How to ditch diets forever

How to ditch diets forever

There's a simple diet hack nobody talks about...

Forget about keto, carnivore, paleo, or any other dietary dogma that you’ve heard about.

The basis of my philosophy on health is flexibility & resilience.

And that includes metabolic flexibility.

Metabolic flexibility is the ability for your mitochondria to use any substrate as fuel - carbs, fat & turning protein into fuel.

From a physiological perspective, there is no “best diet”. Your body wants to use the best available fuel source.

In pre-industrial times, humans were metabolically flexible by necessity. Some days there was plenty of food, and other days there wasn’t enough to go around.

Metabolic flexibility allowed people to go days without eating and feel fine. We are still human - our bodies are designed to use the right amount of fuel, depending on the situation.

But only if it’s set up right.

Metabolic flexibility benefits are similar to intermittent fasting and keto benefits:

• sustained energy

• fewer blood sugar roller coasters

• fewer cravings

• and improved fat-burning

When you’re metabolically flexible, your body doesn’t have to keep seeking food. Instead, your body is able to burn whatever fuel is available, seamlessly shifting from one fuel source to another - without you even noticing.

A lot of things disrupt metabolic flexibility - and can actually lead to metabolic inflexibility - including modern dietary patterns and metabolic disorders like insulin resistance or type 2 diabetes.

The quickest ways to achieve metabolic flexibility are through fasting & cyclical ketosis. But many people find this change difficult, and so they don’t work for everyone.

So I encourage a process of adaptable eating and experimentation where you work out what works best for you, influenced by your genetics.

From a nutritional standpoint, I may use something like paleo or autoimmune paleo as a basis for a client in the beginning.

But that doesn’t necessarily mean we always have to stick to it rigidly.

In fact, I have used different dietary frameworks as a tool to teach the correct eating habits and flexible approach to food.

Then once the nutritional base is there and you understand how foods work for you, you can start to be more flexible and eat pizza, drink alcohol, etc.

Cheat meals or regular boozing without solid nutrition habits and behaviours will always end badly.

So how might this way of eating look?

Let’s say you’re a busy COO who works until 9PM every night to build a legacy for your family and become financially independent.

With that level of stress, an approach like intermittent fasting probably is not right for you.

Fasting places stress on the body due to calorie restriction. Therefore, adding more stress to someone who’s already in a stressed state will further negatively impact their health.

So we work on providing the flexibility within a framework that allows you to make appropriate eating decisions.

You may eat only certain types of carbohydrates, e.g. sweet potato and butternut squash, because they give you sustainable energy, no bloating or gas, and help you feel balanced.

So there’s no confusion about what to eat when you go out – you already know.

Let’s also say that you never eat breakfast because you’re not hungry in the morning.

Not an issue. If you only eat two meals a day, then you make sure those two meals are full of the right nutrients and help you with your goals – whether that’s fat loss, body composition, improved energy, or all three.

Even if you’ve had a stressful day at work, but have no meals prepared (life happens), having a framework of knowing what foods to eat, even if you have to get a takeout, takes all the pressure off you.

So you don’t always have to be dogmatic about meal frequency, calories, macros, etc.

You simply need to develop a flexible framework that fits within the confines of your lifestyle challenges.

There are no shortcut answers here.

It comes down to personal experimentation to figure out what foods and approaches work best for you.

So what to do?

You can follow any approach to begin with to help you develop a framework, such as keto, paleo, intermittent fasting, etc.

But always remember that the idea is to form the basis of a diet, and gain more clarity on what works for YOU.

An adaptable, experimental mindset is the key. I encourage you to be flexible rather than dogmatic, like so many people are with dieting.

This approach will help you cut through all the BS out there, so you’ll no longer be confused about what nutrition is right for you.

So many gurus argue about the ‘best diet.’

But if you practice the principles of metabolic flexibility, 10 times out of 10, things will work out from a health and energy perspective.

You can make massive changes to the way you look and feel through lifestyle changes alone.

But comprehensive blood and urine testing allows us to be surgically precise about any nutritional and lifestyle changes we make.

>>> Click here to get closer to great health

To your best health,

Dr Kpakpo Acquaye