Why Do I Try Other Dietary Approaches?

That Nice Boy I Married's friend Teresa asked him, regarding my articles on The Shangri-La Diet and intermittant fasting , why I don't just stick with a low carb diet? Seemed like a fair question.

There are a number of reasons. First of all, while I try various tweaks to my diet, the baseline low carb element remains. Ever since my disastrous foray into the Carbohydrate Addicts Diet a few months after I started low carbing, I'm not interested in any dietary model that calls for me to eat a bunch of concentrated carbs. Not going to go there. It makes me feel wretched.

But in my fifteen years of low carbing, my weight has gone up and down. Regular readers know that I put on a size or two writing low carb cookbooks, ironic as that may sound. I was still healthy, I still had fantastic energy and great blood work and all that stuff that comes from shunning concentrated carbs, but I was still obviously eating too much food for my body, or too many carbs, or something. So while I'm not interested in going back to eating grains and beans and such, I am interested in variations on the theme.

Too, I'm just a nutrition geek, have been since I was 19. I read stuff all the time. Every now and then, I run across an idea that's substantially different from what I've read about and/or tried before, and get intrigued. Since I've been profoundly misled by nutritional/health authorities in the past, the only real path I have to finding out which of these ideas is valid and which is not is to try it myself. I am a willing guinea pig. Indeed, one of the things I really liked about Seth Roberts, who wrote the Shangri-La Diet, is that he's a big advocate of self-experimentation.

So I try stuff. I see how it works for me -- if it fits my life, if it makes me feel well, if it helps me keep my weight off, or take weight off. If it's helpful, I incorporate it into my day to day dietary plan. If it's not, I ditch it.

And hey, it gives me something to write about.