Transitioning your body from the Standard American Diet (SAD, if ever there was a more perfect acronym!) to an Anti-Inflammatory Diet can be very confusing. Not because it’s overly complicated (it’s actually VERY simple), but because it’s pretty much the EXACT OPPOSITE of what you’ve been taught about eating for your entire life.
If you’re anything like me, you had “healthy nutrition” crammed into your brain since you were a child.
“Fat is bad for you. Use margarine instead of butter. Egg yolks are bad because cholesterol is bad. Bacon will stop your heart. Milk is healthy for you. Eat lots of whole grains. Only eat lean meat. Avoid salt.”
And, if you’re anything like me, this nutritional “wisdom” made you fat, miserable, and guilt-ridden any time you strayed into “bad” foods.
So it makes perfect sense to fall into many of these old habits when starting on an anti-inflammatory way of eating.
I’m going to break down the most common problems I’ve encountered when starting to eat an ACTUALLY healthy, high fat diet. Hopefully you can learn from my mistakes, and avoid them yourself!
Problem #1: You’re Not Eating Enough Fat!
This is the single most counter-intuitive part of the anti-inflammatory diet. Counter-intuitive because you’ve been taught WRONG, not because your body doesn’t understand it.
Your body CRAVES fat. It wants LOTS of it. This is why you’re drawn to foods like butter, fatty beef, eggs, bacon, chicken legs. These delicious foods are FULL of healthy fat and cholesterol.
And if you’ve read my post “Fat Doesn’t Make You Fat”, you know that every cell in your body is made out of fat, cholesterol, and protein.
As I outlined in “Your Body Doesn’t Need Carbs”, an anti-inflammatory diet should be comprised of 85% FAT, and only about 15% protein.
But all too often, and I made this mistake myself, you latch onto the “low-carb” part of the diet pretty easily, but forget to ADD FAT.
Likely because you’ve heard of low-carb diets before. Atkins. The South Beach Diet. Low carb diets have been around in popular culture for YEARS. But none of them escaped the fear of mean-old, heart-stopping fat.
You stop eating bread. You cut out chips and pasta. You avoid sugar, candy, pastries, soda. All that crap you’ve ALWAYS known is bad for you (plus bread and pasta, which you thought were healthy, even though it’s all just sugar to your body).
But you stick with the rest of the foods you have spent your entire life being told are “healthy”. Salads with chicken breast and light dressing. Lean ground beef and steak. You’re still avoiding butter and animal fat like they’re trying to kill you, because you’ve been told THEY ARE.
As a result, you’re eliminating one source of energy from your body (glucose), but not REPLACING it with an alternate source (ketones from fat). So instead of a high-fat / low-carb diet, you’re eating a high PROTEIN, low ENERGY diet.
And that will make you feel lethargic and miserable.
Solution #1: Eating More Healthy Fat!
Forget what you know about “healthy” food! Start looking at food labels (primarily for meat, which is what your body was designed to eat!), and as a general rule of thumb, try to pick food that has more fat per serving than protein. Preferably MUCH more!
And of course, as close to 0 carbs as possible.
For example, 3 oz of Sirloin Steak has 12g of fat, and 23g of protein. That’s pretty lean for our purposes. We want more fat than protein! (Remember, we’re aiming for 85% fat!)
3 oz of Ribeye steak, on the other hand, has 17g of fat, and 15g of protein. That’s more like it!
Additionally, we want to add even MORE fat to our food during cooking!
Personally, I cook pretty much EVERYTHING I eat now in Butter, Olive Oil, Coconut Oil, or some combination of the three.
For meat and vegetables I use butter and olive oil together. For eggs, butter and coconut oil. Play around and find out what you like!
Problem #2: You’re Getting Sneaky Carbs!
You can probably recognize obvious carbs: bread, sugar, candy, chips, etc. But maybe you DON’T recognize that there are a significant amount of carbs in things you’ve always considered “healthy food”.
Vegetables
Vegetables, for instance, can be surprisingly high in carbs.
Carrots, as an example, have 10g of carbs per 100g serving, and 7g of Net Carbs (Total Carbs minus Fiber Content. For carrots, this is 10g of total carbs, minus 3g of fiber.)
