One of the reasons I’m doing what I’m doing – which is mostly TCD/Peat these days – is because IF, keto and carnivore didn’t work for me. You can read about my journey in a post I did. I never wanted to ‘diet’ even when doing keto I didn’t consider it a diet as it was something I was happy to commit to “forever’ if needed. I actually felt great on it. And my brain power was great. But I wasn’t losing fat or weight. At all. I followed so many keto podcasts and influencers and read all the troubleshooting guides.

I dropped the nuts, I dropped keto treats I would bake myself, I dropped the fat (at that point it was probably just low carb as I only really did meat/eggs + low carb vegetables and berries) and just had whatever came with the meat. I even did the super high protein thing with low fat (as I wasn’t having carbs anyway).

I have a sauna, I have a red light thing… I go hiking, I have an Oura ring, I take various supplements.

But the weight (and more importantly fat) wouldn’t melt off.

What did work for weight and fat loss was carnivore… until it didn’t. Strict steak and eggs worked… but that wasn’t something I wanted to sustain in the long term. And it was only when I added pork, duck and other meats that it stopped working and I started gaining weight again. Now I think it could have been the PUFAs but at the time I just didn’t understand. And then I came across a tweet talking about “The Croissant Diet”! And down a rabbit hole I went.

Originally I wanted to do Carnivore TCD. Basically carnivore diet + stearic acid and maybe add in cacao butter. But then one day I went hiking with a friend who heard I was on the Croissant Diet and of course… bought me a croissant!

I’m on this journey to work out the key to unlocking fat loss. And improve/maintain my health.

What’s working? I’m not sure! But one thing to note so far is that carbs aren’t the culprit for weight gain or weight loss. At least not for me! And PUFAs now affect me in a negative way but in the form of a headache. But by dropping the PUFAs totally it’s not like I’ve lost a tonne of fat.

What I know hasn’t worked for me is keto, intermittent fasting and fasting generally.

Keto – I felt great but limited fat loss beyond the first few kilos (which I gained back during when I was still keto’ing hard!)

Intermittent fasting – I tried OMAD. I tried 2MAD. I tried 5:2. Actually 5:2 (5 days of eating and 2 days of fasting or low calorie days) I did first and for about 1.5 years! And I was superstrict at the end and on my fasting days I would fast except for having cups of tea and coffee (no sugar of course!) and I would fast from dinner to lunch… the following day so effectively skip 4 meals or do a 36 hour fast for 2 days a week… for many months (I assume it was around 12 months as I started my 5:2 with <500 calories on my ‘fasting’ days.) I would drop 1kg on fast days but then gain it back on the non fasting days. And I wouldn’t say I was making up the calories on the days I could eat but I did eat whatever I wanted. I never really ate a lot of junk food or ultra processed food either…

So join me on my experiments on what may or may not work for weight loss. I have saved a number of snippets of how to lose weight/fat according to some Peaty people and will put together a series of blog posts discussing them and what experiments I will do on that front!