THE BUFFET DIET

So I'm a software engineer, building startups, training weighted calisthenics like 3-4 times a week and gymnastics another 3, and at some point I went full carnivore because that's just where the rabbit hole took me. And here's the thing about carnivore that nobody warns you about — you just stop being hungry all the time. Like, the constant background noise of "I should eat something" goes quiet. You eat a pile of meat, you're done for hours. Sometimes you look up and it's been a full day and you forgot to eat and you feel... fine? Better than fine actually. Sharp. So naturally you start pushing it.

First I tried 24 hours. Nothing. Easy. Then 3 days, just water. Felt kind of amazing honestly, like this weird clarity kicks in around day 2 that I can't really explain to people who haven't done it. Then I did 5 days. Five days no food. And somewhere around day 4 I remembered — oh right, I have a half marathon in two days.

But here's where the actual problem was. Carnivore plus serious training means you need a LOT of protein. Like genuinely absurd amounts of meat. And I'm running companies, I'm in the gym constantly, I do not have time to come home and pan-sear 1.5 kilos of steak every single day. And sourcing that volume of quality meat from the grocery store was getting expensive fast. So the diet was right, the training was right, but the logistics of actually feeding myself were completely broken.

And the whole time there are these two all-you-can-eat buffets sitting right there, one on each side of the road next to my office. I'd walked past them literally every day for months without thinking about it. Then one day I'm 36 hours into a fast and something just clicks — wait. Unlimited meat. Cooked for me. No cleanup. $15. I walked in, sat down, ate what was probably an irresponsible amount of salmon and roast beef, walked out, and didn't want food for the rest of the day. Just... done. One meal. Full. No dishes in the sink. No tupperware situation. Nothing.

So then I got my best friend involved because that's what you do when you find something good — you drag someone into it. He was overweight, kind of stuck in the usual cycle, and I was like, just come eat lunch with me. Every day. We'll make it a thing. And it became this whole... game between us. Like two engineers who maybe have too much competitive drive sitting across from each other at a buffet trying to figure out the meta. Which stations do you hit first? What's the protein density play? How do you extract maximum value before your stomach taps out? We were basically running optimization problems on lunch. It was genuinely fun. Great food, good company, ridiculous conversations about buffet strategy. Every single day.

And then — and this is the part where my brain kind of broke — I looked at my bank statement. And I wasn't spending more on food. I was spending less. No groceries. No takeout. No food waste rotting in the fridge. Just one buffet per day. And immediately the engineer brain goes: okay well what if I eat every second day? Same amount of food when I eat, same satisfaction, but now the cost literally cuts in half. There aren't many things in life where you can consume the exact same quality and quantity of food and just... halve the bill. That's not a diet trick, that's arbitrage.

So I tested it. Every other day. Then pushed to every third day because why not. Three days without food was kind of the ceiling for me — past that it stops being a protocol and starts being an ordeal. And honestly even every other day isn't exactly a party. But the time you get back is insane. No cooking, no cleaning, no grocery runs, no meal prep Sunday. All those hours just... go back into your business. Into training. Into your actual life. And that's how this whole thing started. Not with some grand plan. Just a hungry engineer who noticed the buffet across the street was a better deal than his own kitchen.

Before we go further I need you to actually look at what you're doing right now with food. Not what you think you're doing. What you're actually doing. Because most people have never stopped to audit this and when they do it's genuinely horrifying.

The food pyramid was a psyop. "Breakfast is the most important meal of the day" was a marketing slogan from a cereal company. Six small meals a day to "stoke your metabolic fire" is propaganda that the snack industry funded into existence. None of this is ancestral. None of this is how humans ate for 200,000 years. Your great-great-grandfather didn't have a meal prep container or a scheduled 10am snack. He ate when food was available and he performed when it wasn't. He was fine. He was probably in better shape than you. Sorry.

Here's what "normal eating" actually looks like for most people. You wake up, eat something out of obligation (or skip it and feel guilty, as if toast is a moral requirement), go to work, eat a sad desk lunch from a plastic container you packed the night before in a ritual you call "meal prep" but which more accurately resembles packing a school lunchbox for yourself as an adult. Then you come home exhausted, stare into the fridge for ten minutes as if the ingredients might spontaneously assemble themselves, cook something mediocre or spend $28 on pad thai from an app, clean up, go to sleep, and do it all again tomorrow. And the day after. And the day after that. For the rest of your life.

