After following this diet here for the last two years, I can safely say that I've found the best diet for me to thrive. But to get here, I had to make a shit ton of mistakes. But I'm confident that by watching this video you are going to save years off your journey so you can get here as well. And this all started when I was in know-it-all kid who had just moved away from home for the first time and I was having a ton of fun. Until things all changed in the last year, and I was about to graduate with literally nothing to show for myself.
I know I'm laughing right now, but I'm laughing through the pain. I had an addiction to the green stuff that I used to run away from my problems. My health was in the toilet and I was really unmotivated. I literally didn't know what to do, and one morning it all hit me like a sack of bricks. I was literally living my life like a fricking loser. And in that moment I realized I needed to start making major changes to my life. So I did some research on good ol' trustee Dr. Google and figured out this thing called OMAD, which is one meal a day.
It made perfect sense to me at the time. I heard the argument of our ancestors used to fast, therefore we should do the same thing. And I freaking loved it. It's the perfect win-win because one, I don't have to waste all my time eating. And it was great because it promoted this thing called autophagy and I could spend that extra working more. And I heard about these longer fasts that were essentially supposed to promote that fancy term that I talked about autophagy even more. And like a crazy person I decided to start off with a seven day fast. Then I did another prolonged fast and another one, but that was great until I woke up one morning with a lump. It freaked me out at first, but then I literally just thought, I'm doing everything right. I should be completely fine. Right? So couple months went by and yeah, man, it, it just kept growing bigger and bigger.
And I kind of realized this, this might honestly be something like serious. So I decided to go get it checked out. I was told it was completely normal and it was just this fancy term called gynecomastia. It's basically when a dude starts to grow boobs. How was that normal? And looking back at it now, I realized that there were other symptoms as well that were starting to surface, that I was just completely neglecting. In my brain I was telling myself, ah, I'm fine. And this scared me silly. It like snapped me into shape. I realized I can't be doing these fricking health fads. I have to find actual, real science-based advice. I need to be working with experts. I, I couldn't keep acting like I fricking knew everything.
And after, again asking around, my nutritionist friend recommended that I check out precision nutrition stuff. They have a long standing record of being science-based and really like knowing their shit like the gold standard in that space. And to hopefully do it right this time I started their year long men's coaching program. And the first thing that I learned completely blew my mind. A lot of people think that all these diets out there, keto, paleo, carnivore, are really different.
But I actually learned from precision nutrition they're not. And there's three main things that they have in common that is gonna help us understand what is the best diet for you. And to figure that out I had to go back to the basics. What I learned from precision nutrition is we want to be focusing on whole foods, ideally processed stuff as little as possible. And then on top of that, we can break our meals into four different sections. So the first one is protein. So this basically meant for me no more sandwich meats and ideally going to fresh stuff. And next up we got carbs. . This is something for a really long time that I thought was the devil. Next up, we got fats.
For such a long time, I think the media probably put this in me, but I was just like, oh, everything has to be low fat, no fat, I don't wanna be fat. And last but not least, number four, veggies. But I ended up learning for like optimal gut health, in an ideal scenario, we wanna be going for like 30 different fruits and vegetables every single week. And ideally we don't want to be snacking, but instead having meals with all four of these categories. And when it came to packaged foods, I had to learn to start reading the nutritional facts and the ingredients. I'm just ideally looking for, when I'm reading it, i'm looking for sugar, which this thing has added sugar and also unhealthy oils. And I can try my best to explain it to you, but I feel like it would be way better if the man who explained it to me, Dr.
Mark Hyman, did the same thing for you. Since the early 1900s, our consumption of soybean oil has gone up a thousand fold. Americans consume at least twice as amount of linoleic acid today, as they did in the 1960s. Well, this has been a huge problem because the increase in these highly inflammatory and unstable omega fats in our diet has led to an increase in so many inflammatory diseases. You see the over consumption of omega-6 fats, which we do need, and the under consumption of omega-3 fats. This imbalance has led to increases in heart disease, obesity, pre-diabetes, autoimmune diseases, and lots more. Even things like depression and homicide and suicide. So at this point I figured out. These are the things that I ideally should be eating and processed stuff I should be trying to minimize as best as I possibly could. But, before we continue on. What are the biggest similarities between all these different diets is that they all promote Whole Foods.
