eating LOTS of vegetables

[boomchakabowwow]

I've been under the weather and it has taken (still taking actually) a long time to get better. in an attempt to mitigate the situation, I amped up "eating healthy". dinner may just be standing around with my wife eating a steamed artichoke, with berries for dessert.. maybe a bowl of beans with kale mixed in. obnoxiously veggie heavy. breakfast is some cut up mango and a banana. I lost 10 lbs in the 4 weeks of being sick.

I am kinda shocked. all bodily functions are firing on all cylinders. I typically cannot sleep when I am sick, so that is a constant struggle, but oddly enough I am feeling kinda better on the insides.

I dont think I have ever eating a balance diet. time to change all that.

my doctor thinks the 3 year social distancing thing cause this years cold/flu to be total asswhuppers.

 

[1315]

Hey Boom,
Hang in there. Spring is right around the corner . Shed winter, get outside, best of luck for spring and summer!
My doc told me if you're an American male, the deck is already attacked against us. Steaks, pizza, hotdogs, ice cream... the list goes on. Time for you and i to turn the page, as you're finding. There will be rewards, it just takes some focus and a little time.
Go get em!
1315...out.

 

[Jovidah]

There's a very simple rule of fist to 'eat healthier'... simply cook from scratch with whole recognizable ingredients and skip on anything processed. This is also why a lot of diets like paleo 'work' for people; it's because by virtue of following the diet they almost by default take all the processed junk out.
It's almost impossible to go wrong with a diet of vegetables, fruits & meats.

In my own experience my body always worked better keeping meat in the diet than out of the diet.... but like all things dietary your mileage might vary. Your body's chemistry isn't necessarily entirely the same as the next body's chemistry, and different people have different intolerances. Not all bodies are the same, but the problems of processed food seem pretty universal.

 

[btbyrd]

Plants are good. But when I get a prolonged illness, there isn't much better than delicious broth. If you're capable of exerting the effort to make some good chicken stock, infusing that with herbs and garlic and or ginger and lemongrass or whatever is a gamechanger. You make your batch stock unseasoned and then parcel out a mug's worth whenever you need a pick me up, infuse your herbs and aromatics, season, and then treat yourself to some life-giving liquid. The hard work is in the stock making, so if you can work up a stockpile in your freezer, you'll have some at the ready.

My other health-giving elixir is the fruit smoothie. My basic recipe is to take a **** ton of frozen raspberries, blackberries, and cherries and then blend them with some soy milk, a splash of OJ, and some collagen and greens powders. I usually throw in a gram or two of vitamin C while I'm at it. A big whallop of phytonutrients with a sizable dose of nutritious amino acids.

Both are also excellent for hangovers.

 

[jaydee]

It's almost impossible to go wrong with a diet of vegetables, fruits & meats.

Sorry but thats just plain wrong. Vegetables yeah but fruit and meat clearly No.
250g of fruit is recommended per day. Thats not much. Any more than that and your intake of simple sugars is too high.
Calorie intake more than likely as well.
Most people in western countries eat too much too much meat and too little pulses, grains, nuts etc. which are far better sources of proteins and fats.
Look at the roman gladiators. They had a vegetarian diet not without reason.

 

[Jovidah]

Sorry but thats just plain wrong. Vegetables yeah but fruit and meat clearly No.
250g of fruit is recommended per day. Thats not much. Any more than that and your intake of simple sugars is too high.
Calorie intake more than likely as well.
Most people in western countries eat too much too much meat and too little pulses, grains, nuts etc. which are far better sources of proteins and fats.
Look at the roman gladiators. They had a vegetarian diet not without reason.

Sugar is mostly a problem because we tend to eat it in refined form. But it's becoming clear that just counting macronutrients only tells half the story since the way you ingest them matters. So eating whole fruit where the sugars are still locked up in their original matrix has a significantly different effect from eating them as juice, smoothies, or refined sugars.

When eating 'whole foods' / sticking to a 'just meat, fruit and protein' diet calories are essentially a non-issue since you're pretty much left with a low-carb diet.

'Dietary recommendations' from government organisations I find hard to take serious given that they are usually at least 10 years behind the science, vary wildly from country to country, are often influenced by lobby groups and have become more and more influenced by sustainability / ideological motivations.