Lets look at the actual numbers because until you see them written down you will not believe how much of your life you are donating to food logistics:

Thirteen to twenty hours a week. That is a part-time job. You are working a part-time job whose entire output is feeding yourself the same 5-6 meals on rotation, half of which get eaten standing over the kitchen counter while you scroll your phone. You're doing this every week. You will do this every week until you die. And nobody has stopped to ask if maybe there's a better way to do this.

And restaurants? Sure, someone else cooks for you. But you're paying $20-40 for a portion that was designed by an accountant, not a chef. 200 grams of protein, a decorative sprig of parsley, and the privilege of tipping 20% for someone to carry it 8 meters. Three meals a day at restaurants is $60-120 per day. $1,800-3,600 per month. Nobody is doing that. And if they are, they should be reading this guide even more urgently.

The system is broken. The time cost is broken. The financial cost is broken. And somehow the food still isn't even that good. There has to be a better protocol. Keep reading.

So here's the thing that I genuinely cannot believe more people haven't figured out. Buffets solve every single problem I just described. Not partially. Not "kind of." Completely. Zero cooking, infinite variety, total portion control, better nutrition than what most people eat at home, and the cost is lower than your grocery bill. The fact that this isn't mainstream knowledge tells me the food industry has done an incredible job making you feel weird about eating at buffets. That stigma is protecting their business model. You are about to see through it.

"But buffets are where people go to get fat!" Right. And gyms are where people go to get hurt. Knives are what people use to cut themselves. The tool is neutral. The strategy is everything. Most people go to buffets and load up on bread, fried rice, desserts, and fountain soda. Those people are playing a completely different game than you. They're subsidizing your sashimi habit and they don't even know it.

Time math. Buffet protocol: walk there (10 min), eat (30-45 min), walk back (10 min). About 1 hour per eating event. Normal eating: 2-3 hours per day minimum between planning, shopping, cooking, and cleaning. That's 10+ hours a week you just got back. Every week. What are you going to do with an extra 10 hours? I built a company with mine. You can do whatever you want. The point is those hours exist now and they didn't before.

This is where the whole thing clicks.

The buffet alone is already a strong protocol. But when you stack it with fasting, it becomes something else entirely. This is the combination that sounds made up when you explain it to people, and then they see your results and your bank statement and get very quiet.

Intermittent fasting is not a diet. It's a timing protocol. Not about what you eat — about when you eat. You cycle between eating and not eating. That's it. Humans have been doing this for the entire history of the species. Your ancestors didn't eat 6 small meals a day while being chased across the savanna. They ate when food was available, they fasted when it wasn't, and their bodies ran beautifully on both. Your body is the same hardware. It's designed for this. The "eat every 3 hours or your metabolism shuts down" thing is straight up propaganda from the snack industry. Your metabolism doesn't shut down. It shifts gears. That's what metabolic flexibility IS.

For me it happened naturally through carnivore. You eat just meat, you stop being hungry every 2 hours, your eating window naturally compresses. First you're eating twice a day, then once, then you're doing 36 hours without food and feeling better than you ever did eating 3 meals. Then you do 3 days. Then 5 days. Then you remember you have a half marathon and run it fasted. And at that point you realize — oh, the body is WAY more capable than the food industry wants you to believe. They need you eating constantly. Your biology does not.

You're not starving. Starving is having no food. This is choosing not to eat because in a few hours you're going to sit down at an all-you-can-eat buffet and demolish an irresponsible amount of premium protein. That is not deprivation. That is anticipation. That is the stack.

I'm about to show you numbers so embarrassingly simple that you'll feel personally attacked for every grocery haul you've ever posted on Instagram. We're talking about the financial case for buffet-based nutrition, and honestly, the fact that more people haven't figured this out tells me the meal prep industrial complex has been running one of the most successful psyops of our generation.

Let's start with what most people are doing. You go to the grocery store, you buy chicken breast at $5/lb, some vegetables that will rot in your crisper drawer within 4 days (we both know this is true), rice, eggs, maybe some overpriced protein bars because the packaging had a picture of a shredded guy on it. You're spending $500-800 a month on groceries. And that's BEFORE we talk about the time cost. Meal prepping takes 3-4 hours per week minimum. At even $20/hour for your time, that's another $240-320/month. You're bleeding close to a thousand dollars a month to eat the same sad tupperware chicken every day. And you think THIS is the optimized path?

Now let me show you what happens when you stop playing their game.

