Everything you think you know about food is wrong

A few crazy things I learned in 3 years on Limbo

Limbo started as a pandemic project in April 2020, and I’ve been on the system since then. Until that point I had considered myself reasonably well educated about food and nutrition — nope! I had no clue about how to fuel the body well, because it turns out almost all of the ‘collective wisdom’ about food is wrong.

I wanted to write down a few of the things that amazed me during the process, as my entire mental model of energy and the body changed. (NOTE: This is not approved by Limbo’s chief scientist — my phrasing is far too over-simplified — but I wanted to use plain language so… ??.)

Carbs are sugar. When you eat a bowl of corn flakes or a slice of pizza, you are eating sugar. It causes a massive spike in blood glucose that your body has to deal with. Whether it tastes sweet or not, it's all glucose to our body.

Fat does not make you fat. The fat on our body comes from excess sugar and carbs, not from fat in food. Turning fat in our food into body fat generally doesn't happen. But storing excess sugar and carbs from food as body fat happens every day.

The obesity epidemic is not about sugar, it’s about carbs. The amount of sugar (sucrose, the sweet granules) you eat is small, but the amount of sugar aka carbs you eat is large. Visualise a ‘portion’ of sugar (a teaspoon, say) versus a portion of fries.

You don’t need carbs at all. Your body manufactures its own glucose (blood sugar). It’s a process called "gluconeogenesis". This is what happens when blood glucose dips and there is no direct access to glucose via food intake. The body turns on this “backup” process, turning stored fat into usable energy, to get blood glucose levels up to normal levels. Mastering this process is hoe you can engineer precision in weight loss.

There are no “good carbs” and “bad carbs” — it’s more like bad carbs and worse carbs. While ultra-processed carbs and sugars are truly terrible, the so-called good carbs are only a little better. Brown rice, whole wheat pasta are cosmetically different but have a very similar bad effect on your body and energy.

The food pyramid is upside-down, is a health disaster. Because carbohydrates form the base of the pyramid, and form around 50% of a “recommended” diet, we telling people: make the primary driver of obesity the biggest part of your daily diet. It’s crazy. One interesting fact: the first food pyramid came out in 1970s Sweden, as part of an austerity drive. The goal was to get people to economize by adding more cheap grains into their diet. It was optimizing for price, not for health. With low-cost highly-processed carbs now ubiquitous, that food pyramid is actively harmful.

The issue is that people (apart from Superman) don’t have x-ray eyes to see inside their body, and its energy system — blood glucose — or guidance on what to do with that info. As people use Limbo (limborevolution.com) and understand the truth of the above, it becomes fairly easy to adapt habits and change your body’s weight. Try it and see — you’ll be very surprised.