I’ve been slowly removing salt, meats, and sugar from my diet. It’s all going great. It’s cheaper, cleaner, and healthier. But I am struggling against milk. It pairs with way coffee so well…

so i guess it's time for coffee to go

KIELBASA.

Also bacon, pastrami, brisket, short ribs, bacon, steak, carnitas, chicken, and black pudding.

Mostly kielbasa, though.

You need Milk for Calcium. So, don't need to stop it completely. Just regulate the levels

Removing salt and meats is not "healthy".

You need salt to regulate water absorption, and you need colagen for joint and skin health. Animal protein is also better than plant protein and plant based fats are some of the worst fats except for olive oil.

Have a healthy balanced diet, don't remove shit at random

You also need salt for heart and muscle function. You can cause an arrhythmia if your levels are too low.

@spongessuck @hazarth

salt is a generic term.

Table salt [NaCl] - that one we get plenty with food. If my memory serves well, we need ~1tsp [5g] daily. In total. We usually get that, if not more, from veggies, shooms, meats and whatever we shove down the shaft. No need to add more, unless you really want to increase blood's osmotic pressure to draw more liquid into the system, ie hypertensia. Do that daily and you have a chronic version of it.

As for striped, striped myocardium and smooth muscles - sodium is not the only crucial mineral. Throw potasium and magnesium into the mix as well. Also, you prolly don't want anaemia, so there goes a dependency on iron [very poor % absorbed from GIT, so we need plenty of it] and B12 [haemoglobin]. And we prolly wang to have immunity, so here come all the antioxidants [fat-sol vitamins].

Bottom line, more mineral-and-vitamin-rich veggies and shrooms, yeast, no additional junk and you should be peachy

Back when I was seriously into fasting, I didn't have a proper meal in 3 - 4 months. Having a cup of soup [liquid part] every other day for 5 days, and smth tasty on the weekend. That's all.

To stay healthy I was having a handful of nuts, a bar of hematogen [basically blood; for Fe] a bottle of kvass [for B group], tge most mineral-rich water I could find in the shops [Vytautas, 2-3l daily] and a set of mineral supplements, focused on Mg and Ca.
2 months in I was having my blood tested for some infection. I was worried I'll get a lecture from the doc I can't be doing this to my body. When the results came in, basically the doc said one would have to search really hard to find someone with bloodwork _this_ good.

I lost ~35-40kg in 3 months, felt incredibly energetic and healthy. I was eating very little and only once every day, drinking a LOT of water and stayed super healthy and happy.. Until my birthday. She makes superb pastries.

@netikras As far as I'm concerned, any Diet that *requires* supplements is not a healthy diet. It's a fucking lab experiment. If you can have healthy, strong and energetic people on normal balanced diet than there's little reason optimizing your diet beyond that other than it being a hobby or just trying to min-max for whatever reason. The only exception are people with problems and defects that prevents them from living a full healthy life on a standard balanced diet.

But I'd argue that forcing people into that lifestyle, selling it as "healthy" is like forcing coders into using vim or emacs or whatever else selling it as "optimal". Incredible coders exist that use far worse setups. So to put it together, just because you *can* do something, doesn't mean everybody *should*!

I'm just a little bit sick of the vegetarian epidemic, when it's shown times and times again that it can hurt people long term, skin problems, stomach problems, brain fog and others. Screw that noise

@Hazarth let's make a distinction of long-term/permanent AND temporary/fixed-time diet. I feel like we're talking about different things here

@mostr4am That's not what the article says.

"in 675 AD, Emperor Tenmu imposed a ban on the consumption of meat of chicken, cows, dogs, horses, and monkeys, as well as small fry fish between April 1 and September 30 of each year."

...

"However the fact that the ban did not mention deer or wild boar, the two most commonly eaten meats in Japan, suggests that influences other than Buddhist morality helped to shape it."

Not to mention maritime animals were never banned to any significant degree, pretty important too.

So there was a ban for thousand years, but it was only in effect from April to October, and it only applied to a certain subset of meats, not including deer and wild boar, which were eaten commonly in the period.

I agree that one shouldn't be eating meat daily, I did say balanced diet. once a week is fine, and we should all be eating more fish anyway

@netikras Sounds good to me. I was under the impression we're talking about complete and permanent lifestyle change.

@mostr4am me, apparently! I read a lot when it comes to pointless arguments on the internet xD

@thebiochemic I’m not ready to do that just yet
@asgs I get mine from beans and a bunch of vegetables
@Hazarth I’m replacing stuff and it has been working out pretty well. I guess instead of removing I should’ve said “replacing”. I do consume plenty of olive oil, yes.

@Hazarth actually one of my sources for my diet updates is the traditional Okinawan diet. They ate almost no meat, and just a bit of fish.
In my case I combine a lot of different things though.

@netikras fasting and extended fasting definitely has some interesting effects on the body.
The consensus is to eat a Mediterranean diet and yogurt but that may only apply if you also live a Mediterranean lifestyle of not stressing too much and frequently looking off to the seaside.
This isn’t possible for everyone and doesn’t factor in specific goals. There were recent studies over intermittent fasting that showed elevated heart risks, but there are risks from not fasting as well.
Personally I think fasting really can help with your relationship to food. It’s easy to get addicted with the high availability of cheap processed calories.
Fixing that and allowing your body to process out the junk is a big help. And as you alluded to, breaking a fast properly is so important. I imagine I’ve done some damage breaking a few with a feast of beer and burgers.

if I ever even consider quitting coffee even for a second, please just put a bullet in my brain and end me

@jeeper The concept of a "Mediterranean lifestyle" is ambiguous. Depending on which part of the Mediterranean, it could be yachts, coke and whores, the Mafia, dance music and amphetamines, fat tattooed people drinking lager, a permanent war, piracy, people smuggling, or hummus.

Hummus isn't even that healthy.

@jestdotty Nothing wrong with it, I could eat a bucket of it. But I think it's quite calorific.