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and vegetables. This can be juices (free of any artificial ingredients), raw fruits and vegetables, or cooked ones.
     
    As you can see, this diet contains all types of nutrients: carbohydrates, protein, and fat and most of the essential vitamins as well. In addition, if it contains sufficient amounts of unprocessed unsalted cheese in each meal, then this diet provides sufficient attention control. The recommended duration of the antidepressant diet is one to three days, but you can extend it up to 7 days if necessary. As soon as the symptoms of apathy, fatigue, or lowered mood disappear, you can resume another type of a high-protein diet. Or you can return to your usual diet if you don’t have to perform any attention-intensive tasks. Official dietary guidelines such as the USDA’s MyPlate or Harvard’s Healthy Eating Plate [ 61 ] are suitable for everyday life. By the way, in Appendix II , you can find a summary of the effects of various diets described in this book.
    As an aside, people who are vegetarians because they believe that meat makes them feel bad can resume consumption of meat if they use these three simple rules:
     
for every 100 grams (~3 ounces) of meat, add a double amount (200 grams or ~6 ounces) of low-fat milk, cultured milk, unsalted unprocessed cheese, or a mixture thereof to your diet (in a separate meal);
always use high-fat or normal-fat meat and avoid lean meat;
avoid meat cooked at high temperatures (fried, grilled, baked or broiled) and instead use boiled or steamed meat.
     
    In my experience, this approach can make consumption of meat tolerable and free of such negative effects as lowered mood or apathy. You will also enjoy such benefits of meat consumption as good attention control and good work capacity.
    Another way to reduce the negative effects of the proposed protein supplement is to replace red meat (beef, pork, and mutton) with white meat (poultry and fish). In this case, the protein supplement will consist of poultry and fish, which is similar to the preferred source of protein of body-builders. I tolerate this “more vegetarian” protein supplement better, but it is less effective at improving attention. Perhaps because the quality of protein is lower. You can take this approach a step further and exclude poultry and keep fish and nuts. Keep in mind that fish may contain mercury as a pollutant and high consumption of fish is not appropriate for everybody. You can also use an all-vegetarian protein supplement that consists of unsalted unprocessed cheese mixed with cultured milk and ground nuts.
    How much fat meat contains determines how well people tolerate meat-based diets. My experience and some studies suggest that large amounts of lean meat can have adverse effects, such as upset stomach, diarrhea, and headache. Therefore, in the context of high-protein diets, meat and poultry should contain sufficient amounts of fat: greater than 7% for poultry and greater than 10-15% for red meat. The fat content of fish does not make any difference. This recommendation goes against the traditional official guidelines that you should limit animal fats. We reviewed the subject of animal fat in detail in Chapter One . If you feel well on high-protein diets that are based on lean meat, then you can stick with low-fat diets and ignore my advice regarding animal fat.
    My experience and experience of the many followers of the Atkins diet suggest that, in the context of a low-carbohydrate diet, people tolerate large amounts of meat well. Low-carb diets are also known as ketogenic diets. Although people tolerate ketogenic diets well and these diets help to lose weight, in my experience, they are not the best diets for performance of mental tasks, such as reading and writing. Hence my view is that high-protein diets that contain sufficient amounts of carbohydrates are more effective at improving mental performance than ketogenic diets. Recent research supports this opinion [ 933 , 941 ].
    Some people