So I don’t eat the same things many people eat. For the most part I’ll be found to be eating slow cooked foods that people otherwise wouldn’t typically pick first. A few examples would be pulled pork barbecue (aka – carnitas meat), baked beans with chicken & bacon, oats, vegetable tomato sauce, and slow cooked vegetables like beets and sweet potatoes. I’m a snob about the way I eat and the source of the food used, moreso than the meal itself. I’ve settled on this way of eating after setting out on making some changes starting back in 2018, and my experiences have spanned about 5 years or so of experimenting with what did and didn’t work for me specifically. Because first and foremost, I’m not writing this to advertise a new way for someone else to eat – it’s more for my own benefit so I don’t have to keep summarizing the way and things I now eat to people regularly because it’s a little tedious to have to say it over and over again and have folks talking offense regularly to me here.
Often people just think it’s a ketogenic diet or something .. but after even moderate exercise and spending a few months with a nutritionist I can safely say that ketosis is not some magic new age diet. If you exercise even moderately, or even diet lightly, you’ll cycle in and out of this absolutely normal metabolic process quite reqularly and come to tell almost immediately the difference between dehydration and ketosis as time goes on. I feel for the most part the obsession with the fad or popular diets comes from folks often not having the experience or capacity to understand on an educated level what they’re doing. Not saying here that I know much better, as for all I know everything I know could just as well be a lie. More that I’ve attended much more schooling than the average person, having 240 college credit hours at the undergraduate level and feel reasonably comfortable diving into the basic metabolic processes and posess a basic understanding of them after having gone through physiology, biology and nutrition courses at colleges over years and I feel pretty comfortable taking the risk in trusting my own understanding to a point. So anyways, this education in combination with having worked directly with a nutritionist and also various articles on the internet over the years has lead me to coming up with something that’s mine, man. Sorry, you probably can’t copy it!
So without further obnoxious setting-of-the-stage here .. the way I eat is very picky at this point, in short. I’ll often tend to favor slow cooked meats, when I’m eating meat. I don’t generally spring for the grill, fryer, and under absolutely no conditions will I even consider touching the microwave to heat something up (unless I’m using the light bulb underneath to proof a couple loaves of bread in it). This leaves me with the oven & slow cookers. I like chicken, sure, but I’ll usually blast it for 300 or 350 F for a half hour then slow cook it around 200 or so for hours, until that meat falls off the bone every single time. I really enjoy pulled pork cooked for an entire day or two around 200 – 215 in the oven, when spiced right. I generally avoid beef like the plague, it really just has a weird taste to it these days as if it’s generally been more boiled after cooking than anything else and I guess they really only can inject so much water into the stuff to push those profit margins that much further out. That’s a large mentality to my approach to eating .. avoiding that kind of stuff.
Avoidance for me starts by preventing this crap from getting into my place. I just don’t buy it, is all. My shopping list is limited approximately to : eggs, chicken, tuna, pork shoulder, pork belly, herring, salmon, broccoli, celery, asparagus, bell peppers, avocado, onions, tomatoes, sweet potatoes, carrots, beets, apples, bananas, garlic, oranges, lemons, blueberries, brown rice, dark chocolate, whole wheat flour, yeast, peanut butter, oats, dry beans, whole milk, some cheeses, pepperoni, maple syrup, honey, vinegars, lettuce, poblano peppers, hot sauce and various spices. This is the most reasonable approach to eating for me, but the major drawback for me is visiting other folks and having no prepared devensive measures for the delicious poisons they all have in their homes.
