The Pro-Metabolic Diet: What It Is, the Food List, and What I Eat in a Day

A pro-metabolic diet is a way of eating built to raise your metabolic rate instead of lowering it.

Most diets work by taking something away. Fewer calories, fewer carbs, fewer meals. Pro-metabolic eating goes the other way. You give your cells enough easy fuel and enough minerals that the body stops running on stress hormones.

This is how I eat. Below is what it is, where it comes from, the food list, a sample day, a few recipes, and what the research says for and against it.

What is pro-metabolic eating?

The idea is simple. Your metabolic rate is how fast your cells turn food into energy. When it is high you are warm, you sleep deeply, your digestion moves and your mood is stable. When it is low the body leans on cortisol and adrenaline to keep blood sugar up.

Pro-metabolic eating tries to keep the first state going. In practice that means:

• Carbohydrates as the main fuel, mostly from fruit, juice, milk, honey, sugar and potatoes.
• Enough protein, balanced with gelatin.
• Saturated fats like butter and coconut oil, and as little polyunsaturated fat (PUFA) as possible.
• Plenty of minerals: salt, calcium, potassium and magnesium.
• Eating often. No fasting and no skipped breakfast.

It is not a branded plan and nobody owns it. There is no calorie target and no list of banned food groups besides seed oils.

Where it comes from

Almost all of it traces back to the biologist Ray Peat. He never published a diet, but his articles keep returning to the same foods: milk, cheese, fruit and orange juice, eggs, gelatin, shellfish, coconut oil, salt and coffee.

I went through his articles and listed every food he recommended and avoided, with the article each one comes from: the Ray Peat diet and the Ray Peat food list.

One warning from me. People add 300 g of sugar on top of what they already eat, gain 20 pounds, and call it peating. That is not what he wrote. His work was about cell biology, and the food was a consequence of it.

The pro-metabolic food list

Eat freely

• Fruit and juice: orange juice, ripe fruit, coconut water.
• Dairy: milk, cheese, cottage cheese, ice cream without gums.
• Sugars: honey, white sugar, maple syrup. I also drink regular Coke.
• Eggs.
• Gelatin and broth: beef gelatin, bone broth, slow-cooked meat on the bone.
• Seafood: shellfish and lean white fish.
• Roots: potatoes, well cooked. Carrots, raw or cooked.
• Mushrooms, cooked.
• Fats: butter, coconut oil, beef and lamb fat, cocoa butter.
• Salt, to taste, and more than you think.
• Coffee, with sugar and with food.

Eat some

• Muscle meat: beef and lamb, eaten with gelatin or broth.
• Liver: about once a week.
• White rice and sourdough bread, if they sit well with you.
• Olive oil, in small amounts.

Avoid

• Seed oils: soybean, corn, canola, sunflower, safflower, cottonseed, grapeseed. The full list is in PUFA foods to avoid.
• Fish oil and other omega-3 supplements.
• Nuts, seeds and their butters.
• Soy.
• Beans and whole grains.
• Raw salads and fermentable fiber, especially if you bloat.
• Plain water in large amounts with no salt or sugar in it.

What I eat in a day

I eat around 400 to 600 g of carbohydrates a day, spread out so that something comes in every hour or two. This is a normal day for me:

• On waking: 300 ml of warm milk with 20 g of beef gelatin and a few spoons of sugar. A pinch of salt.
• Breakfast: 4 eggs with cooked carrots and mushrooms, salted heavily. Orange juice. Coffee with sugar.
• Mid-morning: cottage cheese with honey, or fruit.
• Lunch: beef stew with mashed potatoes.
• Afternoon: juice, fruit or a Coke. A raw carrot.
• Around training: carbs before, and a sugary drink during.
• Dinner: meat or shellfish with potatoes or rice, cooked in butter or coconut oil.
• Before bed: warm milk with gelatin and sugar again.

My goal in the first hour after waking is about 100 g of sugar with some gelatin and salt. Your liver's glycogen is at its lowest in the morning, and that meal is what takes over from cortisol.

Simple pro-metabolic recipes

Gelatin milk

Warm 300 ml of milk. Stir in 20 g of beef gelatin until it dissolves. Add sugar or honey to taste. I drink it when I wake up and an hour before bed. Two cups cover a big part of my protein for the day.

Raw carrot salad

Grate one raw carrot lengthwise. Add salt, a spoon of vinegar and a spoon of coconut oil or olive oil. That is the whole recipe, and it comes straight from Ray Peat's articles. The background is in Ray Peat's carrot salad.

Eggs with carrots and mushrooms

Cook sliced carrots and white button mushrooms in butter until soft. Add 4 eggs. Salt heavily. Have it with orange juice, because protein alone can pull blood sugar down.