The major health concern with meat - and why you often see red meat having some issues in statistics analysis - is the usage of nitrites in processed meats. But there's plenty of alternatives there (and I'm really hoping EU gets their act together on this sooner or later). You can argue sustainability, but you have to distinguish health concerns from sustainability concerns.

And if anything, eating too many grains is exactly what leads to the carb-heavy diet that's the main culprit for the epidemic rise in diabetes we've seen in the last couple of decades (although sugar likely deserves more of the blame).
From a sustainability perspective most of the nuts are actually worse in a lot of factors than poultry.

The diet of combat slaves in the classical era was most likely determined simply by cost. Meat was expensive.
But if you want to go down the historical route; I've seen plenty of reserach comparing hunter gatherers (who had a lot more meat in their diet) to early agricultural populations, who found that the former actually scored better on a lot of health factors than the latter.

Though at the end of the day anything we say / know now about diets is rudimentary at best. There's been barely any proper experimental research (for ethical reasons).

 

[MarcelNL]

read Michael Pollen, I'm not a fanboy but what he says makes very much sense and is more and more backed by science plus that it's written in a way most folks will understand...

processed food is the biggest culprit...stay away from food that your granny would not recognize

 

[Jovidah]

read Michael Pollen, I'm not a fanboy but what he says makes very much sense and is more and more backed by science plus that it's written in a way most folks will understand...

processed food is the biggest culprit...stay away from food that your granny would not recognize

That's also one of my concerns with how the shift from meat to less meat seems to happen here. If you look in the supermarkets what's being promoted as meat alternatives is mostly highly processed artificial crap. A lot of the 'old school' vegans and vegetarians are quite healthy largely because they eat a fairly junk-free diet. But if you're just going to replace meat with meat-free junk I'm not sure that's going to hold up.

 

[Matt Jacobs]

I did an all plant diet a few years ago. I lost weight like you wouldnt believe, I think just under 60lbs. The problem is the protein is so low I lost a ton of muscle mass. Extra plants is great but I dont think weight loss in itself is a good guide. I recently gained 10lbs but I am thinner because I put on a ton of muscle and feel healthier than I did at the extreme low weight.

 

[mengwong]

Reducing protein intake during illness makes sense to me because it should trigger autophagy and general cleanup. Resuming meat upon recovery is something everyone has an opinion about so I won’t open that can of worms now.

 

[MarcelNL]

not eating for a good amount of hours per day is also a great precaution and helps autofagy to keep going...

Problem is, we eat way too much for the exercise we get and our brain loves the starch/grease/sugar/salt combo most processed foods seem to be made of

 

[mengwong]

Some people avoid eating for 24 hours a day, for several days…

I want to share the best writing I’ve ever come across on this subject: HarpersMagazine-2012-03-0083829 on fasting - starving your way to vigor.pdf

 

[coxhaus]

It is not all colds and flu. My wife thought she had a mild cold and it turned out to be covid. You might want to test. She had a stuffy head for a couple of days. She did not lose her taste or smell.

 

[MarcelNL]

Covid is for sure rustling up our immuns system for a couple of reasons....

BTW; I find that while avoiding processed (let alone ultra processed food) takes a while to get accustomed to it does have quite an impact on the very subjective feeling of general well being.

Similar to cutting down high glyceamic index food...

 

[Naftoor]

Sugar is mostly a problem because we tend to eat it in refined form. But it's becoming clear that just counting macronutrients only tells half the story since the way you ingest them matters. So eating whole fruit where the sugars are still locked up in their original matrix has a significantly different effect from eating them as juice, smoothies, or refined sugars.

When eating 'whole foods' / sticking to a 'just meat, fruit and protein' diet calories are essentially a non-issue since you're pretty much left with a low-carb diet.

'Dietary recommendations' from government organisations I find hard to take serious given that they are usually at least 10 years behind the science, vary wildly from country to country, are often influenced by lobby groups and have become more and more influenced by sustainability / ideological motivations.

The major health concern with meat - and why you often see red meat having some issues in statistics analysis - is the usage of nitrites in processed meats. But there's plenty of alternatives there (and I'm really hoping EU gets their act together on this sooner or later). You can argue sustainability, but you have to distinguish health concerns from sustainability concerns.

And if anything, eating too many grains is exactly what leads to the carb-heavy diet that's the main culprit for the epidemic rise in diabetes we've seen in the last couple of decades (although sugar likely deserves more of the blame).
From a sustainability perspective most of the nuts are actually worse in a lot of factors than poultry.