I then employ methods in selecting the foods on the shopping lists. For some backstory in this, I’d read that coin-clipping was a common practice back when coins were minted with precious metals and didnt have the knurled ridges on them to provide easy identification that the entire coin as intended was present and accounted for. It was the process of shaving or adulterating the edge of a coin so as to pilfer the miniscule amounts of shavings from the unwitting transactor by a vile practicioner of the theft that’d often make these grubby folks quite rich due to the volume of the number of transactions they were involved in. What this means to me, when it comes to food .. well in very much the same way and for exactly the same reasons the entire food must be present and accounted for. I consume a lot of food, thus it follows that I stand to lose a lot to a clearly hostile market, at least to the living. Corn syrup is not corn, therefore this is banned in my cabinets. Even further in this analogy, corn itself as a food source has had some extra ingredients added right into the genetic structure of the corn (yes, genetics is a topic I’ve also studied in my time at Mount Saint Mary College). Thus, it follows that in addition to the whole food being present, not more than the whole food must be present as well. It’s for this reason I don’t buy corn. This then becomes a topic of content, because who’s gonna say what is and is not food at the genetic level. So, I’ve found myself not often taking foods that’ve been genetically modified at all. I understand this is an impossible feat, but sometimes the shotgun approach combined with not knowing any better is going to let a few bits of poison through and I can accept this as a calculated risk.
Under no circumstances will I use vegetable or seed oils for this same reason – because the entire vegetable or seed is not present. As a really crude explanation here – I’ve reason to believe that my stomach is “pretty dumb” and receives “genetic instructions” on how to properly digest the food only in cases where as much if not all of the entire food source is present. So if someone’s gone and pilferred the hull of my rice and has opted to sell me white rice instead of brown – my gut only knows how to treat it like a sugar and metabolize 100% of it as fast as possible. Another example is that in the event I were to use olive oil – my body has no true and correct understanding of how to digest “olive oil” or even what “olive oil” is, unless the oil came with the rest of the olive. Sure it guesses, often incorrectly, how best to do this without the directions “stored in the rest of the olive”, but these incorrect guesses I then pay for directly in various accumulations of fat deposits and other damages to my physical structure .. most often in the form of accumulated fatigue, or associated poor decision making and the like.
My chosen method of cooking is entirely a slow cooked style. I do this to slow myself down, from eating. Most everything must take over half an hour to prepare. I can down literally 2000 calories in under fifteen mintues and I’m not unique in this capacity. Taking the moment to heat things up, allows for me to think about the food I’m intending to eat well before I eat it and as such I’m able to better portion my food, and in the event I’ve too little food, or feel I’ve prepared too little food, it’s quite the deterrent to be waiting another hour to heat up more. This is why I don’t fry things, or microwave them. Using a microwave in my home is banned. The most I would consider is grilling, here, which is about the only way I’ll have beef. The slow cooking itself I’ve found comes best from using thick walled ceramics, but also the induction base on some pans will allow stovetop slow cooking to take place too. Short of this, any metal pan with a lid and a standard oven will do.
Another topic of content for me is freezing meat for more than the amount of time you’d expect to keep it in your fridge. Why do people think this is acceptable? Fat does not freeze, and just goes rancid. You don’t generally notice this though! It’s gross. You’ve never gone to a grocery store and purchased a frozen pork roast, or a frozen t-bone, ever in your entire life! Why do you think this is an acceptable practice, to leave fatted meats in the freezer for over a year and then eat them with the rancid fat and mostly edible slightly destroyed muscley parts? I can taste this every single time. You probably think or have thought it to be freezer burn. It’s not. It’s rotten fat and you’ve been eating more than your share of it! Stop hoarding or get a real (-80C) freezer!
Metabolically alcohol is awful in all aspects, and specifically what people do to alcohol is the worst. What with HFCS sweeteners and the like .. make it very hard to drink alcohol, especially because you don’t know and can’t know what is in it. This leaves mostly the only available options to be high proof liquors and well those are bad in different ways, especially if you’re pre-disposed to alcoholism and feel “normal” after drinking 750 ml so for the most part screw that noise. I won’t waste much time explaining this, other than saying that I’ve never sweat my ass off more than when I’ve drank the day before.
Things I curently consider neutral include many condiments and water. I don’t have the capacity to bother with wanting to go around and tell people I don’t eat ketchup because any reason whatsoever. So I don’t. I just eat it usually. I use it rarely enough to not care, because the food I eat doesn’t generally call for its use. This is an example. Usually I’ll heavily spice my meals with high quality spices, and don’t need much more than something like vinegar anyways .. which is a highly under-rated condiment in itself. Overall, I generally never use sauces due to the tendency for the ill-intentioned to cram them full of butter, sugar and syrup and that just drives me nuts and gives me heartburn and a stomach ache if anything. As for water, I’ve found that dehyration induced by consistently being observant of the quality of the water and avoiding “bad water” is more of a health hazard to me versus just drinking the water itself in all my cases. My current approximation of this is that we’re a product of our environment, despite all efforts and pretense otherwise. As the quality of the water is an aspect of my environment, I therefore tend to just drink the water that I also shower and wash my hands with, yes.
