Most people, especially in wealthier countries, are NOT eating a healthy diet. The modern notion of a healthy diet has become intertwined with corporations looking for profits by producing food-like products at industrial scale. Food quality and nutrition is absolutely not the focus. The result of increased consumption of food-like substances is that 88% of those people you know are metabolically unwell and on their way to one or more chronic diseases.
If you want to cure gout without medication you need to radically rethink your definition of a healthy diet.
A New Definition of a Healthy Diet
So what is a healthy diet then? It’s certainly not the USDA Food Pyramid or MyPlate. Here is the definition I use that allowed me to cure gout.
A healthy diet is a pattern of eating that features optimal amounts of amino acids sourced from animal proteins, and a mixture of healthy fats and unprocessed carbohydrates.
It does not contain industrial produced substances (like sugar, vegetable oils, seed oils, or highly refined grains/carbs). It does not chase the latest superfood and for the most part has no need for supplements.
Healthy dietary patterns may shift, slightly, over time to target or return to optimal body composition.
by Me (unless you can offer an improved definition).
Beginning Your Transition to a Healthy Eating Pattern (1-2 months)
Assuming you are like most adults, you are coming off a decades long dietary pattern, high in processed and refined carbohydrates (breads, rice, pasta) and seed/vegetable oils (virtually any manufactured food and fast food). It’s also low in protein and numerous vitamins and minerals.
While healthy carbohydrates are not the enemy in the long term, for now, you need to eliminate almost all of them and replace them with healthy fats. Learn to track your macronutrients (proteins, fats, carbs) and initially just look to get less than 100 grams total carbohydrates per day. However, and this is important, your body needs to get energy from somewhere and it doesn’t yet do this efficiently from your body fat.
The very first thing we want to do is increase the amount of healthy fats you eat to retrain your body to burn fat AND reduce/eliminate the hangry feeling you get from eating excessive carbs (and the resulting low blood sugar that follows).
For the first 1-2 months don’t worry about how much fat you add to your diet. Don’t step on the scale and don’t worry about weight loss or a little gain. The goal is to BOTH eliminate processed vegetable/seed oils and refined/manufactured foods AND replace them with healthy fats.
What are Healthy Fats?
Despite what you’ve been led to believe, healthy fats are saturated fats (SFA) and to a slightly lesser degree monounsaturated fats (MUFA). These are, for the most part unprocessed fats that would have been consumed by humans for thousands of years — long before metabolic syndrome and obesity was a thing.
Unhealthy fats, which you should avoid like the plague, are polyunsaturated fats (PUFA). These fats actually were industrial lubricants before they came to be allowed as “food”. They cannot be squeezed from their source. Instead it takes a ton of processing and chemicals to extract these oils and then make them look and smell pleasant to consumers.
You likely can’t entirely avoid PUFA’s and highly refined oils. However, you can go through your kitchen and discard any of the following (including cooking spray): vegetable oil, seed oil, canola oil, corn oil, peanut oil, almond oil, soybean oil, sunflower oil, safflower oil.
Learn to cook with butter (yes it really is healthy), lard, suet, or tallow. For now olive oil, coconut oil, and avocado oil are fine.
Be mindful of going out for meals. Most all restaurants will cook in vegetable oil And even the “olive oil” is usually a blend of olive oil and vegetable oil. Minimize going out for meals as much as you can. However, if you must go out for meals, don’t be afraid to get a burger with no bun or sauces, a steak with no sauce, or a salad with olive oil on the side (that you can use in moderation as a dressing). Pair your meal with a glass of water or unsweetened ice tea.
Cooking Tips
Depending on your starting point you may have to learn how to cook. And while this may seem daunting at first, it really doesn’t have to be. Here are some suggestions.
- Bacon and Eggs are simple to make. If you like them, they work fine for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
- Cook your bacon in a pan but don’t discard the fat. Pull the bacon and then toss in some veggies like broccoli, asparagus, brussels sprouts, or cauliflower and cook them in the leftover fat. Alternatively, cook your eggs in the leftover bacon fat.
