I woke up on Saturday morning feeling like a monk who had eaten nothing but tea leaves and rice for a week. I was hungry, exhausted and fed-up (pun intended) with my blood type diet.
I never really believed in these health fad diets, as most of them are based on pseudoscience and feigned scientific research, and so I was pleasantly surprised when I checked dadamo.com, the official website for the blood type diet. The better part of their justification for their method actually seemed reputable.
Their basic hypothesis is that different blood types each have slightly different digestive enzymes, which requires them to have different diets. Makes sense. (I did notice later, however, that they had misspelled “cholesterol,” which should have been a warning sign.)
According to the website, people with Type O blood, like me, are more likely to contract certain diseases, such as ulcers and thyroid disorders, because of their higher levels of stomach acid.
The website also tried to explain the various psychological tendencies of Type O individuals, arguing that people with Type O Blood are more likely to drink, gamble and make poor decisions under stress.
Perhaps they failed to consider the fact that eating mung bean porridge for breakfast for an entire week will drive even the most emotionally stable human beings insane.
Pseudo-psychoanalysis aside, my blood type dining experience wasn’t too much better than I’d imagined. Among the things I couldn’t eat were wheat, bread, beans and bacon. I was also supposed to eat as much protein as possible as a substitute for complex carbohydrates.
For breakfast, I usually ate mung bean porridge or, on better days, two slices of gluten-free bread and a boiled egg. Instead of drinking milk, I had a glass of water.
I was hungry by lunchtime, my Thermos stuffed with beans, beef, and rice did little to satisfy my disgruntled stomach.
And I usually did not eat dinner until 7 to 8 hours later. By that point I was too exhausted to care what I ate, whether it was salad, steak, chicken — anything as long as it wasn’t another bowl of mung bean porridge.
Normally, I’d be perfectly willing to limit my carb intake, but running cross-country made doing this particularly painful. I ended up eating bowls of white rice and beef at 9 p.m. (after dinner) just to sate the hunger pains caused by my carb deprivation.
To its credit, the three-week diet did help me lose weight. I’m not sure if it was the cross-country training or the diet or an odd mixture of both, but I’m about five pounds lighter than I was at the beginning of my diet.
Still, correlation, as they say, does not imply causation. As of 2013, there is no empirical or clinical data linking the blood type diet to improved health.
And I can understand why. I did lose weight in the process of dieting, but that wasn’t my original goal. My goal was to feel healthier, and at no point throughout the three weeks did I feel more fit than I normally do.
If anything, I felt worse. A high-protein diet didn’t work wonders for my digestion, and I found myself the victim of late-night hunger pangs.
At the end of three weeks, I had learned that dieting is surprisingly difficult. I now know that I cannot simultaneously limit my dietary options and maintain my sanity for an extended period.
But I did successfully lose weight, even if that wasn’t my original goal, so in a sense the diet succeeded. Given these results, I’d be perfectly willing to try another diet to lose weight.
As long as I don’t have to eat mung bean porridge.