But it gets even more ridiculous when you pair this with extended fasting windows.

Here's the part that really makes my brain light up though. The value arbitrage. When you sit down at a buffet and pay $15-20, the restaurant is pricing that ticket based on the AVERAGE customer. The average customer fills up on bread, drowns themselves in fountain soda, eats two plates of fried rice, then grabs a slice of cake and waddles out. That customer cost them maybe $4-5 in food. You are not that customer. You are walking in and systematically extracting $30-40 worth of premium protein — sashimi, carved meats, shellfish, grilled fish. You're not a customer. You're a liability on their balance sheet. You are the reason their food cost percentage keeps the manager up at night.

Think about it like this. The guy next to you eating his body weight in lo mein is literally subsidizing your sashimi habit. He's paying $18 to eat $3 worth of noodles so that the restaurant can afford to put out the salmon that you're about to inhale. This is wealth transfer, but for macros. You should send him a thank you card honestly.

The Numbers, Visualized

I know I keep throwing numbers at you, so I built some charts. Adjust the buffet price slider to match your local area. These numbers are real. I stared at spreadsheets for an uncomfortable amount of time to verify them. My therapist says the spreadsheets are "a coping mechanism." I say they're proof.

Now here's where it gets truly deranged in the best possible way. What if — and stay with me here — you took the money you're not spending on groceries and cooking, and invested it instead? Into an S&P 500 index fund, for example. The thing that has historically returned about 10% annually. I made a chart for this too, because apparently that is what I do now. I make charts about buffets and compound interest. This is my life. I am not complaining.

Read that final number again. By not cooking — by eating at a $15 buffet instead of spending $700/month on groceries and kitchen time — and investing the difference, you could be sitting on a five- or six-figure portfolio in 10 years. Your unused oven isn't just a place where a spider lives. It's a wealth generation strategy. I told my financial advisor about this. He was quiet for a very long time. Then he asked for the name of my buffet.

Listen to me very carefully. The buffet is not your friend. The buffet is a business, and that business has one goal: make you fill up on the cheapest possible ingredients so they can pocket the difference between what you paid and what you actually consumed. They have literally hired psychologists and behavioral economists to design the layout, the lighting, the plate sizes — all of it engineered to make you a cheap date. This is a psyop, and you've been walking into it with zero counter-intelligence training. Until now.

I've identified 7 tactics they use against you. Learn these, internalize them, and you will never fall for their tricks again. You'll walk through that buffet line like a Navy SEAL walking through a room of laser tripwires — calm, calculated, untouchable.

Alright. You understand the science, you know the financial case, you can see through every trick they throw at you. Now it's time for the actual playbook. These are my 8 non-negotiable rules for absolutely dominating a buffet visit. I've refined these over hundreds of buffet sessions and I can tell you with complete confidence — this is the most efficient way to feed yourself at an all-you-can-eat establishment. Follow these and you will walk out every single time with 150+ grams of premium protein, a full micronutrient profile, and the quiet satisfaction of someone who just gamed a system that was designed to game you.

Your buffet is your kitchen now. Let that reframe settle in. You wouldn't build a kitchen with a broken stove and a mini fridge from a college dorm, so stop treating buffet selection like an afterthought. The quality of your buffet directly determines the quality of your nutrition, your results, and frankly, your entire experience with this protocol. Picking the wrong buffet is like buying a gym membership to a Planet Fitness when there's a powerlifting gym down the street. Technically the same category, but the outcomes couldn't be more different.

After years of field research (yes, I'm calling it that), I've developed the definitive tier list. This is the buffet meta, and if you disagree with any of it, you haven't been to enough buffets.

Now that you know WHAT to look for, here's HOW to evaluate a specific buffet before you commit. Run through this checklist and if a place hits 6 out of 8, it's worth your time.

One more thing that nobody talks about — the multi-buffet rotation strategy. This is game theory applied to eating. Don't go to the same buffet every single time. Rotate between 2-3 spots. Here's why: first, variety prevents palate fatigue. If you eat the same sushi buffet every day for a month, you're going to start dreading it no matter how good it is. Second, different buffets have different protein strengths — your Korean BBQ spot covers your red meat days, your sushi buffet covers your fish days, and your Indian spot covers your poultry days. Third, and this is the game theory part — if you show up to the same buffet every single day and consistently crush their premium protein, they WILL notice. I've heard stories. Managers adjusting portion sizes, moving the sashimi to a request-only basis, suddenly "running out" of crab legs when they see a regular walk in. Rotate your spots and you stay under the radar. You're a ghost. Different face at each location. Maximum extraction, minimum suspicion.