- Cooking steak can be really simple. Learn to reverse sear. Salt your steak of choice, put it in a pre-heated oven and cook it at 200° to 250° until the internal temperature is 110° to 120°. Then pull it out and sear it for 45-60 seconds per side on a cook top. This is really a simple method that doesn’t require any skill. Do NOT trim off the fat. Tip: Put the steak in the oven and use the delayed-start option to have it automatically kick-off 25-30 minutes before you plan to eat (for all you home-office workers out there).
- Find some recipes on DietDoctor.com that you enjoy and can make in bulk. This way you have leftovers or something to take for lunch. (Tip: for now pick from any category — don’t worry about low-carb vs keto vs high protein — just watch out for a few key things to avoid).
- Fish and Seafood are excellent choices as well. Salmon, lobster, crab, and many others make great choices and can be butter delivery vehicles. 🙂
- We absolutely LOVE this Easiest Meatloaf.
- Ninja Air Fryers are great too (my only complaint is you can loose too much fat).
- Other great sources of fat… Avocados! Coconut oil is also a great replacement for seed/vegetable oils when you want something to cook in.
Tracking Macros
A note here on macro tracking. Sorry, but you really must. Don’t fret over being super exact, there is some variation from food to food based on myriad factors. But do the best you can. The easiest way to do this is with Carb Manager or Cronometer. There are other apps available and they’re likely equally good. We at GoutDiY just happen to have experience with these two.
Remember, during this phase we’re really focused only on less than 100 grams total carbohydrates a day (from vegetables, eggs, milk only) and adding enough healthy fats so you are satisfied. Don’t bother with calorie or protein goals at this point.
And to be super clear, the goal is less than 100 grams of carbohydrates. This does not mean you should keep adding foods to hit 100 grams if you aren’t hungry. Think of this more as an objective to be somewhere between 0 and 100 grams total carbohydrates (not net carbohydrates).
Key Things to Avoid
As a gout sufferer it’s going to take a bit of time to restore your body’s ability to process and excrete purines and uric acid correctly. Exactly how long will depend on the severity of your starting point. We want to get you to a whole/real food based diet as quickly as possible and start repairing your metabolism. As you ease in to a new set of dietary patterns you may want to avoid even some low-carb/keto/high protein foods that can have the highest purines or fructose. So for now, skip these:
- Alcohol – Realistically avoid all alcohol. High in purines, but worse, it takes priority for processing by kidneys and liver above everything else (purines, uric acid, glucose, fat). I won’t say wine is okay, just the least toxic, if you absolutely must have some alcohol.
- Yeast – This should not be a problem if you are cooking from DietDoctor.com recipes, they don’t have any.
- Game Meat – Duck, Venison, Bison and organ meats (aka offal)
- Certain Seafoods – Anchovies, sardines, herring, mussels, codfish, scallops, trout, tuna, and haddock
- Fruit – Realistically all fruit for now. If you absolutely must have fruit then a small amount of berries (blueberries, raspberries, blackberries, strawberries).
- ALL juices – This really should be permanent. Juice is a highly processed food that is ultimately seen as concentrated sugar by the body.
- Anything packaged unless you have a PhD in deciphering food labels and are very sure it doesn’t have added sugar, vegetable oils or seed oils.
Parting Thoughts
You may be tempted to ask if all this fat will make you fat. Couple suggestions on this. First, eating fat doesn’t, on its own, make you fat. It’s really the combination of carbohydrates and fats together in a meal that makes you fat. Carbohydrates from whole foods, like fresh vegetables, are a tiny fraction of what you get from manufactured foods.
Second, for now we are focused on helping your body get back to basics, being able to burn fats for fuels. When we do this you have less blood sugar spikes and less of the low blood sugar that causes that hangry feeling. So eat enough to feel satisfied, though not stuffed. Don’t be concerned about weight changes at this point (though many people will find they loose a bunch of weight at this stage).