A diet that actually worked, plus gout.
I started a low-carb diet in June 2023. By September I’d dropped twenty pounds. The weight went from 236 pounds to 216, which is the lowest I’d been since 2018.
The mechanism isn’t mysterious: if you stop eating bread, rice, and potatoes, you eat less total and your body burns the stored stuff. The cravings for carbs are real for about a week and then largely absent. I was not especially hungry after the first couple of weeks.
The gout complicated this. Gout is inflammation in the joints caused by uric acid, which your body produces when it processes red meat and alcohol. On the positive side, the low-carb diet naturally pushes you toward more protein. On the negative side, beef and beer are exactly what gout doesn’t want. I gave up red meat and alcohol in mid-July. The gout improved. The sleep improved. The weight kept dropping.
“First really good night’s sleep in several weeks,” I wrote after a week off alcohol.
I find the diet easy to maintain in the abstract — it’s not hard to not eat bread. The difficulty is social: eating out, eating with other people, explaining why you’re having a burger bowl instead of a bun. People are politely confused. I am politely persistent.
The burger without the bun does get all over your shirt.