn to eat to appetite (real physical appetite) then I hope I can learn to accept whatever weight that leads to.
Re-reading what I have just written it seems like what I'm doing is just part of a progression, not a real departure from anything. I don't want to give up the benefits I've gotten from Peat-ing.......improved sleep, improved mental and physical function, huge improvement in hideous arthritic hands (huge reduction in Bouchard's and Heberden's nodes, which I had thought impossible). Huge improvement in age spots on backs of hands. More stable emotions/moods. And of course the really impressive stabilization of my blood glucose. I hope not to lose any of those benefits.
sol

I've also given that up, LOL.
sol

What makes you think that you are eating too much grain?



Excellent!



I am betting that if you really focus and pay attention to what you want and how much you want that you will lose weight. I gained weight by just forcing myself to drink a lot of milk. I don't dislike milk, but I was overdoing it. Same goes for the OJ.



Yes, I can see that. Looks like you are integrating what works for you and tossing out the rest. It's called evolution! Good for you!!!!

Thomas, I appreciate your thoughtful post on orthorexia, but disagree with some of your points, especially in terms of social interaction. Why shouldn't a person be able to eat the foods they want or avoid the foods they don't want whenever they want, even in a social setting?

While I agree that there's no place for preaching or lecturing, simply obstaining from all or some of the offered food, or heaven forbid, bringing your own food, is enough to create or more accurately, bring about feigned, offense. Why? What should what one person chooses to eat or not eat, have to do with anyone else? Usually it's some imagined message or underlying guilt about their own food choices and how they relate to their health and/or appearance.

Even if that person's diet and restrictions change from gathering to gathering, so what? Again, what does that have to do with anyone else? I'd go so far to say that making such changes based on experience or new information is or can be a good thing.

Paranoia about our food choices and supply, given the obfuscation of the truth by special interests--well funded in the political and scientific arenas-- is entirely understandable. I think we could use more paranoia among the public across the board. It is far too easy for the special interests to treat us as sheep (and fleece us) as it is.

[QUOTE=ThomasSeay]

I am starting to have edema again, the arthritic nodes in my fingers seem to me to be begining to enlarge (I noticed this last night after writing about how much they had reduced!), and the knee/hip pain I have been having that is just not resolving.

It does seem that I should not lump all grain products into "grains", as it seems much more connected to eating wheat than rice, corn, or oats. My DH a few months ago went way back through my daily journals and the only consistent correlation he could find to my pain level was wheat. Despite knowing that, I can't seem to eliminate wheat completely or for more than a few weeks.



I love milk, but find I don't drink nearly as much when I am using 1%. OJ I could drink a lot of, but I still get allergic reactions (itching rashes) when I drink much. I found a brand that is less allergenic to me than others, but still........

Thank you for your encouragement and support.......it really means a lot to me!
sol

Well, look, I think food is a big part of socializing. I think that a fear that a little bit of food that is outside of your diet plan is going to upset your system so much that you start refusing a bunch of foods in social settings is going to cause you a lot of pain in the long run. I think it will hurt your health more than the supposed harm the "bad" food will. This is my experience. It's much healthier to enjoy your friends, the food they offer you than to be a stick in the mud and be "faithful" to the diet. As I said, there are people with real allergies out there. Obviously if you have a true allergy, then it's understandable that you should refuse the food. Other than that, it is my *BELIEF* that you hurt yourself more in being so rigid in social settings.





First of all, I am not saying that people shouldn't be careful about what they eat. I am talking about taking it to such an extreme that when you are in a social setting you can't partake of the foods. For example somebody who thinks sugar is bad. Ninety-five percent of the time they eat at home and don't have to eat sugar. Is it going to hurt them to have the dessert the 5 percent of the time that they are at a friend's house? Now instead of sugar, plug in any food that goes against your present dietary principles. Is it going to really hurt you to have the food your friend cooked in canola oil (remember, this isn't all the time, just a small percentage of times that you eat) or eat the dish she prepared that has a little tofu or whatever in it? Is the social alienation that constant hyper-vigilance over food is going to cause you (when you are out in public) really worth it? I don't think so. I think it is extreme. Obviously, you have the right to make your choice on the matter. I am not suggesting that there be orthorexia police that go out and arrest people who fall into orthorexia as I define it I just use the term as a way to refer to these type of behaviors that *I* consider extreme and deleterious. I realize the potential for abuse in coining the term "orthorexia". Pop-psychologists and psychotherapists have made a fortune pathologizing everything and making their (often dubious) pathologies seem scientific by assigning them a serious-sounding polysyllabic word. That said, I can't always repeat the above five descriptions, so I (perhaps lazily) use the word "orthorexia". Just to be clear, I consider myself orthorexic. I will tend to fall into one or more of the above behaviors, even though I eventually catch myself.

