Food 2x2s

Think of food in terms of 2 axes - good and bad for health, and enjoyable or not. Just cut the "bad for health and not enjoyable" quadrant (in my case that has a lot of density).

Since the start of this month, I’ve been on a diet that I’ve myself invented. It’s a “no grain diet”. So no rice, no breads of any kind, no pastas, no cake etc. This, I figured, was the easiest way for me to stay low carb while not cutting down on my overall enjoyment of food.

As long-time readers will know, I’ve had episodes with mild insulin resistance and have worn a CGM a few times in 2022. From that, I’ve got considerable information on what spikes my blood sugar. However, given that I’ve not wanted to go full-bang keto (a close friend keeps going on and off keto - it’s not that sustainable - and his waistline oscillates accordingly), I’ve always tried to “cut carbs in moderation” and that has never worked well. Nothing works in moderation. You’re always inventing excuses for “this one time”.

I think my diet was inspired by some LinkedIn post that I saw from someone who had “gone off all sugars”. I briefly considered it (maybe for half a second) before quickly abandoning it - sugars are way too yummy and enjoyable to get off.

The mistake that most diabetic Indians do in terms of changing their diet is by assuming that they need to cut “sugar” (maybe because diabetes is called “sugar disease” or just “sugar”). So they cut the four spoons of sugar they have everyday (with their four cups of coffee or tea), and feel virtuous, while at the same time piling up massive mounds of rice on their plates - doing little to their sugar and insulin levels.

There are multiple reasons why we eat - nutrition is just one of them (else we’d just be slurping some green gel and getting all our nutrition from it). Taste / enjoyment is the other very important one.

So if I have to go on a diet, I reasoned, I should cut out a set of foods that don’t give me much enjoyment, and aren’t very good for health either. And thus was born my “no grain diet”.

Potatoes are the least bad carb for me. Basmati rice is second. Anything that contains pulverised grains is horrible (ragi / jowar / wheat / rice flour / whatever). Dosas give me worse glucose spikes than desserts (likely has to do with the absolute quantity of carbs in one “dose” of each). If rice gives me as good (or worse) sugar spikes than desserts (and that I have the latter fairly sparingly anyway) isn’t it rather clear what I need to cut out on?

On Ugadi this year, I ate too many sweets and could feel (yes I can feel it now) my blood sugar spiking. And this had come off stuff that I didn’t enjoy much as well (obbaTTu / hOLige made with jaggery), which caused a double whammy - I’d eaten something I didn’t enjoy too much, and had screwed my health in the process as well. This was highly suboptimal.

And so I sat for one session with an LLM constructing a 2x2 to show that “south indian Brahmin festival food is neither tasty nor healthy”. To avoid offending sentiments (of people who had given me the said obbaTT) I refrained from posting it on Facebook the same day. Anyway, here is that 2x2.

Now this is biased - I prompted Claude with my preferences to give me this (and so the enjoyable / not are mostly my opinions). Notice that festival foods are all in a different colour, and in big. And most of them are clustered in the lower left quadrant - neither healthy nor tasty.

After a short vacation last month (where I actually lost weight despite eating out a lot (this was in Udupi, so kept going out to belt seafood); I stayed in someone’s house and so pretty much didn’t drink any milk or eat paneer during the period - 2 things I consume copious amounts of at home), I decided I needed to finally do something about my diet, and come up with some rule-based stuff.

And then I remembered this 2x2 that I’d made a month earlier, and my insights from my CGM usage in 2022. The simplest rule I had to make to go low-carb was to cut out all grains. So no rice, no breads of any kind, etc.

Among these, rice has been the easiest to give up - I don’t enjoy it (or any combination of it) anyways. Breads and cakes I rather enjoy, and I miss them, but I tell myself that they are really bad for my health so it’s okay to give them up. And the way I have framed my diet (“no grain”) means that I still have access to plenty of enjoyable food - mangoes (it’s the season now!), bananas, ice cream (no grains in that, remember?), milk sweets, etc. etc.

Scales haven’t moved much but I’ve been feeling much better.

Now, there have been exceptions - last weekend was full of weddings (every evening from Friday to Sunday), and wedding food is all high carb. On each of the days, I ate a “pre-dinner” (grilled paneer) at home before going for the wedding. And that meant that at the wedding meals, I could just stick to things that either followed my diet or only mildly broke it. The first day (the best food of all) I ate lots of desserts. The second I was too tired and I just broke my rule to eat poori as well. The third day I skipped all the grains except those in desserts.

All it takes is some imagination!