8 Things I've Changed My Mind On

Why Black-and-White Thinking Nearly Got Me Stuck

I used to think Peaters were the chosen ones.

We had “secret knowledge” about metabolism, hormones, and nutrition that made us superior to everyone else. Or at least, that’s what I believed back in 2017 when I became a full-blown Ray Peat disciple.

For five years, I lived inside that bubble – obsessively reading Ray’s articles, Georgi’s breakdowns, and endless debates on the Ray Peat Forum. We dismissed anything that didn’t fit the narrative as “wrong,” and we preached black-and-white rules: X is bad, Y is good, always.

Nothing particularly bad happened to me personally – I was doing fine – but I watched a lot of Peaters get wrecked. Many became obese, insulin resistant, and metabolically worse off by following dogma instead of listening to their bodies.

Now, I’m not saying no one should listen to Ray Peat – he was right about a lot of things. But sometimes his teachings, when taken out of context or without truly understanding his nuance, can lead to black-and-white thinking. Peat himself was very nuanced – it was often the community (and my own initial mindset) that turned ideas into dogma.

That’s when I started asking questions.

I dug into research outside the echo chamber, experimented on myself, and slowly realized just how much nuance there is.

Health isn’t black and white. What destroys one person can save another. And following rigid dogma – without asking why – can make people do crazy, even harmful things.

So after years of reading, experimenting, and questioning everything I thought I knew, here’s what I’ve changed my mind on.

Some of these shifts happened years ago, others are more recent. Here they are – in no particular order.