You’re actually completely right. Lots of different countries on the med with sometimes radically different cuisines despite similar ingredients. when I say mediterrean, I literally mean “Moroccan”.

Typical breakfast in my Moroccan grandmothers house for individuals not on a diet:

Breakfast: bread with butter and olive oil

Lunch: salad with tomatos and sardines.

Dinner: a huge bowl of couscous (a grain), with carrots, Zucchini, potato’s, lamb/beef/Chicken, bread, followed by a huge plate of fruit (oranges, bananas, melons).

How I adapted this to my diet:

Breakfast: fruit, usually bananas, but sometimes strawberries, raspberries, blackberries.

Lunch: chicken filet, with tomatos and other veggies (when available), olive oil, and American style sliced wheat loaf bread

Dinner: salmon and veggies

Snack before bed: tomatos, olive oil, bread.

My diet isn’t an exact mirror as what my grandmother makes because I’m in America with American ingredients and hate cooking (salmon vs sardines, American bread vs Moroccan bread, American bread vs cous cous), but in terms of the kinds of foods I’m eating (lean meats, veggies, fruit, grains, olive oil), it’s virtually the same thing.

Google for learning about the best foods to fit my preferences (high quantity, low calorie, heart/cholesterol/liver healthy foods).

https://www.calculator.net/calorie-calculator.html to determine how much I need to eat.

Sams club for buying half of my food (chicken, olive oil, tomatos, bread, veggies+fruit). An online, home delivered, keto meal prepper/retailer for the other half of my food.

Excel on my computer and my smartphone for tracking calories.

A dry erase board with calories /100g and a kitchen digital scale for counting fruit calories.

My exercise regimen is dichotomous: pre-sep’22 and post sep’22.

Pre- sep’22, I walked 2-3 hours a day, even when I was at my largest weight. Walking has never been a difficult task for me: I enjoy it, I listen to podcasts, I need to walk my dog anyway.

I (and my liver) was fat because I drank a lot of soda, ate a lot of beef/fast food, and my body was accumulating those excess calories into fat.

I went on this diet and lost crap tons of weight without changing exercise routine.

Post- sep’22: hurricane Ian flooded my house, so now a lot of my free time is taken up by home repairs/improvements.

I now only walk about an hour a day, 2 if I’m lucky.

My only piece of advice if you already have food that’s working for you is:

Track as much as you can in excel. Excel provides a great platform for data analysis and a feedback loop to see what’s happening with your body.

Do more frequent blood testing. I started drinking regularly for the first time in my life in may’22 while I was losing weight, and my ALT spiked to 64 in June. I significantly cut back the alcohol and went to quarterly blood testing, and my sep ALT dropped to the 30s, and my Dec ALT is now the lowest it’s ever been at 24.

If you track both the changes in your diet/exercise and the resulting blood chemistry, you can begin to make better educated decisions on what’s good for your body.

I’ve tried posting there several times and it keeps getting removed lol.

Excel. It was kind of a pita because excel wanted to recognize the dates as numbers. 44132 and so on.

I had to use a formula to get excel to keep the date as a date.

I started out at 318 and eating 2,800-3,000 calories a day, and I was losing weight. But I was probably consuming 4,000-6,000 calories a day of fast food and soda for half a decade before I went on this diet. So 3,000 calories was definitely a caloric deficit for 300 lb me.

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That didn't last long though. As I've scaled down my weight (235), now to get the same weight loss, I need to consistently be in the 1,600-1,800 range.

If the calculator doesnt work for you, I would consult a doctor. You might have a thyroid or other condition that makes it impossible to lose weight through normal means.

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I had no condition. I was just addicted to sugar and overeating fast food.

Honestly, I’m a lazy bastard, don’t like cooking, and not a picky eater. That’s partly how I got so fat, because I was eating a lot of fast food and I can eat lots of anything.

So a lot of my food comes from Sam’s club (deli prepared chicken, veggies if they have it) and a lot of it comes from a meal prep company.

But two things I love to eat as breakfast or snacks:

Bananas, no prep needed.

Sliced tomatos, seasoned in salt and pepper, lathered in olive oil, and the plate cleaned with bread.

Maybe that’s unique to me.

I have a LONG history of kidney stones, dehydration/stress vomiting, and UTIs before I went on this diet/before I switched away from soda.

I haven’t had any of that since I switched from soda to water, and the worst problem excessive water consumption presents to me is more frequent urinating.

Ultimately, I’m relaying what works for my body. This is why I say, caveat emtor (buyer beware), if you find something that works for you, feel free to disregard what other people (including me) say.

It does show YoY. It has Dec’21 as the starting point and Dec’22 as the ending point. You’re free to calculate percentages on your own, though.

I do.

