#breaded fish on buttered baguette is a delicacy that can only be made better by a crack of black pepper

[flocon-tourne-en-rond]

(If there's one thing to know about me it's that when my roommate leaves for over two days I immediately revert to eating like an unsupervised kid.)

[edgystuff]

The Old World Diet

Want to stop your constant fatigue, brain fog, feeling of being bloated? Want to start waking up early, jumping out of bed? Want to have more energy than you remember ever having? This diet can do that for you.

Growing up in France, food on the table used to always come well prepared - peeled, cooked until very soft, prepared at home. Many dishes were following traditional recipes that had been perfected over centuries. Since globalization had not quite happened yet, fruits and veggies were locally grown and only appeared when in season - and even then I wasn’t that big on them, I was nuts about nuts. Grass-fed red meat was consumed no more than once a week, and chicken was a delicacy, reserved for special occasions, freshly killed from the local farm. A pet peeve I developed was snack packages being left open - see, they would go stale within a couple days. No human ate corn really, it was known to be animals food. I can’t remember any exposure to soy, except in my teenage years when I started enjoying Asian food. And above all fresh baguette, pasta and other white wheat derivatives were the basis of our energy.

Since I was quite the rebel and had a tendency to question absolutely everything, especially when it came from my parents, I was very suspicious of the French countryside food traditions. For me a lot of that food selection and meticulous preparing was akin to old wives’ tales. Moving to the US in 2003, then in my early twenties, was a pivotal moment for my diet. I started following all these pseudo-health advices, eating a lot more varied fruits, vegetables and legumes. For the first time they came to me with skin on, partly cooked, sometimes raw, because see otherwise “you lose all the vitamins.” Any fruit could be obtained all year round, though it seemed quite tasteless. Meats were on the menu every day, especially chicken which was the cheap every day option.

Fast forward about 15 years and I had developed many debilitating health issues: massive fatigue and brain fog, blank memory, blurry vision, constant constipation. My brain felt just like a piece of plastic. I would find myself just sitting in my car in a daze. I would sometimes go a full week without going number two (it’s quite a terrible feeling). Most of the time I couldn’t gather any energy to exercise, feeling just knocked out. This made me doubt everything, even my mind - maybe I was just utterly depressed and it created all my health issues? But I realized over time that certain food didn’t make me feel good, although it was so hard to pinpoint which ones. I was supposed to be eating healthy food, following the nutrition advices of many well crafted science-backed blog posts. I had tried gluten free and other arbitrary subtraction diets for months at a time but nothing seemed to feel good past the first couple weeks of positive placebo effect.

Then one day I decided to try something: to forget about what is said to be healthy, and instead to go back to my childhood diet. Exit many fruits and all the obscure grains, legumes and veggies I never heard of before age 20. Shoot for high quality meats, and less often. Satisfy that craving for bread and pastries. Well almost immediately I regained energy. Within a few weeks I was feeling my normal self again, with most symptoms gone. Within a few months, my sharpness and energy reached unprecedented levels - my brain was like overclocked, I could visualize decades-gone events sharply by memory, and my high levels of energy felt almost scary.

This was not the happy ending quite yet. Since I did not really understand what was truly bad for me yet, I then went through many relapses for another 2-3 years. Often times I was pressured by others to eat “healthy”, or I would convince myself that maybe I wasn’t sensitive to some food anymore. Maybe I was just dealing with a lot of stress of early parenthood and could not quite make the food choices I wanted. But finally it came together in 2019 when I put together my experiences with the teachings from the Plan Paradox book. Although the book has its flaws and shoots in too many directions, the main teaching is that plants don’t just give food away to us for free - they absolutely defend themselves with the largest chemical arsenal known to mankind! It makes so much sense, and is why animals need to have a very specialized diet to be able to handle a narrow set of food - and why it can take them hours or days to properly digest things. But somehow humans are now believing that they can eat anything, any time, and keep on with our crazy active lifestyles. Coming up with my new diet, I thought a good description would be “Old World Diet” for bringing me back to what Europeans refined over centuries.

Whole grain food, or how to kill you GI

Principles and rules

What are some principles of a good diet?

Your body and mind should feel good at most times. You should start feeling better right away, there is no “die off” period during which “some dying bugs release chemicals” (the die off period is the most common excuse for bad diets).

Your weight should stay same or reduce, even though you are eating until full satisfaction.

Your GI should not hurt, feel bloated or constipated in any way. Regular daily bowel movements, typically in the morning.

The ideas of the diet can fit in a blog post, not a 700 page book.

