20 Years of Fad Diets: From Keto to Peatarian – My 7 Key Takeaways

0:00 – My Health Journey Over the Years

4:48– 6 Key Takeaways

At 30 years old, I have spent close to the last 20 of my 30 years trying various fad diets. Now in this video, I want to run through my personal journey, going through this dietary gauntlet, and I wanna share with you some of the most impactful lessons that I’ve learned along the way. So my journey starts in 2007 when I was in sixth grade, and I first got into training for sports, so calisthenics training, weight training, et cetera.

This first peaked my interest in nutrition. Health and all of these different types of components. Now, by 2008 I was already getting newsletters, um, about nutrition, about supplementation, and I was on forums reading different nutrition info and things like this. By 2009, 2010, I had already started prepping my own food, cooking my own food, and I embarked on a traditional bodybuilding diet.

By 2011, I had gotten into some of the plant-based stuff and juicing. I had started to juice a ton of green vegetables and things like this, which actually made me exceptionally sick. Now, I had gone to multiple medical doctors. I’d gone to multiple specialists, endocrinologists, cardiologists, et cetera.

Then I went to alternative health doctors like naturopaths and acupuncturists and chiropractors. Basically, I wasn’t able to get any resolution in my symptoms, and then eventually I wound up going to a surgeon who performed a surgery that was arguably unnecessary at that point in time. And needless to say, since then I’ve had quite a few issues.

We’ll get into that later. I. But then by 2012, after having the surgery, my body was all types of messed up and I wasn’t exactly sure on where to go next. So from there, I eventually stumbled upon paleo, intermittent fasting and low carb dieting. And once I started to do that, immediately felt 10 times better.

Now by 2013, I was fully engrossed in keto at this point, and intermittent fasting and paleo. So I went full hog. I went all the way in on this type of stuff, and then that eventually led me. Towards the back corners of the internet, at least in 2013, where I started to discover some of the carnivore stuff going on, some of the carnivore dieting, basically still having problems that didn’t resolve my problems that I was dealing with digestively.

What wound up happening is I started to want to bring in a little bit more carbs. This led into 2015. I had found the bioenergetic diet stuff through Danny Roddy, and at this point, Jay and I were actually in college together. And so we started seeing some of Danny Roddy’s videos and we started listening some of Dr.

Pete’s stuff and reading his articles. And we started to actually increase our carb intake. So first it started with carb cycling and then we started to increase carbs. We had only did starches, or at least I only did starches. ’cause of course fructose was still the devil at this point. And then eventually.

By 2016, I had gone Fullblown, Parian. We’re talking milk, orange juice, collagen, ice cream, oysters, liver. And needless to say, I was, you know, coming outta these restrictive backgrounds, no carbs, the fasting, all type of stuff going full hog, full bore into this, uh, parian stuff, Adlib eating. I started to gain quite a bit of weight.

I basically got fat during this timeframe, which is actually something I see with clients. So we could talk about this a little bit later on now by 2017. I decided that things had to change ’cause I felt a little bit better with the Parian stuff. My sleep was better, my energy was better. I wasn’t having the same stress symptoms.

I was still managing some digestive issues, but I was gaining weight and my workouts weren’t going as well, and I was still having some problems. So then I basically started to experiment and I started to say, all right. Maybe some components of the different diets work for me, whereas some didn’t. So I started to play around with just different elements of each diet.

I started to play around with the stress concepts and the mitochondrial concepts coming outta the bioenergetic diet. And I started to play around with some of the meal timing and food selection stuff coming out of paleo spheres and out of intermittent fasting. And I started to keep in mind some of the microbiome stuff.

From some of the plant-based fears and I started to basically shift and create my own diet from these principles that wasn’t specific to any of these camps. And also during this time is when I started working in the hospital in 2017. Now after about a year of messing around with the dietary stuff myself and then also working in the hospital, I started to work with some coworkers in the hospital.