Okay so think of these like difficulty settings in a video game. You wouldn't boot up Elden Ring on NG+7 your first playthrough. Same energy here. You pick the level that matches where you're at right now, you run it until it feels easy, then you level up. Or you don't. Some people stay on Protocol 1 forever and still get 80% of the results. There's no wrong answer here. The only wrong move is not picking one.

When I started this whole thing I went straight to Protocol 3 because I have no chill, and honestly it was fine — but I'm also the guy who did a 5-day water fast before a half marathon. You probably want to ease in. That's smart. Be smarter than me.

Fine. You want citations. You need a guy in a lab coat to tell you it's okay before you'll try something that humans have been doing for 200,000 years. I get it. Society broke your trust in your own body. So here — let me give you the science so you can stop overthinking and start eating at buffets.

The core mechanism is so simple it's almost insulting: caloric restriction through meal frequency reduction. Your stomach is a physical organ with a physical size. It can only hold so much food before it says "we're done here." When you eat one big meal instead of three medium ones plus snacks, you naturally consume fewer total calories. Not because you're trying. Not because you're counting. Because your stomach literally runs out of room. It's not willpower. It's plumbing.

And before you ask — "but won't I just overeat at the buffet and cancel it out?" No. Research on meal frequency reduction consistently shows that people don't fully compensate. You might eat a bigger lunch than normal, sure. But you won't eat three meals worth of food in one sitting. Your stomach physically won't let you. And when you're prioritizing protein — which is the most satiating macronutrient by a mile — you hit the wall even faster. Your body knows when it's had enough. The problem was never that you couldn't trust your body. The problem was that you were eating so frequently your hunger signals were completely scrambled. Fix the frequency, fix the signals.

Keto, Carnivore, Hormones, and Why Your Body Is a Machine You're Not Reading the Manual For

I mentioned earlier that I have a background in engineering. What I didn't mention is that I have spent an unreasonable number of hours reading published research papers on human metabolism while sitting in buffet restaurants. The staff at my regular spot has seen me eating salmon with one hand and scrolling PubMed with the other. They no longer ask questions. Here is what I have learned.

The Buffet Diet x Ketosis

When you fast for 16-48 hours, your body depletes its glycogen stores and switches to burning fat for fuel — a metabolic state called ketosis. Your liver converts fatty acids into ketone bodies (beta-hydroxybutyrate, acetoacetate, and acetone), which your brain and muscles can use as an extremely efficient energy source. This is not a fad diet concept. This is biochemistry. Your body has been doing this since before humans invented agriculture.

Here's why this matters for the Buffet Diet: by the time you walk into that buffet after a 24-48 hour fast, you are in deep ketosis. Your body has been running on its own stored fat for hours or days. Your metabolic machinery is primed for fat oxidation. When you then eat a high-protein, moderate-fat, low-carb meal at the buffet (which is exactly what happens when you follow the Protein First Protocol and skip the bread), you stay in or near ketosis. You're not spiking your insulin. You're not crashing your blood sugar. You're fueling the machine with premium protein while it continues to burn stored fat in the background.

Carnivore Diet Compatibility

The carnivore diet — eating exclusively animal products — has gained a devoted following among biohackers who report reduced inflammation, improved autoimmune symptoms, and enhanced mental clarity. The Buffet Diet is essentially carnivore-compatible by default if you follow the protocol. Your first plate is 100% animal protein. Your second plate can be more protein. A Brazilian Rodizio buffet is literally a carnivore diet delivery system on swords. A sushi buffet is a pescatarian carnival. A hotel brunch with an omelette station and a carving counter is carnivore paradise.

The beauty of the buffet is that it doesn't force a dietary ideology on you. Carnivore? Load up on the meat station. Keto? Skip the rice, grab the salmon and vegetables. Even if you're doing something like the vertical diet (red meat + white rice for bodybuilders) or paleo(no grains, no dairy), a well-chosen buffet accommodates all of it. You are the architect of your plate. The buffet is merely the supply chain.

