Tiny homes offer the opportunity to streamline the way you live. You can remove unwanted build up from your lifestyle and (hopefully) lower housing costs or turn most of them into investments. Done right, you'll improve your finances and add to your daily joy.
Living in a tiny house creates a challenge: either you live well or you live terribly. And part of living well involves taking an honest look at what's working for you and where things can be improved.
We've always kept a pretty good diet -- mostly whole foods, lots of vegetables, limited amounts of sugar and so on. It worked well for us in our twenties, before having kids, but now we're beginning to age. We can feel the downward trajectory instead of the blissful ignorance of steady improvements.
I don't want my mind or my body to decline faster than they have to. I'd rather continue improving indefinitely.
Over the past few months, we've been testing out new dietary strategies that fit within small space living and center on cognitive, physical, and longevity optimization. We're excited to share some of what we've learned!
So, this is a diet and food post, but it's a lifestyle post above all. This is the diet that we landed on for the same reason that we landed on a tiny home: it allowed us to live our life to the fullest. We were living well before we moved into a tiny house, we were eating well before we started fasting, but both of these things have been game changers on how we live, and this blog is all about sharing those things.
A small caveat: I know there's a ton of dietary advice out there. I worked as a chef for almost a decade and always resisted writing about food because there's already plenty of food writing out there. I also more or less agree with Michael Pollan -- "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." I didn't think too much about there being a "best diet."
I'm not interested in persuading you that our diet is the best, in just the same way that I don't think living in a tiny house is the best form of housing -- it all comes down to your goals.
A Day in the Life
Here's a day-in-the-life of feeding ourselves in our tiny house. Our diet follows more or less a cyclical ketogenic diet combined with intermittent fasting. In other words, we eat mostly fats (80% of our calories), very low carbs (under 50g) and we mostly only eat once a day (within a 3-4 hour window).
Non-Breakfast / Non-Lunch
- 1-2 cups of cold-brew with C8 triglyceride oil
- Electrolyte-enhanced water (it's important to supplement on a ketogenic diet, especially in the beginning)
Dinner
- One or two really big helpings of roasted, low-inflammatory, low-starch vegetables (asparagus, cauliflower, brussels sprouts, delicata squash, etc.)
- One giant pile of salad (mixed greens, cilantro, chopped zucchini, avocados, raw apple cider vinegar)
- One serving of protein (low-mercury fish, grass-fed beef, etc.)
- Occasionally add some more carbs in the form of sweet potato or the like