So other nurses, physical therapists, et cetera, and start to talk to ’em about some of the diet stuff. ’cause they saw me, you know, having weird diet, like weird dietary choices coming in. ’cause I was having juice and I was having like all these raw carrots and things like this and the ground beef. It’s like, what am I doing with my diet?

So I started to tell them and I started to help people to set up their diet, to troubleshoot different situations. I was doing this for free, I was just helping, uh, the different people I was working out with. And then by 2019 I was still working in the hospital and then I was still helping people to troubleshoot their diets.

I. While also working on my diet, continuing to read the research and things like this. And then essentially by 2020, I was taking travel contracts, working in different hospitals, different ICUs around the country during covid, after working in the traditional medical system, and then also being involved in these different dietary spheres.

And then having been sick, quite sick myself at one point, from doing some of these different diets, I basically discovered six really important key takeaways that I wanna share with you in this video. So takeaway number one. It’s not about having a diet, it’s about principles. So you want to understand what are the underlying principles that you’re incorporating with your diet, whatever that diet is.

Keto, if paleo, carnivore, bioenergetic, et cetera. You want to extract the key principles. Work and apply them to your context and kind of throw out the things that maybe tail more into ideology or maybe aren’t helpful. And so this also tapers into another point here that with every diet there is an ounce of truth.

Vegan, carnivore, paleo, bioenergetic. There are components of all of these diets that are quite helpful and quite useful, but there are also components of these diets that don’t necessarily work super well. So it’s kind of important to to weed out and sift through and find the diamonds or the massive coal that comes with all of these different diets.

In order to figure out what’s working, you actually need to use what Dr. Pete called Perceived Think act. This is essentially a cyclical, systematic hypothesis testing approach. And basically what you do is you embark on some type of diet or some type of a component. You wanna rely on your own symptoms and experiences that you’re having on a regular basis.

Kind of gauge what’s going on. From there, you wanna start to think about these things rationally. You wanna determine, okay, well maybe this is going on because of this, maybe it’s going on because of that, and start to determine cause and effect and what next steps would be so that you could then act, which is basically you test it out and then you come back full circle and you start to perceive again.

This helps you to figure out. How the different diet or different intervention or supplement is working and without having to know, test every single thing with lab testing mean, of course the lab testing can be important, but also those symptoms are the real time data that you can use on a consistent basis to determine what’s going on and start to give yourself some direction.

Another important piece here that especially for me, is that sometimes your failures are actually huge lessons. ’cause if you try something and it doesn’t work out well for you, what you can actually do is use that as information to gauge like what’s your next step’s gonna be. So basically, when things don’t go well, that is information in and of itself as well as when things go right.

The next thing is once you settle upon different interventions that work for you. Consistency is absolutely king. So you wanna set up your own personal system that you can run on a regular basis. You gotta set it on autopilot and, and keep going with it. And then you want to add to that system instead of jumping wagon to wagon, to wagon.

’cause once you find things that work, you kind of just move one piece at a time in and out. Figure out what’s working for you, and then you add over time until ultimately you have your own personalized system. And the way to recover your health is to consistently do this over time instead of leapfrogging all over the place.

Now the question is. With all the things we have going on in our life with our jobs, with kids, with, you know, monetary concerns, with with family stuff going on, everything that’s going on, it can be difficult to stay exceptionally consistent instead of focusing on being absolutely dialed in a hundred percent of the time and you never fall off the wagon.

It’s more about being good at getting back on the wagon. So you want to be in a circumstance where if you do fall off, so say it’s, you know, Thanksgiving night and you go ham on the Turkey and dessert and whatever else. The next day, yeah, you’re probably not gonna have as good digestion. Maybe you’ll feel more sluggish, but just hop back on your normal routine.

No big deal. Say it’s Friday night, you go out for drinks with your wife. You guys have a couple glasses of wine. You’re a little bit hung over the next day, okay? No big deal on Saturday. Hop back right back on the plan. You don’t have to make up for what you did Friday night. Just keep going back as normal.

