Archevore Diet Revised
Kurt Harris MD
The all vegan version is now up.
Not really.
But I did just spend several hours doing a needed update. I think this is about version 3.0 since the original back-of-the-envelope diet I first put on the web in June 2009. That was a diet I had been using successfully clinically for more than two years.
The emphasis on animal products remains.
The emphasis on real whole foods - kill it or dig it up with a stick - remains and is enhanced.
Macro ratios had already been de-emphasized in v 2.0, but that has now been made even more explicit in the steps, and not just in the coda.
Things which in my mind were "givens" but had been pointed out to me were not clearly emphasized have been made more explicit, like sleep and eating some offal.
I've deleted references to legumes other than avoiding soy and peanuts, as other legumes seem more and more benign to me.
It remains congruent with, and is perhaps now more so with other whole foods diets that I consider "Paleo 2.0" approaches, like that of Chris Kresser, Paul Jaminet, Chris Masterjohn (he won't force you to eat wheat) and J Stanton, and with more potatoes and less steak, Stephan Guyenet.
I've not had a chance to do big blog posts about food reward yet. Those who might have seen some comments of mine elsewhere will see I find merit in the idea, but I don't know its ontological status yet.
Whether reducing food reward is restoring the EM2 or whether it is just a useful fat loss maneuver I am not sure. Either way, I think that is part of how diets like mine and maybe all diets may work, so I have emphasized that a bit more in the rank ordering.
There is also a notable but not strictly scientific bias I have used for this re-write.
It could fairly be called data mining or reverse engineering, but I've tried to write the steps such that most of the weight optimization failures that I know of would have not been following the new steps.
For example, I know of people who failed despite eating very low carb, but I cannot think of many that actually ate only twice a day with no snacks, never ate from a box, avoided restaurants and never ate ANY liquid calories, including milk and cream. So this has resulted in modifications that make my own current diet noncompliant in a few ways (I still add cream to my coffee), but I think these changes make it more universal.
This does seem to work well for many people, but nothing works for everyone. If it optimizes your weight and health and you are satisfied, you can always break a few rules and see what you can still get away with.
I'll try to do a re-write of "how to lose weight" sometime soon and add more therapeutic tricks for when the whole foods low-NAD idea is not enough.
Kurt G. Harris MD