The Health and Nutrition and Other Travels (formerly “A Few Other Things”) pages are back, along with my health-related blog. The SQL Server blog now has its own home on Sql2Go.com.

Gone are the low-carb reading list and other low-carb links. That experiment didn’t work for me. It doesn’t work for a lot of people, from what I read. I gave it a good go, and I am disappointed because it worked extremely well for weight control, and now that problem is back. But after a couple of years I began to experience serious side effects, and the situation worsened over time, culminating in a very bad episode one year ago (that I would rather not recount).

Two years is also how long I was able to stay on a vegan diet before the nutritional deficiencies caught up with me, though the symptoms were different. Interesting coincidence.

These days I am following a moderate carb, “real food” “paleo template” diet, a la Chris Kresser. Apart from some weight gain, it works pretty much like the low-carb diet, but without the nasty side effects. No going hungry; no craving food after just a few hours. I still forget to eat lunch sometimes.

The one thing I have to be very careful with is avoiding processed and factory farmed foods. I don’t know for sure what is in that stuff, but it makes me sick, pretty much every time, within a day or two. When other people are eating these foods, I can detect peculiar chemical-like odors in the air. I didn’t notice it when I was eating those things myself, but I sure do now.

Possibly it is the GMOs. I “went organic” back in 2009, and my health improved significantly — more than any extra nutrients that the organic foods might have contained could account for. It was a bit of a mystery.

Now I realize that going organic also implied cutting out genetically modified foods, and I am seeing a lot of accounts of these foods making sensitive people (and livestock) sick. So perhaps the mystery is solved.