So I've passed a year eating from an ancestral/paleo framework, realizing that I've never derived any concrete answers from n=1 type experiments with food/supplements, besides the most general ("I feel better with more carbs than with hardly any", for example). Does anyone else find this? Having problems but still just shrugging in the produce aisle?

So ubiquitous and nonchalant on this board are statements like "I don't tolerate bananas" or "If I eat more than 2 eggs a day I break out" or "I feel better with 2.5 grams of krill oil, but not fish oil" and I simply have no idea how all this is known. Personal experience is king on PH, but I find it so murky. I feel stuff and notice changes, but can't tie it to anything. There is so many potentially confounding factors, and if I've understood correctly, a proper way to figure out if a food is problematic, one would:

1. Keep a stable diet before the experiment to get a baseline as to how you feel.
2. Eliminate the food in question.
3. Keep everything else in the diet exactly the same, including your sleep, stress levels etc.
4. Evaluate how you feel after a week or two.
5. Add food back in and note what happens.

It sounds easy on paper, but my life just ends up not fitting into that hermetic parameter and I've never really done it with any "A-ha!" assuredness. I could try adding in goat milk kefir today, changing nothing else, feel great tomorrow, then get a small pimple on the third day, which I might have gotten anyways, but maybe that was from that pesky apple I ate before the experiement, take the kefir out, feel just as great long after, which invalidates the intital effect, then stay up too late....you get the idea. I've given up on this way of thinking, it's silly. I've never been able to "go bacK" to a period of eating where I felt good and get the same effect.

I know something like heartburn or severe gas pain could be more of a red flag, but some problems don't have give those clues. Then there's groups of foods (histamine, nightshades etc...), possible gluten contamination, the inherent effect of having a limited diet, a distorted memory of what things where like before, an off night of sleep, delayed reactions (especially with issues like acne), the myriad of way to prepare the food, the Heisenbergiish way something, like say your energy level, can change just by paying vigilant attention to it.

So is there a silent minority out there who are kind of blunted to this stuff, where food logs ended up being a creepy waste of time? How certain are you of the conclusions you've made about foods you avoid? Any tips for someone who doesn't want to ruin the fun of eating?

So I've passed a year eating from an ancestral/paleo framework, realizing that I've never derived any concrete answers from n=1 type experiments with food/supplements, besides the most general ("I feel better with more carbs than with hardly any", for example). Does anyone else find this? Having problems but still just shrugging in the produce aisle?

So ubiquitous and nonchalant on this board are statements like "I don't tolerate bananas" or "If I eat more than 2 eggs a day I break out" or "I feel better with 2.5 grams of krill oil, but not fish oil" and I simply have no idea how all this is known. Personal experience is king on PH, but I find it so murky. I feel stuff and notice changes, but can't tie it to anything. There is so many potentially confounding factors, and if I've understood correctly, a proper way to figure out if a food is problematic, one would:

1. Keep a stable diet before the experiment to get a baseline as to how you feel.
2. Eliminate the food in question.
3. Keep everything else in the diet exactly the same, including your sleep, stress levels etc.
4. Evaluate how you feel after a week or two.
5. Add food back in and note what happens.

It sounds easy on paper, but my life just ends up not fitting into that hermetic parameter and I've never really done it with any "A-ha!" assuredness. I could try adding in goat milk kefir today, changing nothing else, feel great tomorrow, then get a small pimple on the third day, which I might have gotten anyways, but maybe that was from that pesky apple I ate before the experiement, take the kefir out, feel just as great long after, which invalidates the intital effect, then stay up too late....you get the idea. I've given up on this way of thinking, it's silly. I've never been able to "go bacK" to a period of eating where I felt good and get the same effect.

I know something like heartburn or severe gas pain could be more of a red flag, but some problems don't have give those clues. Then there's groups of foods (histamine, nightshades etc...), possible gluten contamination, the inherent effect of having a limited diet, a distorted memory of what things where like before, an off night of sleep, delayed reactions (especially with issues like acne), the myriad of way to prepare the food, the Heisenbergiish way something, like say your energy level, can change just by paying vigilant attention to it.

So is there a silent minority out there who are kind of blunted to this stuff, where food logs ended up being a creepy waste of time? How certain are you of the conclusions you've made about foods you avoid? Any tips for someone who doesn't want to ruin the fun of eating?