I’m sitting on a plane to Cancún, a rare opportunity to read and write without distraction. In the morning I looked through the fridge to make sure nothing would go to spoil, I ate two hard boiled eggs, two pieces of celery, one apple, two peaches, and 500ml of greek yogurt. All that was left were two steaks (about 800g total), which I cooked but didn’t eat. When I came back from yoga I sliced the steaks in strips and put them into a container. At the airport I made a stop at Burger King and got a combo which I filled with most of the steak, and I’m very glad because the portion they served in the flight was absurdly small, I’d be ravenous.

The other day at work I told a co-worker I was experimenting with eating as much healthy food as possible to see if I gained fat. I was at 4,000 cals per day and not yet hitting fat gain. He asked me if I was weighing myself and I said no. He said “what kind of experiment is that if you are not weighing yourself”. I said “well, I’m not interested in weight gain but in fat gain. You guys have seen me eat the last two months, I’ve been eating like a madman but I don’t gain fat!”. He said “yeah you are, but are you measuring your body fat?” and I said “yes, by hand” and he chuckled as if I was doing something stupid. I said “it’s very easy for me to notice fat gain”. I lifted my shirt and pulled the skin around my tummy demonstrating how thin it was. I thought I had hallucinated a face of surprise from everyone present, but as days have passed I see the reaction was genuine, they still inquire how my abs are doing.

Perhaps I’m boasting because I don’t know where I’m going with this, perhaps just to share that my amazement has been validated by my co-workers. I have no interest in creating a formula or prescription to accomplish this. It’s partly genetics (though my siblings have gained significant weight in their forties), partly good eating habits, and partly exercise. I also notice I’ve never seen anyone sweat in yoga as much as I do. Claude said there was nothing to be concerned about, I gave it my bloodwork and it said it was excellent and didn’t look like a 46 year old profile.

I’m also glad to have made my calorie counting exercises with Claude. In my twenties I counted calories for a time. It’s a useful skill in life to know how to balance macros and maximize satiety while keeping calories in check, but to constantly do that and obsess about it is not. One pattern that I’ve noticed recently is that the digital and analog must complement each other by periods. The prescription is not to count calories for the rest of your life, it’s to alternate counting with intuitive eating, to develop a “well informed intuition” about the nutritional content of food.

Also, an important reason why I’m able to do this is because I don’t share the household with other people. When I have access to junk food, I can’t help but eating it, even if it’s not mine! Many times I have woken the next day to apologize for raiding the pantry and eating my roommate’s junk food, I wake up ravenous and seeing only veggies fruit and steak I will go after my roommates cookies and chips.

The diet I eat is paleo-like in its appearance but I would say they have different philosophical underpinnings. At its base, the food pyramid should have the food our prehistoric ancestors ate: meat, greens, veggies, fruit. Nuts must have shells so that they are not easy to eat. Civilization staple crops are the next tier: maize, wheat, rice, potato, cassava are calorie rich and should only be eaten in their crudest form. So bread would have to be super rustic, potatoes roasted or boiled, corn eaten from the cob. Here there’s also early pastoral civilizations with rustic cheese, yogurt and milk. Next tier is… let’s call this “culinary civilization”, when people started preparing food in more convenient and energy dense forms such as cheese, tortillas and bread, and so on. Thus, protein powders are not in my diet even if other people consider it “healthy”. It’s just too convenient to eat and when I have whey powder I tend to have protein shake and also dinner.