Salted juice

Orange juice with a pinch of salt. In the summer I add 5 g of salt to a liter of whatever I am drinking.

Beef stew with mashed potatoes

Slow-cook beef on the bone until the broth turns to jelly when it cools. That jelly is gelatin. Serve it over potatoes mashed with butter and milk.

What the studies say

Nobody has run a trial of a pro-metabolic diet as a whole. What exists are studies on its separate parts.

• Carbs and muscle. Competitive natural bodybuilders spent two months on a ketogenic diet or a normal high-carb diet. Lean mass rose significantly only in the high-carb group. Strength went up the same in both. (Paoli 2021)
• Carbs and lean mass in women. In a controlled feeding trial in healthy young women, a ketogenic diet reduced lean mass by 1.45 kg and fat mass by 0.66 kg compared with the control diet, at the same calories. (Burén 2024)
• Carbs, cortisol and testosterone. A meta-analysis found that resting cortisol rises during the first three weeks of a low-carb diet and then returns to baseline, while cortisol after exercise stays higher. High-protein low-carb diets lowered men's resting testosterone by a large amount. (Whittaker 2022)
• Carbs and thyroid. Seven healthy adults ate low-carb diets for a week. Their T3, the active thyroid hormone, fell on both versions. (Ullrich 1985)
• Sugar and stress. In a two-week trial, women drinking sugar-sweetened drinks had a smaller cortisol response to a stress test than women drinking aspartame-sweetened drinks. (Tryon 2015)
• Carbs and body fat. In a classic overfeeding study, men could store roughly 500 g of extra glycogen before the body began turning carbohydrate into fat in any real amount. (Acheson 1988)

The honest part

Read the same studies from the other side.

• In the bodybuilder study the keto group lost more body fat and had lower triglycerides, glucose, insulin and inflammatory markers.
• In the overfeeding study, once glycogen was full, about 475 g of carbohydrate a day became about 150 g of fat a day. Carbs can be stored as fat. It just takes a lot.
• The authors of the sugar and cortisol trial read their result as a reason sugar is hard to quit under stress, not as a reason to drink it.
• Large population studies link one daily serving of sugar-sweetened drinks to an 18% higher rate of type 2 diabetes, 13% after adjusting for body fat. Fruit juice showed a smaller link. (Imamura 2015)
• Mainstream guidelines recommend the opposite of this diet on sugar, saturated fat and seed oils.

So this is my reading of the physiology and my own experience, not a proven protocol. If you have diabetes, do not change your carbohydrate intake without your doctor.

How to start

1. Swap the fats first. Cook with butter or coconut oil and stop eating seed oils. This is the change I would make even if you ignore everything else.
2. Eat breakfast. Something sweet with protein within an hour of waking.
3. Add gelatin. 10 to 20 g a day, in milk, coffee or broth.
4. Salt your food until it tastes good.
5. Raise carbs slowly. Add fruit, juice and milk over weeks, and watch your weight, your sleep and your body temperature.

If food sits in your gut and you bloat, fix that first. The plan is in How to fix leaky gut.

Ray Peat called vitamin E and salt the safest supplements, and vitamin E is the one I take against the PUFA already stored in my tissues.

E-Complete Oral Supplementskin.foodView product

Quick answers

What is a pro-metabolic diet?

A way of eating meant to raise the metabolic rate: carbohydrates from fruit, milk, honey and sugar as the main fuel, enough protein balanced with gelatin, saturated fats instead of seed oils, plenty of salt and minerals, and regular meals with no fasting.

What is pro-metabolic eating based on?

Mostly on the articles of the biologist Ray Peat, who wrote about thyroid function, stress hormones and cell energy. He never published a formal diet, so the popular versions are interpretations of his work.

What foods are pro-metabolic?

Fruit and orange juice, milk, cheese, eggs, gelatin and broth, shellfish, potatoes, butter, coconut oil, honey, sugar, salt and coffee.

What foods do you avoid on a pro-metabolic diet?

Seed oils such as soybean, corn, canola and sunflower oil, fish oil, nuts and seeds, soy, beans, whole grains and large raw salads.

Will a pro-metabolic diet make you gain weight?

It can if you simply add sugar on top of your current food. In overfeeding studies, carbohydrate was turned into body fat once glycogen stores were full. Raise carbohydrates gradually and keep fat intake moderate.

Is the pro-metabolic diet proven?

No. There is no clinical trial of the diet as a whole. Individual parts have some support, such as better lean mass on high-carb diets than on ketogenic diets, and mainstream guidelines disagree with its position on sugar and saturated fat.