The diet of combat slaves in the classical era was most likely determined simply by cost. Meat was expensive.
But if you want to go down the historical route; I've seen plenty of reserach comparing hunter gatherers (who had a lot more meat in their diet) to early agricultural populations, who found that the former actually scored better on a lot of health factors than the latter.

Though at the end of the day anything we say / know now about diets is rudimentary at best. There's been barely any proper experimental research (for ethical reasons).

not eating for a good amount of hours per day is also a great precaution and helps autofagy to keep going...

Problem is, we eat way too much for the exercise we get and our brain loves the starch/grease/sugar/salt combo most processed foods seem to be made of

So much agree with both of these.

I’ve done carnivore, paleo, keto, calorie counting. Now I’m doing “make a regular dinner, eat what you want and dinner eat until you’re full”. Keeps the day simple, no need to snack. Let’s me use knives. Gives me an excuse to sharpen knives. With that, weight lifting and working my way slowly into light running I’m down 10-12 lbs this year. Nothing special about the dinners, just stuff that looks like it’d be tasty and contains sufficient protein

What I’ve learned through it all: dietary science has as much opinion in it as politics. There’s new papers out every week about it, most drs aren’t read up on current topics and it can be tough determining what from the new stuff has a large enough sample size to be useful in life. Nutritionists are the worst of the bunch. As others said, have to find what works for you. I have a friend who’s been vegetarian beyond 1-2 cheat days a year where he’ll have a steak, and it’s great for him. The idea of more then a day a week meatless is enough for me to walk into the sun. You can find health either direction but the old adage of moderation is key is, as I’m learning in my rapidly approaching old age, the proverbial key to the matter. Processed stuff is designed to make you keep eating, and I think for many people, they would be surprised at how fast they actually drop weight once they find an eating pattern and diet style that works for them.

As for vegetables? I love them as ingredients, I can’t do raw vegetables for whatever reason, but I’ll eat pretty much anything roasted and most things grilled.

Only thing I’d say is watch out for the trap of the dirty diet. You see it with keto where people go “I’ll dip pork rinds in cream cheese and it’s keto teehee” , technically true but terrible for you. The convenience foods and fake meats for vegetarians seem to be the equivalent. Highly processed, made to taste addictive. Likely worse for you then actual meat with how much stuff they put into it. If you want to go vegetarian, look to cultures that have been doing it for hundreds or thousands of years, they’ve definitely figured out the nutrition part and how to keep the diet interesting

 

[boomchakabowwow]

i am not going vegetarian. haha..

i think my plate needs to be 50% veg, 25% meat, and 25% white rice.

 

[rickbern]

I’m not vegetarian at all, but nobody loves and respects vegetables that much more than me. I try to put vegetables and grains at the center of most meals.

I read this book way back in the early seventies, it had a profound impact on me and got me to take up cooking for myself.

I’m not recommending this as a diet to follow but it’s interesting to look back closer to the beginning of the movement. Kind of a culinary Hubble telescope.

PDFs of it may be floating around

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diet_for_a_Small_Planet

 

[M1k3]

For my wife and I, the easiest changes that made a big difference for us, was putting vegetables as the "star" and meat as a side, something starchy as a side at times also (I'm a sucker for risotto and pasta). Or a vegetable side.

And cutting out processed, premade, prepackaged stuff. And soda.

 

[daddy yo yo]

So many great recommendations. Separating proteins from carbs is also a great thing for me. And I have made good experience with following Traditional Chinese Medicine recommendations when it comes to eating (no dairy products, no raw fruits and veggies after 14:00, warm breakfast, and so much more). I have made that experience when my ex-wife had to follow a strict TCM-diet for health reasons. I was the chef at home and wanted to eat the same (aka did not want to cook 2 separate meals). Before that I had always thought my body can take everything and my digestion works fine. Well, I learned a lot. Just because you’re used to smth that doesn’t mean that this is fine…

 

[Jovidah]

Some people avoid eating for 24 hours a day, for several days…

I want to share the best writing I’ve ever come across on this subject: HarpersMagazine-2012-03-0083829 on fasting - starving your way to vigor.pdf

Okay it was a looong read...but definitly an interesting one. A lot of things mentioned it resonates with my own experiences (never did longer fasting, but used to do some extreme sports in the past and had health issues that also led to prolonged calory deficits). It also brings up one issue that a lot of people struggle with in diets though: the tendency to have your weight bounce back in no time. I'd be really curious to see how he'd compare the experience of doing intermittent fasting (like eating every other day). Maybe this is why it's more popular?