I’m very selective with my caffeine intake as well. I generally prefer black teas. For me, there seems to be something that grows in coffee makers that my body finds toxic. I’m able to drink more often than not from new coffee makers, or cleaned/sanitary devices like french presses, but machines where the water sits inside of I often find to be too unsanitary for me to drink coffee from and as such I will generally opt for hot tea. Green tea comes later in the day, same with herbals like mugwort or chamomile. I prefer a water kettle to heat the water. The toxicity is still in the coffee for me, at all times I’m wary of drinking it and usually I’m physically unable to have more than a few coffee’s in a week before I start having digestion issues like an aching stomach and intestines and I don’t generally have this issue with caffeinated teas which I’ve found mostly due to the method of preparation of the beverage. Seriously, I went for a decade thinking I was allergic to coffee – that’s just not the case. It’s the case that I don’t wish to be vigilant of coffee makers everywhere and as such just stick with tea.
My approach to spices is more that the meal is an excuse to take in large amounts of the spices themselves. For example in eating oatmeal … I’ll usually have about a heaping tablespoon of ceylon cinnamon in there for a single cup of oats and then top it with some maple syrup for balance so it tastes less like Big Red. I like the effect and way I feel after eating a lot of cinnamon and it’s quite delicious to me. Careful which cinnamon you use, apparently only Ceylon can be eaten safely in large amounts, I’ve not tested this or cared to, the internet told me this and I got no reason to care one way or the other as it could just be a marketing gimmick. For meals I generally tend to favor ample amounts of berbere or harissa seasonings, baked into the food, due to how well the profile seems to fit slow cooking foods. Even then, fresh spices are still the best over dried and jarred ones. I do consider vinegar to be a spice too, here, and usually if I have some lettuce its more of an excuse to down a few tablespoons of vinegar due to I’ve had a lot of good benefits and it tastes good.
TImes it’s okay to let loose on these rules, for me, include predominantly hybrid moments where one finds themselves in a normal food setting, but instead is working toward a particular goal that will offer better benefits were they to cast aside all restrictions and partake in consuming literal poison. This includes getting to know your co-workers, meals prepared by family, going out on dates and not wanting to overwhelm them right away, so mostly meals with company and the like. Of course, these types of situations have the tendency to come one after another .. to which one’d certainly need to at one point just decide, to eat right again at the cost of impacting that business meeting, or that family member – the costs are real and dire at a social level, but so is the cost of unwittingly consuming a poisonous diet and each must live through their own desired threshold of pains in this life. Seriously! My body is such a snob that it can actually determine if the vegetables are past their prime! My tongue’ll swell up and actually ache, I shit you not. For a while I played with the idea that this was due to something being sprayed on the vegetables or the like, but all it seems to be is an affinity to detect decay in what seems otherwise like a perfectly fine vegetable.
Something I don’t mind too much though is a diet soda. I’ve not had any immediately negative consequences of drinking these things, but I’ve seen the recent reclassification of Aspartame into a cancerous chemical of late and well I can at least say that yes, it’s completely possible to lose 40 pounds and keep it off while drinking diet sodas and I’m tired of having the same argument with people that just have not had the same experience I’ve had with these drinks.
Anyways, I’m sure there’s a few other things I can add to this list but for the most part I’d consider that about 90% of the way I eat and what I eat is represented here, without going too far off topic, so I guess it’s a mostly complete article for me at this time. In summary, since last year this way of eating has lead to me losing about 90 pounds when I stick to it, but allows quite a bit of room to gain weight back, too. Especially around other folks. It also runs me about $400 – $450 a month, which is a reasonable price to pay for food here in the USA this year.
So, what do you eat?