The Sugar Problem (And How the Buffet Diet Solves It)

The average person consumes approximately 77 grams of added sugar per day — over three times what the WHO recommends. This constant sugar bombardment creates a metabolic disaster: chronic elevated insulin, insulin resistance, inflammation, visceral fat accumulation, and eventually metabolic syndrome. It's the quiet engine behind the obesity epidemic, type 2 diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. It is, by most reasonable scientific accounts, the single biggest dietary problem of our time.

The Buffet Diet attacks this problem from two angles simultaneously. First, fasting resets your insulin sensitivity. Every 24-48 hour fast gives your pancreas a break and allows your cells to re-sensitize to insulin. Studies show that intermittent fasting can improve insulin sensitivity by 20-31% within weeks. Second, when you follow the Protein First Protocol at the buffet, you're naturally avoiding the highest-sugar items (bread, desserts, sodas, sauces). You're replacing a sugar-heavy Standard American Diet with a protein-rich, whole-food feast. Your average daily sugar intake on the Buffet Diet — especially on the Warrior protocol — can drop below 15 grams. That's an 80% reduction. Your pancreas sends its regards.

Testosterone, Growth Hormone, and the Fasting-Feast Cycle

This section is going to make the biohacker bros very excited, and I want to be responsible about it, so let me cite actual research. A study published in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism found that short-term fasting (24-48 hours) can increase luteinizing hormone (LH) by up to 67% in men, which is a precursor to testosterone production. Another study showed that 24-hour fasting periods increased growth hormone secretion by an average of 2,000%(yes, twenty times). Human growth hormone is responsible for muscle protein synthesis, fat mobilization, and cellular repair. It is, in biohacker terms, the good stuff.

Now combine that with breaking your fast at a buffet loaded with zinc-rich red meat(critical for testosterone production), omega-3 fatty acids from salmon and tuna(reduces SHBG, freeing up more bioavailable testosterone), cholesterol from eggs and shellfish(the literal building block of steroid hormones), and vitamin D from fatty fish (linked to testosterone levels in multiple studies). You're not just eating. You're running a targeted hormonal optimization protocol. At a buffet. For $15.

Macro Math: What a Buffet Diet Day Actually Looks Like

People ask me: "What are your actual macros?" Fair question. Let me walk you through a typical OMAD buffet meal, tracked to the gram, because I am that person.

151 grams of protein in a single meal. That exceeds the daily recommended intake for a 75kg adult (which is about 60g by RDA standards, or 120-150g by athletic/bodybuilding standards). You hit your protein target in one sitting. The calorie total? About 1,130 kcal. Even if you're generous with portions and add a dessert, you're looking at 1,400-1,800 kcal for the day. The average maintenance calorie requirement for an adult male is 2,200-2,500 kcal. You are in a caloric deficit by default, while eating until you're comfortably full at an all-you-can-eat buffet. Let that mathematical absurdity sink in.

On the 48-hour Warrior protocol, this gets even more extreme. You're consuming ~1,200-1,800 calories every other day, which averages to 600-900 calories per day. That's a massive deficit. Combined with elevated growth hormone (preserving muscle), ketosis (burning fat), and high protein intake (maintaining lean mass), you get what bodybuilders spend thousands on supplements trying to achieve: simultaneous fat loss and muscle preservation. Except you're doing it at a sushi buffet for the price of a medium pizza. I genuinely cannot think of anything funnier than that.

Every single time I explain this protocol to someone, I get the same five objections. Like clockwork. It's actually kind of beautiful how predictable it is. So let me just burn through all of them right now so we can move on with our lives.

Spoiler: none of them hold up. Not even a little bit.

Theory is done. Objections are handled. Science is covered. You have zero excuses left. Here's what you actually do this week, day by day, step by step. Start slow and steady. Don't overthink it. The protocol is simple enough that the hardest part is literally just walking through the door of a buffet for the first time and realizing this is your life now.

When I did my first week I was basically vibrating with energy by day 5. I became a human golden retriever. Started jogging in place. Calling all my friends and family. Bursting with this feel-good, optimistic energy that I genuinely did not expect. You might have a different experience. But you won't know until you start.

The protocol works. The math works. The science works. You've got all three now. There's nothing left to figure out. The only variable is whether you actually walk through the door.

People will tell you this is crazy. These are the same people spending $800/month on groceries and throwing away a third of it. The same people who spend more time in the kitchen per week than they spend exercising per month. The same people eating the same four meals on rotation and calling it "cooking." Meanwhile you're sitting at a clean table, eating world-class sashimi and prime rib for $15, and walking out with your entire evening free. One of us is crazy. It's not you anymore.