You should not follow keto diet in early 21st century
You should not follow keto diet in early 21st century even if a single thing below applies to you. Let us see how this relates to you.
- You are too busy in life: You have better things to do in life than to understand an obscure diet. Let us not waste your time. Thanks for visiting. Bye bye.
- You cannot give up sugar: You believe that you are born to eat sweets everyday. What is the point of living without eating that Gulab Jamoon or the Halwa after every meal. Yes, you may be right if you can follow this throughout your life without any regrets. Enjoy your life. Bye bye.
- You did not have a close friend or relative who was a victim of the consequences of modern day diet: You were not affected by somebody whose life was suddenly cut short by a kidney failure, heart attack or cancer. But wait, how do you even know whether somebody had any of these diseases due to modern day diet? May be you are right. Bye bye then.
- You feel perfectly normal after your modern day meal: You have been tasting Idli-Sambar, the Masala Dosa, the Kerala Parotta or the white bread-Jam for years and had no issues. You believe that the modern day diet does not affect everybody. In fact if somebody is not affected for years after eating something, it may not be the cause of anything bad. You must be right. Bye bye.
None of the above apply to you or at least one of the above apply to you, but you are still curious and are ready to invest a bit of your time here. I thank you for that. Let us continue.
When the entire humanity is suffering with something, it will have something to do with the human biases. This post is not about a diet. This is about Human Psychology.
When the world was populated by Hunter-Gatherers just 12,000 years ago, humans' life was very resilient. Humans were not bothered about growing their clan fast to conquer the entire world. They lived in smaller groups. Everybody knew something about everything. Specialization, if it was there, was not very deep.
Today's human world is completely different. We are very efficient in everything. Every industry is specialized. Every industry including the food industry is large and efficient. We are supporting 7+ billion people with a small fraction of people generating the food for everybody. All this became possible after we moved to agriculture and the, largely carbohydrates based, diet we follow today. In some sense we can be proud of this. However, there are significant consequences to this.
The primary reason this has spread across humans is that the larger consequences are not seen for years or even decades in a human's life. Human's are grappling with Diabetes, Heart diseases, Kidney failures, liver failures, Cancer, Alzheimer's and many more which probably would not have happened to young people before agriculture. None of us might be affected by these diseases in the short term.
Was it your choice ever:
You are born. You are sent to school. With good intentions, your parents and the society make sure that you eat three big meals a day and snacks in between. And what you eat for breakfast, lunch, dinner and for snacks are very well pushed into your mind before you can form your own opinions. Then you become busy in making a living. You get married and are blessed with kids and manage your family. By the time you are in your 40s or 50s is when you may face any of these diseases. Does the society give you a solution immediately. Nope, not at all. You even see the corporate big shots and politicians suffer with these diseases. Doesn't matter if they are billionaires.
You have to invest your time, You have to become a pioneer:
But wait, what is the solution? Even if I assume that the diet is the main cause of these diseases, there are tens of hundreds of varied advises and recommended diets being marketed. How am I to figure out what works for me. Unfortunately no big shot, no authority will come and give you the red pill. At least for a few years or may be for a few decades. One option is you can follow status quo as you do not want to take any risk in life. Just doing what the majority of the world does. Or you can become a pioneer. Once you are ready, there will be many people suggesting many different diets. I am suggesting the ketogenic diet. But this is only one of the few hundreds. You have to invest your time. May be a few months. You have to do your own research. You have to first consciously convince yourself that you have found the right thing. Then you have to fight your habits. You have to understand that you are addicted to carbohydrates. The entire world is addicted to carbohydrates. Humans believed that smoking is good for health. Doctors recommended smoking to everybody in the last century. It took a few decades for the pioneers to prove that smoking has its ugly consequences. The same thing will happen to carbohydrates.
At most there may be a few million people in the entire world following keto diet today. Assuming that this prevents the modern day diseases I discussed here and this will be the red pill, this has to spread across all the 7000+ million people. This may take a few decades before you know that this is the new normal. So you either become a pioneer now or follow the majority till it hits you. Either ways, do it whole heartedly.
External hurdles:
Convincing yourself is only the first step. If you decide to follow the keto diet, others will vehemently oppose you. Your family members will be afraid. You have to invest a few months or years to find ways to prepare tasty food. But all these are bigger problems to fight with only if you are not internally convinced.
Who will help you:
You can check the videos of doctor "Eric Berg" in youtube who has posted more than 1500 videos on this. Tamil people can also check videos of doctor "Arun Kumar" who has started posting videos on this. There are hundreds of books and videos on the topic. Also thousands of recipe videos are available. You only need to be open minded enough and not busy enough in life to explore these. The billionaires do not have such freedom.
My story so far:
I have been successfully following the keto diet for the last 3 years. I am doing one meal a day for the last 1.5 years. I eat my only meal at around 5.30 pm everyday. Also I do 3 day fasting once in 3 months. You can read my first post "Do we really understand how Carbohydrates affect our health?" and the second post "Indian Style Ketogenic diet" if you have the interest and time. Nothing much has changed in terms of what I eat. I just removed curd and started having more butter in the last one year. I have been getting my blood tested every 6 months. You can find the most important parameters tracked here.
Reach out to me for any queries you have on this. All the best.
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