Has eating healthy made a difference in your life?

[MarkKol]

Sometimes eating healthy seems kinda time-consuming and expensive for me, I strangely got into this field of nutrition because of 1. Being unhappy with my weight in the past and 2. My desire is to have an ultra-high libido and sex drive because I liked being horny all the time. 

Sometimes I read some old posts on this forum of people mentioning stuff like bell peppers increased my sex drive, or eggs did this for me, or vegetables made this difference for me, etc...

So to get a bigger picture here, what has improving your nutrition done for you?

Edited Tuesday at 01:58 PM by MarkKol

[Leo Gura]

1) Makes it much easier to keep fat off.

2) Ends pigging out and feeling gross.

3) Most of the benefits will be unfelt and untestable, like living longer with less disease. But you will never even know for sure you received this benefit or if it was a fantasy.

[Patrick_9931]

To me it just makes all of the difference of the world. And it’s actually super easy to eat healthy and it’s not even expensive  

The main thing for me was

- remove gluten 

- remove sugar

-remove obvious junk food 

- Eat whole grains 

- eat prebiotic foods and focus on gut health

 

super easy and cheap but the mental improvement that I’ve received is just a whole another world , I just live a different life 

Edited Tuesday at 02:45 PM by Patrick_9931

[bazera]

@MarkKol Unrelated to your question, but what's your diet like? What food categories have you eliminated so far? And do you eat 100% clean?

[max duewel]

yes, there is a clear difference in my mental health, sports and work performance and happiness. Also i look much better compared to eating less healthy

[Princess Arabia]

Only thing i can say is that when I don't, I feel like shit and certain health problems start to arise. As soon as I get back to eating better, they go away. So I don't think it's the eating healthy as much but it's the opposite that creates the problem. Eating healthy probably just puts the body back to homeostasis and eating poorly takes you out of it and sends the body out of whack. 

[MarkKol]

47 minutes ago, bazera said:

@MarkKol Unrelated to your question, but what's your diet like? What food categories have you eliminated so far? And do you eat 100% clean?

I've been all around the place so I couldn't tell you exactly because I haven't been consistent with any specific diet, my main belief is as much fiber/vegetables/fruit as possible, the 30 plants a week recommendation. The only thing I don't eat is dairy because of acne but I'm not strict about it.

I've been eating almost a pound of beef a day recently, eating lots of meat with lots of fiber is debatable, carnivore or animal-dominated diets definitely aren't, without fiber animal products will raise your APOB clogging your arteries long term. I was never scared of a heart attack, I was scared of the artery plaque worsening circulation resulting in poor erections 

Edited Tuesday at 03:34 PM by MarkKol

[Michael569]

Its an interesting question and everybody's answer will likely be different. 

I imagine an overweight employee in a Fortune 500 company eating junk food and surviving on coffee has actually never felt the effect of a healthy diet so he doesn't know. He sits at work, sits in a car and sits at home. He does not give his body an opportunity to show him how its really doing. He just know how he feels every day, for him that's normal, for another that would be chronically fatigued and brain dead. 

Equally if you were brought up in a family that valued health and you sorta grew up eating well, your cells are healthy & unimpacted by stress & disease and everything works as it should, you wouldn't know what it feels like to eat a rubbish diet. 

A person who is healthy and has no severe genetic mutations (e.g. major absorbtion / storage / antioxidant issues) can go on and eat poorly for ages. Others might run into deficiency issues, energy issues and even end up with autoimmunity, viral diseases etc pretty quickly. 

There is also the factor that most chronic diseases develop in 50s so all of us responding might be still too early to tell. The effects of diet are slow and subtle and it may only be perceived in a way that you avoid things others are ending up with. 

Personally I don't feel different after having paid attention to my nutrition since about mid 20s, which was 10 years ago, compared to how I used to feel. But then I wasn't particularly sensitive to it , nor very conscious back then so I wouldn't have even noticed unless those signs were major like painful digestion, major fatigue. 

