That Moment When 6: Happy Trails to TMW! I'll Hope to See You Soon!

People online who swing from raw vegan to eating nothing but meat are playing the 21st century game of doing what everyone in the past KNEW to be bullshit, and acting as though it’s somehow some profound and higher wisdom, and just really ping-ponging backwards and forwards between imbalances, and fighting the fires lit by their previous stupidity.

Example: my nan, “Don’t eat between meals, it’ll spoil your appetite.”

Waaaah that’s wrong you anti-snack bigot! We’re going to graze, graze, graze, because it’s NEW and therefore RIGHT!

What happens?

The entire western world and a fair chunk the rest develops problems which originate in loss of satiety, losing all control of what is an appropriate portion size and the ability to stop eating after having a suitable amount, and no longer finds eating 2 or 3 times a day with nothing in between satisfying.

“oh yeah no but that’s not what happened tho.”

Sorry, but yes - it is.

Eliminating animal fat while promoting snacking broke the satiety response which protected against pathological overeating in millions of people. :man_shrugging:

Ancel Keys, who originated the war on fat, has killed and crippled more people than (insert your favourite 20th century tyrant).

And almost all those people went through various personal hells of self-hate, shaming themselves and being shamed, and yet when they reached out for help they were pushed into worse versions of the very behaviours which break satiety.

The excesses above were totally shunned, that’s one main difference. It’s pretty important when you start to implement it, because it’s natural to want to go to some excess to try and balance out the previous excesses (keto after vegan, raw after SAD, bulletproof coffee instead of smoothies, etc).

The individual things people ate depended on income, sex, activity levels in job (a housemaid scrubbing floors all day 6 days a week would eat more than an elderly male clerk), day of the week (people usually had something special at the weekend or on Sundays), etc.

Specifics:

The basics I can recall from my own family’s older generation and from what I have read were:

  • to avoid all excesses & imbalances, period - no all-veg or all-meat or all-fat bullshit, nothing with like 50g+ “grassfed butter” etc either, just because something’s good doesn’t mean more is better

  • eat 2 veg in moderate amounts with any cooked meal, which would usually have some meat or fish in it, or eggs

  • eat 2 - 3 times a day, with at least 4 - 5 hours gap, and nothing in between

  • eat butter or some other kind of animal fat with any starch (potatoes or bread, rice wasn’t really used much except as a pudding)

  • eat something sweet afterwards, this is a known cravings-killer to eat something when already satiated by a balanced meal, likewise you can induce cravings for a food by eating it when hungry, so the “dessert” tradition that was considered dated was actually a way of countering our evolutionary preference for sweetness :roll_eyes:

  • don’t aim for bulk which stretches your stomach, and causes a spiralling expectation around what the body needs. Heaping your plate was always frowned upon.

Skipping breakfast is fine if you feel like it but eating animal fat with a starch (bacon and egg with tomatoes and fried bread, or 2 boiled eggs with 2 slices buttered toast, or oatmeal with cream) was the norm. I don’t recommend wheat but again this is because it’s been so fucked with to increase proteins, and because we’re all trying to heal from some very fucked-up things these days.

Cooking the main meal from scratch (actual veg and meats, butter, lard) and not buying food products was the norm, frozen and tinned veg that haven’t been treated or coated seem reasonably okay (frozen veg is often fresher, and tinned veg sometimes has more available nutrients, like tinned tomatoes and carrots).

Pasta, pulses, fruit, and fruit juices and constant sweet drinks were not common, nor was constantly sipping water, unless doing manual work and breaking a sweat from that.

The main thing was smallish amounts of as much variety as possible, seasonal veg for example (which probably also reduced intolerances, which bear a resemblance to becoming sensitised to chemicals through repeated exposure), varying your protein sources (meat, eggs, fish, poultry) and nothing in between meals.

:rofl: Yeah just trying to make sense of what I remember and have read, that site I linked and this are worth perusing: https://www.westonaprice.org/

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