The fat and carb experiment, part 1

This year I've noticed an emerging trend of vegetable oil eliminating, protein restricting diets. These guys are eating to satiety, often no calorie restrictions at all, and yet they're going from fat to thin at a crazy rate.

Slime Mold Time Mold have the Potato Hack – although perhaps more interesting are their Potato Riff Trials.

Fire in a Bottle is experimenting with the Croissant Diet and Emergence Diet. (I'm not very moved by mouse studies or speculations about evolution, but the results speak for themselves.)

Experimental Fat Loss has been iterating on his ex150 diet, which The Heart Attack Diet has also followed with some success.

So seeing their success, and given the size of my own gut, I decided to give it a go. How have I gone? I eat until I'm full, I never exercise, I never feel hungry or tired, but I lose about 1 kg each week. This is not like any weight loss regime I've every been on, and I'm honestly shocked by the results.

I'll grant that it's only been 3 weeks, but I really think there might be something to this. So I'm going to start recording my results in case it helps anyone else.

The philosophy behind this diet is fairly simple: eat how people ate before we started getting fat. And, at least as far as I can tell, that means eating almost no vegetable oils, less lean meat, and basing your diet mostly around starch and animal fats. (Sugar has also increased, but unless you regularly drink soft drink, probably by less than you would expect. So I'm leaving sugar in my diet for now.)

For reference, a typical day of my starch-and-animal-fat diet might look like this:

Breakfast:

• 1 bowl of oats, with cream and maple syrup
• 1 cup of coffee, with cream and sugar

Lunch:

• 4 slices of bread, with butter
• 1 apple
• 1 cup of coffee, with cream and sugar

Afternoon tea:

• 4 all butter shortbread biscuits
• 1 cup of tea, with milk

Dinner:

• 1 bowl of soup made from vegetables, beans and lard
• 1 slice of bread with butter

Bedtime snack:

• 1 cup of ice cream (make sure it's a good one made from cream)

I suspect there are some people who this diet won't work for. Perhaps too much damage has been done to their metabolism, or they have some other disorder causing the weight gain. But for me, so far, it seems to be working. So let's see how long it will keep working for.

If you're interested in seeing further updates, check my homepage. I also plan to post new updates to /r/SaturatedFat.