Here are a few common vegetables, broken down by carb content:
*(Vegetable, Total Carbs, Net Carbs)
- Carrots, 10g, 7g
- Brussels Sprouts, 9g, 5g
- Broccoli, 7g, 4g
- Green Beans, 7g, 4g
- Cucumber, 4g, 3g
- Tomato, 4g, 3g
- Lettuce, 3g, 2g
- Celery, 3g, 1g
Vegetables are by no means “unhealthy food”, but as you can see, if you’re not careful you can get a significant number of carbs into your diet by eating too many vegetables.
If you cook your vegetables in healthy fat like butter or olive oil, you can still get the nutrients vegetables have to offer, while allowing the higher fat to trigger your body’s satiation response. Vegetables by themselves don’t exactly make you feel “full”, and this is why. No fat, too many carbs.
Nuts
Nuts can be an excellent snack on an anti-inflammatory diet, but they can also be a significant source of carbs.
Here are a few common nuts, broken down by carb content:
*(Nut, Total Carbs, Net Carbs)
- Cashews, 30g, 27g
- Pistachios, 27g, 16g
- Almonds, 22g, 9g
- Peanuts, 16g, 7g
- Walnuts, 14g, 7g
- Macadamias, 14g, 5g
Nuts can be a great snack, in moderation. But they can easily derail your body from entering ketosis if you don’t limit your intake.
Also, make sure when you buy nuts that you look at the package and make sure they’re not coated with an inflammatory oil! A lot of salted nuts are coated with vegetable oils to help the salt stick. Not good!
And I recommend avoiding peanuts altogether for a variety of reasons.
Fruits
When you’re first getting started on an anti-inflammatory diet, I recommend avoiding fruit altogether. It’s very sweet, full of fructose, and your body really wasn’t designed to consume fruit on a regular basis.
Remember, before modern transportation and agriculture, fruit was only found for a very limited time during the year, and was a rare treat for humans, if they encountered it at all.
If there is an exception, it would be lower-carb berries, in moderation.
Here are a few common fruits, broken down by carb content:
*(Fruit, Total Carbs, Net Carbs)
- Bananas, 23g, 20g
- Apples, 14g, 12g
- Blueberries, 14g, 12g
- Pineapple, 13g, 12g
- Orange, 12g, 10g
- Strawberries, 8g, 6g
- Raspberries, 12g, 5g
- Blackberries, 10g, 5g
Rice, Pasta, and Potatoes
I’m lumping all of these together, because the have a reputation for being relatively “healthy” foods, but on an anti-inflammatory diet, should really be avoided entirely.
Here is the carb content of these common foods:
*(Food, Total Carbs, Net Carbs)
- White Rice, 28g, 28g
- Brown Rice, 26g, 24g
- Pasta, 25g, 25g
- Quinoa, 23g, 20g
- Sweet Potato, 20g, 17g
- Potato, 17g, 15g
Solution #2: Keep it Simple! Focus on the Meat!
It’s easy to fall into the trap of trying to keep your diet recognizable, especially based on years of habit.
There are a lot of “keto recipes” out there that will let you make low carb versions of the food you’re used to eating: Pancakes, burgers, pizza, even fried food.
And while they will often be significantly lower in carbs than most food you’re used to eating, even at 4-5g per serving, it’s all too easy to start consuming more than 50-100g of carbs in a day, which throws your body out of ketosis and misses the entire point of changing your eating habits.
The purest anti-inflammatory diet, and the diet your body EVOLVED to consume, is a carnivore, or all-meat diet.
Now, I understand that this isn’t overly practical for many people. And with the lack of availability, and the significant expense of grass-fed meat, even the meat we consume regularly doesn’t contain many of the vitamins and nutrients our ancestors received from wild game.
But simplicity and health are still attainable on a primarily meat-based diet, and you’ll reap most of the rewards in the process.
My suggestion is that your meals consist of a significant portion of meat, and a small portion of vegetables cooked in healthy fat such as butter or olive oil.
If you do this without exception for a month, the difference it will make in how you look, think, and feel will be more than enough to motivate you to continue. It truly is a life changing, and health saving way of fueling your body.
Problem #3: “Keto Flu” Caused by Low Electrolytes
Many people who don’t know much about the ketogenic diet have still heard about the dreaded “keto flu”. Which is to say, people tend to look for reasons why this incredibly effective new way of eating is doomed to fail, so they don’t even have to try.
