If you want to lose weight and don’t do well on a keto diet, I have an answer that could be just the ticket! I lost about 20 lbs on this diet back in 2011 and recently remembered how well it worked and started it back. It’s from Tim Ferris’s book The 4-Hour Body, and it’s a slow-carb diet as opposed to an extremely low-carb diet like Keto. Some people just don’t do well on too few carbs, so this one gives you slow-burning carbs instead of cutting them dramatically. Here are the basics of the diet, which you follow 6 days a week (I’ll talk about Day 7 at the end):
1. Ingest 30 grams of protein within 30 minutes of waking up. This is to jumpstart your metabolism. If you don’t feel like eating a meal like 3 eggs, lentils, and spinach (Tim’s go-to) so early, you can do what I do and use a protein shake.
2. Avoid “white” or even whole grain starchy carbs…. No bread, pasta, rice, potatoes, or grains. The carbs you will eat with each meal include lentils and beans of any kind. These are the slow carbs that keep your blood sugar balanced.
3. Don’t drink calories. Drink lots of water or naturally calorie-free herbal, green, or black tea. The exception to this is that you may have a glass of dry red wine at night.
4. Don’t eat any fruit, because fructose can lead to fat gain easily. You’ll get the vitamins you need from veggies.
5. Eat the same meals over and over, especially for breakfast and lunch.
6. If you’re hungry at night, you can eat a spoon of nut butter. But Ferris says that if you find yourself getting hungry, your meals weren’t big enough. You do not count calories on this diet!
7. Now we talk about Day 7! On Day 7 (which can be any consistent day you choose), Ferris says “go nuts!” He says you can eat tons of sugar and unhealthy foods, which I would not agree with. The point of Day 7 is to eat a lot of calories, so your thyroid doesn’t down-regulate your metabolism. I plan to eat fruit, gluten-free pizza, potato, etc, in addition to proteins and veggies… not the ice cream, cookies, donuts, etc that Ferris talks about. No thanks to a sugar hangover the next day 😉 But you should definitely eat a LOT of food.
This sounds crazy, but for many people it really does work! Tim is a good writer, so if you want to know more you can check out The 4-Hour Body. He talks about things like minimal exercise for maximal results and even how to improve your libido. He’s an experimenter and biohacker, so keep in mind the principles of good health and modify some of his ideas.
I’m hoping this works as well for me this time as it did in 2011! I’m on Day 3, feel good, and am looking forward to Day 7, lol! Let me know if you try it out and what you think.
Disclaimer:
This should go without saying, but I’ll say it anyway: We are not medical doctors and nothing in this newsletter should be taken as medical advice. Discuss all medical issues with your own MD.