I might give the intermittent fasting thing a go myself; if anything my experience has been that following the traditional 'make sure you eat breakfast and 3 meals a day' is an almost guaranteed way for me to feel a lot worse.

 

[Jovidah]

I’ve done carnivore, paleo, keto, calorie counting. Now I’m doing “make a regular dinner, eat what you want and dinner eat until you’re full”. Keeps the day simple, no need to snack. Let’s me use knives. Gives me an excuse to sharpen knives. With that, weight lifting and working my way slowly into light running I’m down 10-12 lbs this year. Nothing special about the dinners, just stuff that looks like it’d be tasty and contains sufficient protein

If you're remotely physically able, simply being more active is by far the most easy way to 'diet' / lose weight. When I still did a lot of sports it was outright silly how much I could get away with while still holding a perfect figure. It also reduces issues related to your body tuning down its metabolism in response to a diminished calory intake.

What I’ve learned through it all: dietary science has as much opinion in it as politics. There’s new papers out every week about it, most drs aren’t read up on current topics and it can be tough determining what from the new stuff has a large enough sample size to be useful in life. Nutritionists are the worst of the bunch. As others said, have to find what works for you. I have a friend who’s been vegetarian beyond 1-2 cheat days a year where he’ll have a steak, and it’s great for him. The idea of more then a day a week meatless is enough for me to walk into the sun. You can find health either direction but the old adage of moderation is key is, as I’m learning in my rapidly approaching old age, the proverbial key to the matter. Processed stuff is designed to make you keep eating, and I think for many people, they would be surprised at how fast they actually drop weight once they find an eating pattern and diet style that works for them.

I've had similar experiences. Dietary science in general is problematic since it's so hard to do proper research (long timelines, inability to do experimental research, interaction effects / not all bodies necessarily responding equally), but it really doesn't help when it seems like most doctors / government advice and even what you hear from dieticians is often 10-15 years behind the cutting edge of the science.
What's sad is that if you dive into it, a lot of the nutrition advice was always built on really dodgy research with severe limitations. Many people's lives have been impacted negatively by slavishly trying to follow what often ended up being bad advice. But figuring out 'what works for you' can really take years.

 

[Jovidah]

I’m not vegetarian at all, but nobody loves and respects vegetables that much more than me. I try to put vegetables and grains at the center of most meals.

I read this book way back in the early seventies, it had a profound impact on me and got me to take up cooking for myself.

I’m not recommending this as a diet to follow but it’s interesting to look back closer to the beginning of the movement. Kind of a culinary Hubble telescope.

PDFs of it may be floating around

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diet_for_a_Small_Planet

Not to nitpick too much (because as you said it's mostly interesting as a historical document), but if you look at the 20th century, famines - just like most food production - were always local, and not necessarily a result of 'choosing the wrong diet'; they were generally a result of 'local circumstances', usually due to a sudden shock to the system causing either logistics, productions or stockpiles to collapse all of a sudden..And circumstances usually being one of 3 options: war / armed conflict, natural disasters, or massive government mismanagement (sometimes intentional).
If you look at a global level there would usually be enough... since up until now it has always been an issue of allocation / distribution, but not necessarily an absolute shortage.
Though admittedly Malthusian catastrophe is a still a potential scenario in the future (and even regardless of what diet people choose, since after all a change of diet might increase carrying capacity of the earth, but not until infinity).

 

[rickbern]

Not to nitpick too much (because as you said it's mostly interesting as a historical document), but if you look at the 20th century, famines - just like most food production - were always local, and not necessarily a result of 'choosing the wrong diet'; they were generally a result of 'local circumstances', usually due to a sudden shock to the system causing either logistics, productions or stockpiles to collapse all of a sudden..And circumstances usually being one of 3 options: war / armed conflict, natural disasters, or massive government mismanagement (sometimes intentional).
If you look at a global level there would usually be enough... since up until now it has always been an issue of allocation / distribution, but not necessarily an absolute shortage.
Though admittedly Malthusian catastrophe is a still a potential scenario in the future (and even regardless of what diet people choose, since after all a change of diet might increase carrying capacity of the earth, but not until infinity).

