Microbiotaphilic Reset Diet

 

Is the glass half-full or half-empty? While I’m typically pretty optimistic, my eating habits have historically been half-empty in their approach. In my adult life, I’ve periodically followed strict elimination diets to cleanse and identify food sensitivities. In a change of approach, I recently embarked upon a Microbiotaphilic Reset Diet.

Food: fibrous and fermented

After another long COVID Winter, Collette and I decided to shake up our eating habits with a dietary reboot. Our initial inclination was to repeat the elimination diet we last followed ten years ago, though recent scientific developments led us to rethink that approach. Since our last foray into eliminating foods, there has been an explosion of research on the human microbiota.

Books such as The Good Gut and Fiber Fueled made the science accessible, and both books reframed my approach to food. Rather than focusing on the foods that historically made me ill, I focused more on fortifying my gut’s resilience. For the past few years I’ve focused on eating a microbiota-friendly diet, and enjoyed positive results. Among the positive results? I’m now able to eat food containing gluten without the explosively negative repercussions! The positive results piqued my curiosity – what would a longer-term commitment to a rigorously microbiota-friendly diet feel like?

This was the inspiration to create our home-grown Microbiotaphilic Reset Diet (MRD). The MRD has five components. Each component is somewhat distinct, yet all the components are extensively interconnected. The five points of our MRD are:

1. Increase consumption of live-culture fermented foods
2. Increase fiber consumption (> 60g of fiber per day)
3. Eliminate all processed food (all – even plant-based milks and oils)
4. Eliminate all sugar 
5. Replace coffee with tea (> 70% reduction in caffeine intake)

In the first two weeks of our month-long MRD experiment, Collette and I are enjoying some of the best quality sleep we’ve enjoyed in years, along with a wonderfully smooth energy that sustains us well into the evening. Rather than lurching across the workday’s finish line, Collette and I are alert and calmly energized right up 'til bedtime. Along with more energy, we’re also enjoying many more benefits that I’ll cover in future blog postings.

In the coming weeks, I’ll unpack each of the five components of the MRD, sharing some of our thinking behind these points. I’ll also share some of the challenges we’ve encountered along the way, and the ways we’ve learned to work with these challenges. I am super-pleased at the half-way results of our MRD experiment, and look forward to experiencing what the next two weeks feel like.