I am still trying to dial in my diet Right Now. I am a Type 2 diabetic and cardiac patient; it all came on very fast and furious. I've tried LCHF before and it didn't work as described with my chemistry. Same with vegan (low fat super high carb). What diet Team am I rooting for now? Team I-Don't-Want-To-Get-A-Bad-Case-of-the-Dead's-Right-Now. Not sure what form that is but I am still testing.

I saw a ted talk, I think, about the ideal diet. It really depended on how the individuals body responded to foods. Some people can eat rice all day wit minimal glucose spiking and others spike after very little rice. They suggested getting a blood glucose meter. They then suggest monitoring your response to various foods. Look for foods that cause the least spiking and most stable glucose levels.

Going vegan is definitely helpful.

If you want to get the "team vegan" take on reversing type 2 diabetes with diet then watch Forks Over Knives on Netflix. Its actually not a purely vegan film like everyone claims, because the doctors talk about limiting meat (e.g. 5% meat intake), if not completely removing.

By LCHF, just how low a C do you mean?

I had great success with what I considered low C, but what would be considered high C by the Atkins, paleo, and keto folks. I aimed for 40% of less of calories from carbs--low by the standards of the average American.

I was not even trying to cut calories. I just wanted to lower blood sugar, and was trying to see how much changing carbs affected that. However, I found that because the food was now more satisfying, I ended up cutting calories as a side effect.

I picked 40% because (1) it is significantly lower than what I was doing before, and (2) it is really easy to check on a nutrition label--take total calories, divide by 10, and if that number is larger not larger than the number of grams of carbs, the item is 40% or under calories from carbs.

If I wanted to eat something that was over 40%, I would fix it by adding fat or protein. For example, suppose I wanted a ham sandwich. Before I would have ordered that with cheese, assorted veggies, and mustard. No mayo to try to keep the calories down.

On the "40% or under" diet, I would order that ham sandwich as before, but would go ahead and add mayo (full fat mayo...none of that lite crap) and/or order it with double meat. That would raise the calories by about 50%, but it would bring the carb percentage down from about 45% to about 30%.

Not all foods could be tweaked easily to bring them under 40%, but if I ate such a food I would try to pair it with other foods that were enough under 40% to bring the total for the meal under 40%, and if a meal was a little off I'd fix it in the next meal.

You can pretty easily keep a running total of how you are doing, by on a food by food basis keeping track of how many grams over or under you are. So if I had something that was 300 calories and 20 grams of carbs, I'd mentally think "300/10 = 30 grams of carbs to be 40%. 20 grams is 10 under, so add -10g to my running total".

If at the end of the day the running total is not positive, I've met my 40% goal for the day.

To reduce the risk of getting to the last meal or snack of the day and being too far over to correct, I put in some effort to make sure breakfast put me a fair amount under 40%.

A nice thing about this approach is that 40% (I actually ended up at around 35% once I found a diet soda that I actually started to like, and so cut full-sugar Pepsi out) can be done without giving up most fast food restaurants. You might have to give up some items on their menus, but a lot of their main items can be brought under 40% by tweaks like I did for my sandwiches. E.g., if you want a burger and fries, you might be able to get the combo down to 40% of you go for the double burger and extra cheese and mayo. Pizza can be gotten under 40% with enough meat and cheese.

That makes it much easier to stick to it compared to diets where you have to plan ahead for all your meals away from home.

Result: over about 18 months, I lost 140 lbs, and then mostly leveled off. A1C went from 8.1 on 4 different diabetes medicines to 4.8 on no diabetes medicines. Also got completely off cholesterol medicines.

Try paleo?

To be absolutely fair, Team Keto and Team Paleo are almost the same team. Keto people avoid foods with grains and refined sugars just because they're high carb; Paleo people avoid them because they're toxic, and often naturally fall into a lower carb diet (not necessarily "true" Keto lowness, but still usually a lot lower carb than they were pre-Paleo).

Check NCBI and Pubmed. There's a lot going for ketosis and certain vegetarian diets, backed by good research.

Not saying there aren't an abundance of diet fads that find roosts the minds of uncritical hopefuls (like anything else, really), but being more conscious of what you eat and how you feel is a good thing. If the diet seems zany and tenuous but promotes portion control and variety to people who've been feeding themselves and their families out of cans and whatever is closest and cheapest, I'd tolerate if not encourage their new interest.

Some people's enthusiasms are just difficult to put up with day in and day out, whatever they might be. But in the grand scheme of it, I'd rather they be obsessed with salads than Scentsy.

tribalism.

it pops up everywhere, sports, operating systems, code editors, vehicle manufacturers.

and it is actively used by and encouraged by all sorts of power structures.