The Experiment (n=1)

I love food- pretty much all of it. I love to cook, especially with my husband Ron. I love to entertain. We subscribe to Bon Appetit, Saveur, and Cook's Illustrated, and read blogs like The Kitchn, to find delicious new recipes to wow our friends when we have them over for brunch or dinner on the weekends. When we travel to a new place, we plan our trip around awesome restaurants or unique local cuisine.

I spend a lot of time thinking about how to make delicious food that's healthy, too. But recently, I've been feeling inundated with conflicting information about how to be healthy- eat less meat but more protein, less gluten but more fiber, less dairy but more yogurt, etc.

All of these different diet trends come along with scientific-sounding claims that would seem to prove the soundness of the theory on which they're based. Their hordes of cult-like followers state the case even more stridently, on blogs and in comments across the web. 

They can't ALL be right, can they? Their claims completely contradict each other! How can the modern day cavemen who follow the Paleo diet AND the New Age-y raw food vegans both have the keys to speedier weight loss, higher energy, healthier muscles, slower aging, clearer skin, shinier hair, etc, etc, etc?

The fabulous Dr. Emmett Brown
He tested his hypothesis on himself
and look how great that turned out!

Hypothesis: None of them really know what they're talking about. Or, maybe more accurately, they're all a little bit right, although maybe not for the reasons they say they're right. The body is a hugely complicated, wondrous machine, and I don't think we've begun to understand how it works and why. At the end of the day, I believe that moderation will be the answer.

But how to know for sure? I've done lots of reading, but the information is overwhelming, contradictory, and fundamentally inconclusive. There's only one way to know for sure. I'm going to run a little experiment-  I'm going to try them all.

OK, I'm not going to test every single diet. At the bookstore today, I saw  "The Coconut Diet", which I think I'll take a pass on. But in the course of the next year, I'm going to research, test out, and report on six diets that run the gamut from the Paleo diet, which emphasizes lean meats, lots of veggies, healthy fats, and low carbs, all the way over to the raw foods diet, where nothing I eat will be heated over 104 degrees F. 

In order from Stone Age to New Age, I'll be testing out:

1) The Paleo Diet or What would a caveman eat?

2) The Maker's Diet or What would Jesus eat?

3) The Mediterranean Diet or What would Granny eat?

4) The Vegetarian Diet or What would Gandhi eat?

5) The Vegan Diet or What would Bill Clinton eat? (Don't answer that)

6) The Raw Food Diet or What would Bambi eat?

Finally, one thing all of these diets have in common is that they're focused on prescribed and proscribed eating behaviors, and the scientific(ish) reasoning for eating or not eating certain things. But knowing what to eat, and actually doing it, have always been two separate issues for me. I'll spend the end of this experiment focusing on this disconnect, explored in books like Breaking Free from Emotional Eating, which encourages not following any particular diet, but instead listening to the cues coming from your own body to make your food choices.  


My goal is to figure out what works best for me (how to define "works best" is another discussion). But my research has an n of only 1 (me)- hardly a conclusive sample size- so I'll also present the most meaningful information I find while doing my own research. You're smart- you can make up your own mind and figure out what makes most sense for you. 

To paraphrase Dr. Brown, above- if you're going to conduct scientific experiments on your own body, you might as well do it with style!