#5 Diet - Big plate, little plate

Welcome to Men on Fire, a podcast about what it means to be a man.  How you, mate? You're right? Yeah. Good, good, yeah. Hungry? I'm getting a bit hungry too, then. I'm always hungry this time of day. You got some nice beef smoking away over there. Yeah, that should be ready in about 7 hours. So that'll deal with my hunger. So diet. We were going to try and tackle diet today, which  I think it can be controversial because everyone's got those different opinions on things. And also my strong belief is that every human body is different anyway, so it's quite likely that different diets would work for different people.  There's a lot of stuff on social media now, isn't there, about diet and personal trainers saying this diet works, that doesn't work. And yeah, there's a lot of stuff. There's a lot of noise, definitely. I mean, I'm not a diet expert, a nutritionist or something, but I know what works for me. I finally almost 50, worked out how to lose weight myself. And yours is keto, isn't it? Low carbs. And yeah, I've I've worked out, but that doesn't work for everyone. So I know other people who've seen what I do, try and copy it, and it just doesn't work for them. That's okay. Definitely. And again, it depends where you go with it.  I try to look as much as possible at any kind of research that's been done around different diets, but even then, you can read different papers that suggest different things. There's loads of good evidence around keto, certainly for weight loss, but also just for longevity, even mental health, to an extent. I know they use at ketogenic diets for certain types of cancer as well. Now, I think, was an epilepsy. I think that's where it came in from. Okay. And I think for me, I wonder if the one connecting thing about a lot of these sort of diets that get pushed forward is that they just eliminate or lower processed food. Yeah, I was reading something the other to the extent that if you're actually having sugar that is natural, so cane sugar, honey fruit,  it has way less of a spike on your blood sugar levels than, say, stuff that's come from corn syrup or things like that. And I think with Keto.  You could potentially you would you would automatically eliminate a lot of processed food by cutting the carbs, wouldn't you? Yeah, I think, I think I mean, for my you know, I've I've been I care about what I eat, and so much so that when I couldn't afford good meat, I stopped eating it and went vegetarian for 14 years and then started back when I could afford good quality meat. Let it out, it's over, turn the corner. But, yeah, for me, good quality meat now is something I enjoy and I feel good eating. And for me, the keto wasn't necessarily  about just eating the fats and just doing it on a diet where I lost five stone and I've managed to keep that off now, pretty much, which is good for me, it wasn't necessarily about the fats, it was how I felt as well, in myself, in my head. It definitely gave me more of a clarity, which I like, but it had a big effect on my weight and my physicals as well. So you kind of did do it for kind of mental health or just overall well being, not just the weight. And I said to myself, this is it now, once I worked it out, this is how I eat now, not I'm going to reach certain amount of weight and then go back to how I was eating before, because that's not good  for me. I was vegetarian and I ate lots of carbs and I piled on weight, even though it was good quality carbs. A lot of brown rice, brown pasta, own bread  and. But I just piled on the weight through my twenty s, thirty s, early forty s and nobody had ever told me about fats and stuff and how they could be quite fats. And protein for me are quite fulfilling. And it was when somebody said, well, you can run your body on that. You don't need the carbs, the sugars to run your body. And and that was what opened my eyes, really. And  I think people get keto. A bit wrong. Th