Living without watching

For a long time, I thought my history looked inconsistent.

Keto.

Then carnivore.

Now fasting.

Different tools. Different rules. Different outcomes. On paper, it looks like I was bouncing around, trying things until something stuck.

But when I step back and look at it honestly, I wasn’t changing direction at all. I was reusing the same approach, just pulling different levers depending on what problem I was trying to solve at the time.

Back in 2022, when I was in Malaysia, the problem wasn’t weight. It was fear. Diabetes had already shown up once, and I didn’t want to live my life constantly checking whether it was creeping back in. I was pricking my finger around meals, waking up thinking about numbers, always on edge.

Keto wasn’t about aesthetics or fat loss. It was about lowering insulin enough that I didn’t have to monitor my body all day long. Carnivore took that one step further. It wasn’t an elimination diet for me. It was a fail safe. I didn’t need to check my glucose. I didn’t need to worry about my A1C. I knew, structurally, that diabetes wasn’t coming back while I continued life.

The fact that I didn’t lose much weight on carnivore didn’t bother me. I was heavy before. I stayed heavy. But my internal systems were quiet. My blood pressure was stable. My metabolism felt predictable. I could live without constantly watching myself.

That worked. Until it didn’t.

Eventually, I realized that while I had removed the need to monitor diabetes, I hadn’t removed the shell. Weight wasn’t a threat anymore, but it was still there. And I knew that no amount of fine tuning meals or macronutrients was going to change that.

That’s when I pulled a different lever.

Prolonged fasting wasn’t about discipline or pushing harder. It was the only thing aggressive enough to say, enough is enough, without reopening the metabolic risks I had already solved. Everything else was already under control. Fasting was the missing piece.

What’s interesting is that the feeling is the same.

Just like carnivore quieted my glucose worries, fasting quiets my system. My digestion is calmer. My blood pressure is stable. There’s less noise. I don’t feel like I’m constantly managing myself. If anything, I sometimes feel like I’m coming out of the fast too soon.

That’s when it clicked for me.

I wasn’t optimizing for weight loss.

I wasn’t optimizing for diets.

I was optimizing for removing the need to constantly pay attention.

Each phase used structure to offload vigilance.

I don’t think most people struggle because they pick the wrong diet, but because they pick approaches that keep them constantly paying attention to themselves.

Keto removed insulin spikes.

Carnivore removed uncertainty.

Fasting removed the shell.

Now I’m using that same approach again, but for transition.

As I move toward maintenance, I’m not asking what’s perfect. I’m asking what lets me live without slipping back into monitoring, negotiating, or worrying. Daily two meals might do that. If it does, great. If it doesn’t, fasting stays in the toolbox. I don’t need extremes. I need rails.

When I look back, the pattern isn’t chaotic. It’s consistent.

Different levers. Same intention.

I wasn’t chasing outcomes.

I was chasing quiet.

And every time something stopped giving me that, I changed the lever, not the philosophy.