gemini://thrig.me/blog/2024/02/13/diet-hacking.gmi

Food, not the parliamentary kind. The scientific method is somewhat suspect when there's only you with the placebo effect, though one can vary diet over time and try to make sense of the changes.

Of course there can be problems, such as withdrawal, so maybe first consult with a Doctor or such if you are lucky enough to have access to health care and can afford it. A particular problem with new foods would be the discovery of new allergies, so try not to move fast and break things when exploring new foods? Another problem is if you drop something essential from your diet, such as all sources of Vitamin C. You probably do not want the the scurvy diet.

For example milk is now bad for me; it makes the snot flow. Seeing as I like breathing easily through the nose, this means no milk. Cheese is suspect, so not much if any of that. (Consider also the amount of water used in industrial cheese production.) Clarified butter is probably okay, though I'll need to make some of that to test. Probably not all the problematic proteins are clarified?

Meditation with labeling may help—oh, the body signals eat! something! but I'm not actually hungry—and then wait for the next thing to come along. Also try not to keep a variety of sugary snacks around the house. This may be hard when everyone else in the house is more or less a sugar addict.

So the method here is to add or subtract one thing from your diet and then see what happens. Multiple trials may be necessary as there can be confounding factors. Maybe your nose was acting up because of allergies, or to a cleaning chemical? A log or notebook may help record things: does eating that produce blehs, or what? The blehs may be distant from the event of eating by some number of hours, which is why ideally you only change one thing at a time and try to observe the results over some number of days or even weeks.

The one thing can be a particular food product (milk) or a class (things with added or anyways too much sugar). Probably there will not be much of an effect if you replace chocolate frosted sugar bombs with mint chocolate cookies: both have sugar and chocolate that may light up reward centers. This goes back to avoiding having a variety of the foodstuffs around: X is bad, so I'll just eat Y (also bad!) instead. Brains are tricky like that.

Ratios (fat protein carbs) is not something I have paid much attention to. Others do. You may also need to pay attention to foodstuffs that block mineral uptake, interfere with drugs, etc. Anti-nutrients would be something to research. If possible, aim for things with more vitamins, minerals, and micronutrients. This may be tricky if the food is grown on soil that lacks such.

A bummer is that most diets fail, which is probably why folks are trying to invent a weight loss pill that does not have terrible side effects, but then you would need to take that pill all your life? As for the sensible approach of reforming the food system, well, there's money and some addiction on the line, so that has been and will be a tough sell. Rats for instance were best obeseified back in the 1970s on the so-called "cafeteria diet", or basically junk food.

Hopefully younger folks will not be fed excess sugar from an early age and therefore may have a better diet and fewer health problems down the line.

Diet Hacking