That’s why I said “half way between keto and mediterrean” and defined mediterrean as having moderate meat consumption and high in carbs (veggies, fruit, bread).

Implying a blend of the too diets.

Also, mediterrean doesn’t have a homogenous definition. My family is Moroccan, which is a mediterrean culture. They eat a lot of poultry and fish.

My diet now is exactly as my dads side of the family (Moroccan) normally eats.

Always, with the exception of cheat days, usually because that involves eating out and tracking is a PITA.

Honestly, it was all personal research.

How I started: fat (318 lbs), high blood pressure (unmedicated : 166-176), high-side of normal cholesterol (180+), high-side of normal liver enzymes (ALT=46).

I said to myself, what are natural foods that are high in mass, low in calories, and address BP and cholesterol?

Over 9 months, that slowly turned into my current diet. And now I’m 235, unmedicated BP is 146, cholestoral is 130, ALT is 24. Hopefully, within another year, I’ll be able to transition of losartan (BP meds)

Like 5 months ago, I was researching more and more things to incorporate into my diet, and I learned that I basically adopted what’s known as a “liver shrinking diet” that’s prescribed ahead of bariatric surgery.

Half my meals come from a Keto food company prepped at the cost of $13/, which is on par with a fast food meal. I try to get their salmon and veggie or shrimp and veggie meals. They’re delivered to my door already cooked, I pop them in the oven for 10 minutes, eat, and recycle the plastic trays.

The other half of my meals (chicken and veggie) comes from Sams Club deli, again, already cooked, something like $15 for 5 filets.

I eat sliced tomatos with salt and pepper, lathered in olive oil, use bread to clean off the olive oil, and banana, and these are also from Sams.

If you refrain from bread, you might have better results, but I love olive oil+bread too much to refrain from it lol.

I take supplements (fish oil and cranberry concentrate) religiously, which are supposed to help with cholesterol/BP.

I think what’s important to stress, is that merely switching what foods you eat is may not be enough. You still need to be in a caloric deficit. Now my diet is easy to be in a caloric deficit without as many hunger pains because you eat voluminous, calorically light foods, but the thing you need to focus on is ultimately calories. And for that, I use this:

https://www.calculator.net/calorie-calculator.html

This calculator comes in clutch, because you’ll have to scale down your calories as you lose weight. That’s where fasting can help you out.

Other tips and tricks:

the reason I get veggies at sams is because some things like fruits and tomatos will have consistent sizes, and it’s easier to calorie count (I’m sure cosco is the same way, I just haven’t shopped there).

For calorie counting fruit, I have a dry erase board where I keep all the calories /100g, and I use a kitchen scale and excel on my phone to track calories on a daily/weekly basis (I unfortunately don’t transcribe onto my computer).

Drink lots of water. On a bad day, I drink 4 liters. On a good day, 7 and I I work at home in a/c.

Ultimately, if you find something that works for you, adopt it and don’t mind other people. Most people say you shouldn’t eat big meals before you go to bed, but I hate going to bed hungry, so I eat most of my meals right before bed. I’m still losing weight, I’m still healthier than I was a year ago, and that’s all that matters.

The gist of it is: lots of fruit, veggies, bread, fats (butter and olive oil), moderate meat consumption.

My diet is half way between keto (all meats and fats, no carbs) and Mediterranean.

I eat a LOT of meat, it’s easily half my diet, BUT it’s lean (calorically light) meat.

The staples of my diet are from greatest portion to least portion: fish/chicken, tomatos, miscellaneous veggies, olive oil, low calorie (much more expensive) multi grain wheat bread, bananas, misclleanous fruit (strawberry>+other stuff).

I’ll have to check my file (im out walking the dog), but that might have been when a friend invited me over for an MMA fight and I just let loose on solid party food lol.

I can’t remember everything we ate, but buffalo chicken dip was one of the dishes. You can probably tell I’m a natural fatty lol.

Edit: my excel file shows on 08/10/22: “took 1 oxycodone/hydrocodone [prescribed after oral surgery].”

That shit stopped my bowels right in its tracks and I was constipated af for days. I didn’t even break the diet, lol.

Lol no it’s my data.

My total data set spans Dec 21 to Dec 22 (YoY). You can see this by looking at the bottom and at the very left where it clearly has 12/11/21. I got this data (December) from my last physical with my doctor.

I started my diet in April and that’s where you begin to see it fall.

The data between December and June I got from searching my Facebook convo with my friends. I wasn’t telling my frends on a daily basis what my weight was, so that’s why you see it scatter every couple of weeks.

the day by day portion of the data starts in June because that’s when I started recording it daily in an excel file. Right in June, we all got into a biggest loser contest.

I’ll post a YoY diet photo of myself in April before I leave for Greece. I’m still only 9 months into the diet which is an odd interval to take a comparison photo.