Here are the main rules of the diet:

Stick to refined foods as much as possible. Refined doesn’t mean that you should go for chemicals - it means that the food was prepared in the “most evolved way” to make it the easiest to digest - shelled, peeled, deseeded, cooked until soft, etc.

Stay away from anything too sweet, especially fructose, which tricks your body into eating a lot of it. Many fruits are evolved to make you fat.

Stay away from anything known to be poisonous, or which may not be ripe for consumption. This seems obvious, but apparently not, look at all the potatoes.

What (bad stuff) you don’t eat is more important than what (good stuff) you eat. Stop harming yourself.

Supplements and vitamins are great. They are the way to bring back what was lost in processing - without the poisons.

You eat what the things you eat, ate.

The food list

With this in mind, the Old World Diet:

Main grains like wheat and rice are fine, but only in most refined form like white flour and white rice. Baguettes and other breading, white pasta is all good. Prefer bakery items that have risen by yeast (break up gluten) and are vitamin enriched. But stay away from whole grains! This includes most of corn based products, like corn flakes and most breakfast cereals. Also no to oats and other whole cereals found in most energy bars.

No legumes: anything soybean / soy based is off. Same for most bean and pea families. They are some surprise entries in this category, like peanuts and cashews (not nuts) which must be avoided.

Real nuts (shelled and peeled) are your friend. Best are pistachios, hazelnuts, and pecans. Almonds are fine but prefer peeled or as a flour.

Reduce meat consumption and shoot for highest quality like grass-fed beef and pasture raised chicken.

Fish and seafood should be your main protein, as long as wild caught to avoid corn feeding.

Milk should be A2 casein (coming from southern european cows). There are brands that promote A2 (like the A2 brand). But really, truly, just stay away from milk altogether if you can. It’s got enough calcium to build a cow, along with an overdose of vitamin D that increases its absorption. Hypercalcemia is a very debilitating condition. On the other hand, butter has little casein so is fine, but prefer yellow-colored European style butter.

Limit fruit consumption to only local, organic and very ripe fruit. Rule of thumb: it should smell very good. Still many fruit have high doses of fructose and are the surest way to become fat. Avocados are fruit, and although they don’t have the usual sugar, they personally make me feel really bad.

No nightshades! Potatoes, tomatoes, eggplant are off the menu. Maybe once in a while if peeled, deseeded, ripe and well cooked. Tomato paste may be ok.

Having a bit of regular sugar or maple syrup is fine, since they both have 50% or less fructose ratio. In general just avoid sugar and ban any fructose rich food (like honey).

For alcohol, the best is some clean white wine with lower sugars, like Sauvignon Blanc. Some red wine feels ok too, but it varies quite a bit based on skin content and amount of aging. Many beers seem to too much of the original lectins (the bad proteins attacking your gut) and are not aged long enough, so in doubt go for very clear Belgium-style ones. Overall the harder alcohols like whisky seem to be much easier to digest.

Overall it is close to the Plant Paradox diet, but with notable differences:

White wheat flour (with gluten) and white rice are fine really. Enjoy these delicious breads and pasta. That’s where you can draw most of your energy, and digesting them seem really easy once all of the gut-attacking substances are removed. Take the ones enriched with iron / thiamine / etc.

Avocados are not fine. Overall double check that the food is not banned in the FODMAP list.

White wine or champagne seems to go better than red wine, even with the need for sulfites.

A2 milk, so easy to digest. But really just ditch the milk.

Great: traditional white bread, enriched with vitamins

Easy dinner: sardines on a brioche bun, with white wine

Trusting our history rather than pseudo-science

Fairly simple diet isn’t it? Personally I have been feeling amazing and lost quite a bit of weight after just a few weeks on it. GI is working like clockwork. This diet just brings you back to the most evolved food humanity was using before the health craze shifted us off track. What we are seeing really with all these bad “healthy” diets, is that modern science and medicine have become self-fulfilling. They are somehow telling us what healthy foods are (which they are not, besides for animals with specialized digestion that have plenty of time to digest them), which in turn make us sick in ways that are impossible for your body to fix (mostly auto-immune diseases, so your body IS the attacker) and finally we are given medications to fix ourselves (but they are just about reducing the inflammation and pain really). It’s time to stop this vicious pseudo-scientific cycle. Think about it - humanity mostly evolved by preparing their food better than animals, starting with the discovery of fire for cooking, which gave them their huge advantage over animals. It is time to enjoy the benefits of humanity’s experience and live a pain-free, energy-filled life.