One thing I have been noticing as I am reaching my mid 30s is that I am seeing differences in my health vs the health of my peers with whome I grew up with.  (not wanting to sound cocky, this is just an observation) I notice myself complaining less about health like joint pains, surgeries I had to have etc,  getting sick less often, having more energy, being one of the few who isn't steadily growing a belly and having a healthier looking skin. I was hiking with few of my high school mates a while ago and I did notice how out of shape some of them were, but that could be a factor of exercise as well. But then some of my mates have kids and I don't and maybe I'll be the same once I have the first kid...that tends to change people a lot. 

Maybe because healthy diet is a proxy for overall healthier lifestyle, it is hard to isolate its effects. People who eat healthier tend to exercise more, put more attention to their sleep, to relaxation, self development, stretching regularly, hydrating, avoiding toxins etc. So it could be a combined effect of the entire umbrella rather than just diet. 

You can also see it as a form of prophylactic. Maybe you eat healthy and still die when you're 80 and maybe you'll live to 100 and die peacefully in the middle of the night. It is likely to be subtle but if you are surrounded by a peers of similar age, you can almost use that as a cohort of comparison, as selfish as that sounds. 

Edited Tuesday at 03:51 PM by Michael569

[Rigel]

My skin doesn’t lie. I put shit in my mouth, I get pimples & disgusting skin. I put great food in my mouth, my skin clears up & starts to glow. It’s very obvious. Not subtle at all.

[Ero]

On 1/7/2025 at 10:55 AM, Rigel said:

My skin doesn’t lie. I put shit in my mouth, I get pimples & disgusting skin. I put great food in my mouth, my skin clears up & starts to glow. It’s very obvious. Not subtle at all.

Same. Also, if you are a very active, the difference in diet is immediate. 

[Schizophonia]

@MarkKol I'm sick way less often.

[Sugarcoat]

I eat healthy generally. But when I do eat unhealthy, I don’t notice any negative effects. I think that’s because I have a good baseline of health and a strong digestion. If you have this, especially if you are young, I think you shouldn’t feel that much of a difference if you eat a little unhealthy food vs healthy, maybe in excess amounts yes but not a little deviation. I feel good generally health wise eating generally healthy, so that’s a benefit, but on the other hand I feel “normal” like this is how I’m supposed to feel. My body feels healthy and light and my energy is stable. It’s supposed to feel that way, imo. Like @Schizophonia would say “it’s normal”. So it doesn’t feel so much like a benefit, it just feels normal.

[Schizophonia]

2 hours ago, Sugarcoat said:

My body feels healthy and light and my energy is stable. It’s supposed to feel that way, imo. Like @Schizophonia would say “it’s normal”. So it doesn’t feel so much like a benefit, it just feels normal.

Ahah.

 

Let's say that you can eat enough junk and still feel good if you eat enough good food alongside it and/or take supplements. 
Then the differences are essentially felt in the long run.

[Sugarcoat]

1 minute ago, Schizophonia said:

Ahah.

 

Let's say that you can eat enough junk and still feel good if you eat enough good food alongside it and/or take supplements. 
Then the differences are essentially felt in the long run.

Yes exactly, if you eat healthy in general eating some junk sometimes won't affect you at least not in a way thats noticeable, also assuming you have a good foundation of health because if you have a sensitive system then yes maybe some junk could affect you but that isn't ideal. And yes differences are usually felt in the long run so if one would eat unhealthy for a long time things would start to feel different

[Schizophonia]

14 minutes ago, Sugarcoat said:

Yes exactly, if you eat healthy in general eating some junk sometimes won't affect you at least not in a way thats noticeable, also assuming you have a good foundation of health because if you have a sensitive system then yes maybe some junk could affect you but that isn't ideal. And yes differences are usually felt in the long run so if one would eat unhealthy for a long time things would start to feel different

👍

[Jannes]

I changed my diet when I was like 17 and felt a huge difference. All sorts of little pains, brain fogs, bloats cleared a lot it was quite magical.  

Now the difference seems less noticeable.

I was always skinny I never gained or lost weight when I had phases when I ate more or less junk.