What do I eat? 2013 update

OK, what do I eat? It's been a long time since I posted anything about myself. Another hastily written post during Hazel's nap.

Breakfast is always the same. I melt about 100g of butter in a frying pan. I crack 11 eggs yolks in to this (I fry the whites later for the chickens!) and fry them until they hold their shape. I then pour 8 yolks for myself and Hazel, with all of the free butter, in to a bowl and mash them with a fork before stirring the mix in to an "egg soup". Hazel has a dollop, I have the rest. We like it quite solid. I finish any Hazel doesn't want, hopefully I get six yolks worth. Daniel likes his yolks just fried, he has the other three.

If I feel like it, I have a creamy cocoa, ie about 4g cocoa powder, 2ml honey, maybe somewhere between 30 and 60ml double cream. Usually a decaff coffee too. Sometimes with caffeine, though I tend to prefer my caffeine in the evenings.

Lunch on work days is portable stearic acid as 100g of Lindt 90% cocoa solids chocolate. Sometimes with 100g macadamias, sometimes not. Occasionally 300ml of soured cream along side some chocolate.

Supper is a meal. It varies a lot. If you scroll down the index to the set of posts starting with "Food" you get the idea of the sort of things I eat for a main meal. I have been known to eat green leaves with supper. I have been known to eat parsnip chips. I have been known to have gluten free home made cake for desert under a centimetre of butter or drowned in soured cream. If fat has been a little low with supper I might make ice cream with just a little added sugar. Or rhubarb baked in cream and flavoured with cinnamon. Or another creamy cocoa.

Alcohol, some. I like dry wine and gluten free beer. Never a huge amount.

I don't weigh any food nowadays (I went through the Fitday kick years ago), especially since the digital scales passed away. I weigh myself about once a year. My jeans are 28" waist, depending where I buy them.

There are oddities that need to be borne in mind, ie that I have never been overweight. I eat this way as a result of an accident at an anaesthesia meeting, chatting with a friend who had dropped from 18 stone to 12 stone on Atkins induction. I had just discovered Pubmed and devoured studies voraciously.

It didn't take long to realise that Kwasniewski's Optimal Diet was where I wanted to go. I don't eat enough offal and I don't make enough bone broths, but otherwise I keep fairly close. My biggest transgression is excess protein.

Quite why excess protein is bad is interesting. If you read the DNA chapter in Nick Lane's "Life Ascending" it brings home quite how closely  integrated amino acid metabolism is to the TCA. It's way too complex to see how any given protein would interact, so aiming for high grade low quantity is how I work, when practical. If you eat more than you need it goes in to the TCA.

In my Fitday days I used to run at around 2000kcal/day for weight stability but I probably run a fair bit higher than than nowadays, most days. But no two days are the same and there is far too much to enjoy in life without agonising over +/- 5g of butter.

Is it worth it? Well, I sort of forget that eating this way is odd. You have to giggle at the nurses with their little tubs of salad and half an apple but they're just kiddies... But I went from being early middle aged to pretty much how I felt as a teenager, once I had adapted (full adaptation took me about 6 months). I don't feel I have changed much, beyond the needs of a second family, in the last 10 years healthwise. Beard is a little greyer.

I feel well. You sort of forget what it used to be like to need to eat NOW. And to fall asleep for three hours after a huge bowl of rice before being awake half the night. Anyone with a bad back will be very familiar with using one foot to pull your underwear up the other leg to where you can actually reach it without bending down. All gone, along with the little pot belly.

I have no expectation of living for ever. But I have no intention to going back to where I was at 40 years of age. Aging un-noticed would be nice. When you find something which works this well you don't throw it away.

Peter