There’s a tremendous cost associated with that meatball on your plate. Please note, I am an omnivore. I try to put vegetables at the center of my meal but I don’t always succeed. This book did, though, early on at least expose me to the possibility of there being another way, and I think that was a valuable lesson to learn.

This little fact from the attached webpage really caught my eye:
82% of the world's starving children live in countries where food is fed to animals in livestock and then sold to wealthier and developed countries.

https://www.colorado.edu/ecenter/20...it-animal-agriculture-industry-and-zero-waste

 

[blokey]

There’s a tremendous cost associated with that meatball on your plate. Please note, I am an omnivore. I try to put vegetables at the center of my meal but I don’t always succeed. This book did, though, early on at least expose me to the possibility of there being another way, and I think that was a valuable lesson to learn.

This little fact from the attached webpage really caught my eye:
82% of the world's starving children live in countries where food is fed to animals in livestock and then sold to wealthier and developed countries.

https://www.colorado.edu/ecenter/20...it-animal-agriculture-industry-and-zero-waste

While I do support a plant centered diet, I need a citation for that number, academic search engine doesn't come up with anything.

 

[Jovidah]

There’s a tremendous cost associated with that meatball on your plate. Please note, I am an omnivore. I try to put vegetables at the center of my meal but I don’t always succeed. This book did, though, early on at least expose me to the possibility of there being another way, and I think that was a valuable lesson to learn.

This little fact from the attached webpage really caught my eye:
82% of the world's starving children live in countries where food is fed to animals in livestock and then sold to wealthier and developed countries.

https://www.colorado.edu/ecenter/20...it-animal-agriculture-industry-and-zero-waste

While I won't deny there's a cost to meat production, the '82% of world's starving children' part (which the article says is a 'fact' from the Cowspiracy documentary) sounds like complete and utter rubbish to me. There's virtually no overlap between the food / fodder / livestock exporters and the countries with food insecurity. And again, if you look at the current list of countries struggling with food insecurity they're almost all in the categories I mentioned above; war / natural disasters / government failure (or outright state collapse).

Historically there are a handful of cases of countries exporting food during a famine, but those are really the exception, and only found in totalitarian regimes as a deliberate policy choice (like USSR exporting grain during the holodomor, China exporting grain during 1959-1961 famine while insisting it didn't require food aid).

In other cases where this happens 'statistically' it's usualy a result of civil strife; for example you can find food insecurity in conflict-affected parts of the country while other more stable / safer areas of the country are functioning normally. But changing diets in the safer parts of the country does nothing to improve the situation in the more conflict-affected areas, especially since a lot of the time the starvation is intentional and a result of deliberate policy (Sudan trying to starve South Sudan, Ethiopia trying to starve Tigray, etc.)

Their number just doesn't make any sense.

 

[rickbern]

Are you arguing with a particular statistic or the idea that animal husbandry carries an enormous environmental impact? If you disagree with the stat but accept the concept, I can understand that. If a suspicious statistic invalidates the entire concept I put forward, I’m not so quick to buy that.

For forms sake, I decided to look at the exports of Somalia, where lots of kids are at risk from food insecurity.

https://www.nationsencyclopedia.com/Africa/Somalia-FOREIGN-TRADE.html
And from the UN
https://news.un.org/en/story/2022/06/1119862

 

[MarcelNL]

I won't argue that the Horn of Africa does not suffer from Hunger, and that malnutrition is a cause and contributor to child death. I do question the causal relation you put forward, perhaps this page can help looking at things in a broader perspective.

https://borgenproject.org/child-mor...eases, polio,child mortality rate in Somalia.

 

[Jovidah]

Are you arguing with a particular statistic or the idea that animal husbandry carries an enormous environmental impact? If you disagree with the stat but accept the concept, I can understand that. If a suspicious statistic invalidates the entire concept I put forward, I’m not so quick to buy that.

For forms sake, I decided to look at the exports of Somalia, where lots of kids are at risk from food insecurity.

https://www.nationsencyclopedia.com/Africa/Somalia-FOREIGN-TRADE.html
And from the UN
https://news.un.org/en/story/2022/06/1119862

I'm argueing against the link that's being drawn between animal husbandry and starvation / hunger. And especially against the 'fact' from your later link (the 82% of the world's starving children live in countries where food is fed to animals in livestock and then sold to wealthier and developed countries' part).