What’s worse, the keto flu is also widely misunderstood even by people who DO follow an anti-inflammatory, keto way of eating.
It’s really quite simple:
-
- When you eat carbs, your body becomes inflamed from the effects of the insulin being pumped into your blood, and retains fluid in order to digest the carbs.
- When you STOP eating carbs, your body flushes out that excess fluid and inflammation.
- The inflammation is flushed out primarily through urination, and takes your body’s electrolytes along with it. (Sodium, potassium, and magnesium.)
- This lack of electrolytes is essentially severe dehydration, and can cause headaches, muscle cramps, lethargy, and generally feeling like garbage.
These are the same effects you encounter during an illness that raises your body temperature and makes you sweat, or makes you experience vomiting and diarrhea. Again, due to lack of electrolytes.
When experiencing symptoms like this, people often “rehydrate” by drinking a lot of water. The problem is, normal water contains NONE of these critical electrolytes, and by drinking an excess of water, you will simply urinate more, flushing out even MORE electrolytes.
I’ve done this myself on many occasions. And since figuring it out, I’ve been able to easily avoid these negative effects. Even when I splurge on some carbs and recognize that it will cause a fresh cycle of inflammation.
Solution #3: Mind Your Electrolytes!
You’ve likely been taught to fear adding salt to your food.
“Too much salt is going to give you a heart attack!”
This isn’t entirely accurate. The truth is, when you’re eating a diet that is carb heavy, you’re getting TONS of sodium in your food. So when you shift to eating ACTUAL healthy food, the amount of sodium you’re consuming goes down dramatically.
Now, if you were eating the same meat our ancestors did, from entirely grass fed animals, you’d receive all the sodium, potassium, magnesium, and other critical nutrients you need directly from the meat you consume.
But the vast majority of modern meat comes from feeding lots, where animals are forced to eat an almost purely grain based diet. Wheat, oats, corn. All the stuff that is making YOU fat is making THEM fat. Which is exactly why they do it. Fat animals mean more meat to sell.
Without getting too much down that road, this means that YOU need to ADD SALT to your food.
Nothing crazy, just salt your food as much as you like so it tastes good to you. Don’t be afraid of salt, YOU NEED IT.
Now, this is about an 80% solution, and it worked wonders for me. I didn’t have any “keto flu” symptoms like headache and lack of energy. But I was still having muscle cramps semi-regularly, especially in the middle of the night.
This is the rest of your electrolyte puzzle. Potassium and magnesium.
For potassium, I buy “No Salt”, sometimes called “Nu-Salt”, and add it to my food just like I do regular salt. This “No Salt” is marketed for people who are afraid of REAL salt, as a seasoning that doesn’t have any sodium. (You know, because of the heart attacks? 🙄)
But it’s a GREAT source of potassium, so I add Salt and No Salt to all of my meals! Combined with taking a daily magnesium supplement, my muscle cramps have completely vanished.
… unless I splurge on carbs, and then go through another cycle of flushing the inflammation a couple days later. You’ll recognize these predictable patterns of how your body responds to what it’s fed, and this will all start to click in your mind!
Additionally, you can mix up a simple electrolyte water, which I have made a nearly daily part of my diet. I add a couple teaspoons of lemon juice to water, with a good dash of salt AND “no salt”. Shake it all up, and it’s a great way to keep your body supplied with electrolytes and feeling good!
Conclusion
When starting ANY new diet, there is a learning curve. With an anti-inflammatory diet, your body is simply returning to the natural state it WANTS to exist in. But you’ve been spending most of your life pushing it into a state of stress and inflammation, because you thought it was “healthy”.
Transitioning back to a healthy body is a wonderful experience, and will teach you so much about how you are supposed to feel when you’re TRULY healthy.
By recognizing these 3 common problems, and responding accordingly, you’ll make the transition to a healthy lifestyle and a more satisfying way of eating without ANY of the struggle and grumpiness that typically comes along with a new “diet”.
After all, a life eating bacon, eggs, steak, and butter isn’t exactly a hardship. Not like salads, lean meat, and force calorie deficits! Been there, done that. No thanks.
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