🍽️ How I Eat

If it doesn't grow, swim, walk, or fly, or if it comes with an ingredient list, I don't eat it. Meat, seafood, eggs, and whole vegetables and fruit are the entire menu. No packaged snacks, no bars, no cereal, no bread, no seed oils, no artificial sweeteners, no "low-carb" processed substitutes pretending to be food.

This isn't a weight-loss diet with an end date — it's a permanent, prevention-first eating pattern built around one question: does this food give my body real information, or does it confuse it? Whole, unprocessed food gives clean signals. Processed food — even "healthy" processed food — is noise, and noise is what drives insulin resistance, inflammation, and gut dysfunction over decades.

A 16:8 eating window, roughly 12pm to 8pm. I stop eating by 8pm and don't eat again until around noon the next day — an overnight fast of about 16 hours, with all meals falling inside the remaining 8-hour window. Water and electrolytes without sugar are fine during the fasted stretch; food isn't.

This isn't a separate program bolted onto the food rules above — it's the timing half of the same approach. A consistent multi-hour daily fast gives insulin a real chance to come back down between meals, which matters directly for the triglyceride and small-dense-LDL work already happening through the food choices themselves. It also lines up with the rest of the daily structure: the first supplements are taken fasted at 7:30am, and the eating window opens with the first meal around 11am–12pm.

Sugar and refined carbs drive the exact metabolic problems I'm working to reverse — elevated triglycerides, small dense LDL particles, insulin resistance. Removing them at the source does more than any supplement can. Whole fruit and vegetables still provide carbohydrate, fiber, and micronutrients — just without the insulin spike of refined starch or added sugar riding along with it.

"Processed" is its own separate problem, independent of carbs. Emulsifiers and additives common in packaged food — even sugar-free ones — measurably disrupt the gut microbiome, including the exact keystone bacterial species (like F. prausnitzii and Akkermansia) I'm actively working to rebuild. A "zero-sugar" protein bar can still be off-limits if the ingredient list is long and synthetic — the additive burden matters as much as the sugar content.

Protein and nutrient density come first. This isn't restriction for its own sake — the goal is to make every calorie count toward muscle, micronutrients, and metabolic health, not to eat as little as possible.

This way of eating isn't just a general preference — it's currently load-bearing for an active project: rebuilding two keystone gut bacteria, Akkermansia muciniphila and Faecalibacterium prausnitzii, that showed undetectable on both prior GI-MAP draws. That rebuild depends on diet at least as much as it depends on the supplements (Akkermansia 500 PRO, Sunfiber PHGG, Tri-Butyrin, MegaPre) — so eating whole-foods-only isn't a nice-to-have alongside the protocol, it's part of the protocol.

Whole food does double duty here: cutting out additives removes the headwind, while specific whole foods actively feed the rebuild —

There's also a retest riding on this: the plan is to stop the bridge supplements (Tri-Butyrin, MegaPre) 6–8 weeks before the January 2027 GI-MAP retest, so the retest reflects whether Akkermansia and Sunfiber — plus diet — have durably reestablished these species, not whether the bridge agents are still propping things up in the moment. A diet slip doesn't just risk a bad week; it risks muddying that readout.

This is the part that separates this way of eating from a diet I picked because it sounded good: the specific inclusions and exclusions above aren't guesses. They're derived from my own genetic testing and bloodwork, run through a real decision process, the same way a clinician would use a patient's chart. Two data sources dictate the food rules directly.

1️⃣ Genetics — what my own biology can't process cleanly

23andMe testing surfaced variants in three genes that directly changed what counts as "food" versus "avoid" for me, even within categories that are otherwise considered healthy:

2️⃣ Labs — what my bloodwork is telling me to change

Bloodwork functions as an ongoing report card on whether the diet is working, and specific markers have directly shaped specific choices:

The through-line: every food rule on this page can be traced back to either a whole-foods-first principle, a specific gene variant, or a specific lab marker. Nothing here is arbitrary, and nothing here is permanent dogma — if the labs and the genetics say something different one day, the diet moves with the data, not the other way around.

People sometimes ask what "diet" this is — it doesn't map cleanly onto one label, but borrows the best-evidenced piece of a few:

Isn't fruit just sugar?

Fruit's sugar comes bundled with fiber, water, and micronutrients, which blunts the insulin response compared to refined sugar consumed alone. The rule isn't "zero carbohydrate" — it's "zero added carbohydrate." Whole fruit passes that test; fruit juice or dried-fruit snacks generally don't.

What about "healthy" processed foods — protein bars, diet soda, plant-based meat?

Still out, even when the sugar content is zero. The additive load (emulsifiers, gums, artificial sweeteners, synthetic vitamin forms) is the disqualifier, not just the sugar line on the label.

Is this forever?

Yes — it's framed as a permanent operating pattern, not a temporary diet with a finish line.

Does this mean no carbs ever, in any context?

No — it's carb-minimized, not carb-zero. Vegetables and fruit are unrestricted within reason; the target is refined/added carbohydrate and sugar specifically.