Let's put it this way. I have been doing these crazy-ass diets for the last 25+ years of my life. During that time I have at some time or the other shunned just about every food there is:

sugar
grains
meat
dairy
cooked vegetables
raw vegetables
fruit
coffee

At other times, the same above foods became a centerpiece of my diet. I suspect the same holds true for other "Professional Dieters" here. Isn't that curious? Yet, none of the above foods really poisoned me (as it turns out) or sent me to the Promised Land of health bliss.

That said, I am not suggesting complete cynicism towards "healthy eating", or a return to SAD. We cannot deny that the contemporary SAD hurts people. We don't need to throw the baby out with the bathwater. However, distinguishing between the baby and the bathwater is not that simple. It would require us to rid ourselves of the accumulated dietary dogma and truly figure out what works for each of us. As it turns out, for most of us that's not so straight-forward. For years, I was convinced that I was sensitive to milk. Sure enough, on the rare occasions I would try it, I would get a stuffy nose, a symptom which proved to me that all I had heard about dairy was correct. However, it wasn't correct. Ray Peat helped disabuse me of that notion. I can now drink half-a-gallon of milk a day without problem. Now that's me. It's not to say that there aren't people who really do react poorly to milk and are allergic to it.

Of course, that raises another question. How reliable are appearances? For example, I seem to tolerate sugar well NOW. I have noted a correlation between eating sugar and a significant healthy drop in my fasting blood glucose levels. However, who is to say that there might not be a cumulative noxious effect over the years? I certainly can't. One would hope that science would provide some answers, but the experts disagree. Whom should we believe? If we look at the studies ourselves (and who has time to wade through all of them) we still have problems. Was the study done correctly? Did the researchers have an interest in the outcome (either monetary or simply finding a result that corroborated their pet theory)? Even if the study is replicated did the various research groups weed out certain conclusions because they do not support the dominant paradigm?

Trust yourself more, your intuition as well as your ability to decipher the science and your ability to see through bullshit. Give it your best shot. There are no guarantees. That's life.

I would say that a good starting point is, "All things in moderation, including moderation!" [RANT OVER ]

Excellent post ThomasSeay!

I am starting to think I'm doing more of a gluten free Intuitive Eating woe than a Peat/PHD woe.

Hi everyone,

i havent posted in ages because i just didnt know which way to go as far as diet is concerned. I like RP ideas, but after doing it for 6 months, i"ve lost nothing, actually gained 15lbs, so i decided that maybe this isn't for me. I've started a gluten free diet since last week, and i notice that most of the allowed foods are what RP suggests we should eat.... am i just repeating the cycle???

i think i suffer from excatly what ThomasSeay describes as orthorexia!!!

its really debilitating, as i've reached a point of where i'm even afraid to eat anything, and i dont even know what to feed my kids most of the time???



i dont use any sugar because i dont like the taste of sweet things, but i do have one really weird 'addiction' i call it, and that is, i eat up to 2 cups of raw organic sesame seeds daily... i've tried to stop, but just cant.
i've been doing this for about 15 years now, daily!! i spoke to soo many doctors, did tons of blood tests, but cant figure out why i crave this so much.
i'm aware that sesame seeds contains PUFA, so maybe thats whats sabotaging my efforts???

any thoughts?? has anyone else had something similar?? how did you overcome this??

thanks

[QUOTE=simplydeli]

i

First thing that comes to my mind is that Ray Peat's eating suggestions are NOT a weight loss diet. It is a "diet" to heal the thyroid and balance hormones, thus promoting health. Functional diet, in other words. I've seen several people besides myself who have actually gained weight. Peat believes that if one is eating by his ideas, most of the gained weight is probably muscle mass.



So far as I understand Peat, sugar in the form of fruit and juices, as well as honey and sucrose, is very important to establish sugar burning metabolism.



Looks a likely suspect! 2 cups of sesame seeds is nearly 2000 calories right there. Plus 184 grams of fat, 76 grams of which are PUFA. If my arithmetic is right, that makes that portion of your diet by itself 41% PUFA. You can look up sesame seeds at the USDA nutrient database or at one of the online nutrient/calorie calculators, such as the MyP.L.A.N. here, or Cronometer, FitDay, etc. to take a look at the complete nutrient profile and see if anything clicks with something you might be deficient in. FWIW, I keep my PUFA intake about 2% of fat calories. Which means less than 4 grams out of 114 grams total fat on one day I looked at. So 76 grams of PUFA is a really huge amount......I tend to be orthorexic too, so I get upset at myself if I get 10 grams of PUFA in a regular day.

I suspect the main reason I gained weight on Peat is I came to it from a very low carb very high fat way of eating, and just added the sugars and OJ, milk, and potatoes. I know for myself that I can eat a LOT of calories when I'm very low carb, but add the sugar and grain carbs and I have to cut total calories.....this just seems to be how my body works.

I have not "overcome it" yet, but am working on it. And last night I hapened to notice that under my fat, I have some amazing upper arm muscles. Can't see them, but can feel them. So maybe I did indeed gain some muscle in my weight gain? I'd be very happy if that were the case.
sol