My eating right now has settled into a decent place where I eat mainly meat with some vegetables and then an occasional sweet treat. I think my next challenge will be to go without sugar and possibly try intermittent fasting on a regimented schedule instead of randomly like I have been doing. I read Sugar Blues last summer and tried to cut out sugar for awhile, but I wasn’t eating like I am eating now and the result was feeling like I couldn’t eat anything. A few weeks ago I was pretty much eating no refined sweets, but I don’t know that I felt incredibly better. I am aware that a lot of the benefit of not eating sugar comes from not having free radicals running around your body or oxidizing and aging your body. I’d like to see how I feel if I went completely without sweets and I’d also like to see how my training improves or is affected since I’d like to redouble my efforts to improve my vertical and sprinting times. I’ll probably start Monday.

I finished Gary Taubes’ Good Calories, Bad Calories several days ago. The book was an incredible read, easily the best book I’ve ever read on nutrition. It doesn’t cover everything I would like to know, which would be difficult, but it does an incredible job of examining the evidence from a scientific approach. This is not your average “eat good foods, here’s a meal plan, you’ll lose a pound a week” diet book. This is almost more like a textbook, which is a good thing in this case.

While reading the first part about nutrition history in America and how scientists have approached it, I was both angry and deeply saddened at the same time. It is shocking how most of our beliefs about food are based on suspect evidence and how the low-fat dogma spiraled into our everyday thinking so that we all accept it as a fact. Whenever people give out diet information they will generally recommend to get certain products as low fat because of it’s reputation.

The rest of the book is about how the body responds to different foods (namely carbohydrates), and what the scientific trials done so far have shown. It was enough to convince me that loading your body with sweets and even “good” carbohydrates is something to avoid. I found the sections on hunger particularly interesting as I would like to get to a point where my hunger dictates what and when I eat naturally. I also found the portion on calorie restriction/ semi starvation insightful and definitely symptoms to keep an eye out for and avoid. While I was reading that I thought better to eat some carbs that to starve yourself.

The books effect on me has been increased knowledge more than anything, as well as piqued interest in some of the more esoteric areas of nutrition. Overall I wholeheartedly recommend anyone and everyone to read this book, if you find it boring that maybe it’s not for you and maybe how we eat doesn’t interest you, which can be a good thing, but if you think you’ll be interested at all then you’ll love it.