That’s how people in my experience, develop high level consistency. ’cause when they fall off, they could just get right back on. There’s not all these barriers and all this mental stuff that goes into it. Well, I have to make up for it. I miss this, I miss that. Just don’t look back. Just keep going forward and run the setup that you know works for you on a regular basis.

The next piece with this, and this is something that’s really important to understand with that lesson piece, is the idea of establishing a floor once you have your system in place, and this is why it’s so important to get to a personalized system. That becomes your new baseline, that becomes your new floor.

It’s the lowest place you will fall. So if things happen in your life, you have a stressful event, you have a death in a family, you have a divorce, you go on vacation, you, you fall off track, you have, you know, something goes on at work that flares the autoimmune disease you’re dealing with. If you have a floor, you have a specific regimen for your supplementation, for your exercise, and you know.

This is what worked for you in the past. This is what kept you healthy. This is what maintained your health. And then maybe you have contingency systems set in place so that if something like that happens, you can get back. Then now you have a strong foundation to start from and you can go upwards from there.

So if, if, you know, if things fall off, you can at least land in this nice spot. Instead of going all the way back down to zero, you pick up the pieces and you start to rebuild and spiral back up. Is exceptionally important, and you also want this floor to be something that you can maintain on a consistent basis.

It’s easily implementable and it’s also sustainable. You want to be able to set it on autopilot so that you can run it into perpetuity because essentially it’s, it takes so much time and energy. To always be worrying about, well, how many grams of pufa and is my vitamin D status dialed in? You wanna get a system in place where those things are taken care of so you don’t have to think about it anymore.

And this is something I do with a lot of clients. They usually find once we start to get their health under control and they start to feel better, then they stop thinking so much about health. They stop reading all the blogs and stop listing all the podcasts, and then they go into some other direction.

Is it business? Is it relationships? Is it their exercise and their performance? Is it things like this, they start to want to move in another direction because this tier has been solidified. So you want to think about this as one pillar of your life. You get it under control. You have it set on autopilot such you can start to dial in the other pillars in other areas of your life.

The last piece that I want to talk about here is before you embark. On a specific experiment or hypothesis testing process or anything like this, you want to clearly determine the risks versus rewards. Why? Because sometimes you can go and do an intervention. As an example, for me, I decided that, you know, Dr.

Pete talks about antibiotics. So I’m just gonna take like a full course of tetracycline, and then I wrecked my gut health for about a month. I wasn’t fully aware of what the risks were gonna be in that circumstance. I was just hoping for this reward that the gut problems I was having were gonna be resolved.

And so essentially you want to get a clear picture as best you can to determine is this thing that you’re going to do, does it have a high risk profile? And also does that balance itself out based on the reward? And in certain circumstances it won’t. And in that case, you don’t want to embark on that intervention, and then you don’t want to ignore your symptoms and the things that you have going on based on just this hypothesis.

You wanna be very careful with these slippery slopes and these tracks of thinking that can box you in. I’ve worked with a number of clients at this point where essentially they get into this box and it’s like, well, I can’t eat oxalates and I can’t have pufa, and I gotta avoid all the lectins. Then I, you know, I wanna make sure I don’t have fibers because I’m gonna have endotoxin.

And it creates this circumstance where people don’t know what to eat and they don’t know what to do anymore. These are the exact principles that I incorporate every day with my personal clients when I’m working with somebody one-to-one, the principles that I’m incorporating with people inside my coaching program.

Now, if you’re struggling, going from diet to diet. And you know, leapfrogging all over the place. You haven’t set up your personal floor yet. You need help setting up your perceived think act hypothesis testing process. These are the exact things I’m doing with my one-to-one clients and also what I’m helping people to do inside my REVIVE program.

If you need help working through this and you’re at this point in the journey, you can check out the link in the description below and you can book a call. And also you can check out this video that I have linked below.