I won't go against there being a significant environmental impact (although a lot of caveats apply there as well, but that discussion has been had here several times already), but that's a far cry from having a causal link to food insecurity. While this scenario is hypothetically possible in a far distant future, we're still quite some billions of extra population away from such a Malthusian catastrophe-level of population.

Specifically the case of Somalia is a really bad example to use to make your point since:

-It's essentialy 3 countries; Somaliland, Puntland (both de facto independent but unrecognized as such) and the rest of Somalia. So it's likely the animals are growing in the north (or for example in Ethiopia) and getting exported from there, while the south is starving (where Al Shabaab is active).

-In countries of economical collapse this can be a sad reality; whatever a farmer doesn't use for their own subsistence gets sold on the open market, and if there's no social welfare system or almost no state at all it will get sold abroad rather than getting donated within the country. If the whole world was vegetarian you'd still see the same thing happening, just with different types of food. Especially when abundance and shortage happen in different parts of the country.

-In Somalia the climate and geography is such that pastoralism is the norm. Most areas simply won't support intensive agriculture. In these kind of areas it's not a choice between herding animals or agriculture, it's a choice between herding animals and nothing. The same is true for some other areas in sub-Saharan Africa.
-The UN article even hints at this; a lot of the problems are a result of droughts that had a significant effect on livestock and their milk production.

But I can guarantee you, kids in Somalia are not starving because of European consumers consuming Argentinian beef, fed with Brazilian soy, or Dutch pigs fed with Ukrainian grain.
The only real connection you can draw there is that European demand for fodder (whether it's soy, wheat, corn or whatever) increases demand, thereby driving up prices, which can really create problems for extremely poor countries that are reliant upon the world market for food imports.

But that's a very different claim than was made in article making the 82% claim. And though I won't fault the book too much because it was written a long time ago with the best of intentions, it's rather academical to talk about the impact of diet on global food scarcity when there is no global food scarcity. It's always been local and situational.

People are starving in Tigray not because people eat meat, but because there's been a war going on and the Ethiopian governement has been trying to starve them into submission. People are starving in Yemen not because they're exporting all their camels, but because there's a war going on and other countries are trying to starve them into submission. People are starving in Somalia not because they're selling all their wheat to feed our cows, they're starving because there's been a massive drought killing off a lot of the livestock of the pastoralists that make up like 50% of the population and... yeah here it comes again: there's a war going on.

Fun bonus fact: there's also significant food insecurity in Afghanistan.... and a significant part of their limited arable land is still used for poppy production...

(And sorry if this came across as too much of a lecture. It's just a pet peeve of mine when people or organisations - regardless of how good their intentiosn may be - play a bit fast and loose with the facts, whether out of ignorance or on purpose. There's a very sad but long track history of 'well intended' interventions with bad results' because they were based on flawed premises. You can't solve a problem by manipulating something that isn't a causal factor.)

 

[DitmasPork]

I've been under the weather and it has taken (still taking actually) a long time to get better. in an attempt to mitigate the situation, I amped up "eating healthy". dinner may just be standing around with my wife eating a steamed artichoke, with berries for dessert.. maybe a bowl of beans with kale mixed in. obnoxiously veggie heavy. breakfast is some cut up mango and a banana. I lost 10 lbs in the 4 weeks of being sick.

I am kinda shocked. all bodily functions are firing on all cylinders. I typically cannot sleep when I am sick, so that is a constant struggle, but oddly enough I am feeling kinda better on the insides.

I dont think I have ever eating a balance diet. time to change all that.

my doctor thinks the 3 year social distancing thing cause this years cold/flu to be total asswhuppers.

"obnoxiously veggie heavy"—gasp! Love my veggies—being from a primarily Asian food background, veggies compromised the bulk of my diet growing up.

Yeah, a balanced diet is a good thing. Typically my aim for a meal is 25-25-50—that's 25% meat (limiting meat portions to the size of a card deck), 25% good carbs, 50% plants—of course I don't always hit those numbers, but it's a target. Holidays, special occasions, I just eat what I fancy. There're year's when I explore/eat more meat heavy cookery; but do try to balance things out.

 

[mengwong]

Fasting this week. Next week I will start following your suggestions. Thank you all for the inspirations.