I don't see any of them going, hey, eat more McDonald's. Maybe some of them do, but the bulk of them are like, no, let's eat nutritious good food that's gonna help us thrive. Back to the huge waste of time, like I needed to figure out how to do cooking effectively because again, cooking three times every single day, seven days a week. No, that's not happening. I have other things to do with my time. So literally the solution that I came upon was basically meal prepping and I would basically meal prep a shit ton of protein. And a shit ton of carbohydrates and essentially just put them into little meal prep containers. So all I had to do was take that container, toss it on a pan fry, warm it up on the stove, cut up some vegetables, and literally grab some fruit and I was good to go. That was my meal instantly. And also, another thing I realized as well from Mark Hyman is again, we wanna be aware of the oils that we're cooking with, so I didn't even realize this, but extra virgin olive oil is supposed to be used at low temperatures.
I was literally using it for high heat stuff, like literally to cook my meat. For cooking, you can use extra virgin coconut oil and avocado oil, which actually can be used to higher temperatures and even ghee, which is clarified butter. You see, ghee has a higher smoking point about 400 – 500 degrees, and it has all the same nutrients found in grass fed butter. And this is a perfect segue into the second similarity between all these different diets. Interestingly, they all really just raise awareness of what you're eating. So if you're vegan, you're aware that no animal based products are on your plate. Even a level above that, if you can actually even start to intuitively eat to understand what you're actually consuming and be present with it.
That's like next level. There was this meta-analysis. Meta-analysis are like the pinnacle of research. They essentially found that those who actually were present when they were eating food, not on Netflix or watching YouTube, they were actually able to lose weight and maintain their weight. Without even tracking their calories at all. It was really interesting just because when you were actually doing it during that given sitting, you would still eat roughly the same amount of food, but because you were more aware of it, they saw that the next meal, you wouldn't eat nearly as much food, which then could put us in a caloric or an energy deficit, which means we would lose weight.
And from here you might have thought that it was smooth sailing. Yeah. You know those times when like everything's going so good, but then for some reason you just stopped doing what's working. That was one of these times. Basically the woman in the red dress, otherwise known as temptation, came and struck. There was like this gnawing feeling in the back of my head, telling me your have to find the optimal diet so you can be your best self. It was back to the ancestral eating the animal-based diet popularized by Paul Saladino and by liver king got me really excited and I fully bought into this. But now I was basically consuming a diet that was supposed to be the perfect diet for humans, and I wasn't as satisfied. Look, I was conflicted. I wanted to be eating the most optimal diet, whatever that is. I didn't care if it was ancestral or not. I just wanted to be my best self. But at the same time, there was a part of me that missed certain foods that now I just wasn't allowing myself to consume.
It was like I was putting myself in this box, this prison of sorts that made food not enjoyable. But while I was figuring out this battle, something good did happen. And this brings us to our last similarities between the diets. Those people that are actually on these diets figure out at a certain point. Hmm, I'm eating more whole foods, less processed garbage, and at the same time, I'm more aware of the food that I'm eating. They have a really high likelihood of starting to exercise as well, which then means they can actually use the food that they're getting to actually make functional tissue instead of fat. So at this point, you're probably asking, bro, what is this optimal diet, this best diet that I should be following? Well, the answer is humans are super adaptable. So I hate to be this guy, but it depends.
Throughout this video, you've learned three different pillars of what it means to actually have a healthy diet. So if you're someone that likes meats or that prefers being plant-based or prefers high fat, low fat, the answer is you can do it all and still be really healthy. So it's gonna be that diet that you can actually stick to long term that meets all of your preferences. And for me, that's paleo-ish and from eating this for over two years. I am literally healthier than ever. My gynecomastia went away. My stress levels are way more manageable. I feel way freaking better, and this whole journey taught me that there is no perfect diet. And also to be really careful about who I'm listening to for advice. Please even fact check me. We want to be hungry to find this stuff that actually works, the science-based stuff, and hopefully that'll help us all live healthier lives.
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