The Diet: What, Why and How

So, what am I actually doing?  What are the rules and what can I eat?


As mentioned before, the key to this is actually just being more conscious of what we eat.  "Flash Dieting" is the process of stopping and considering what you're going to put in your mouth.  There's nothing quite like sharing it with the world to make you stop and reconsider!  The "what gets measured gets managed" cliché is what I'm leveraging here.  If you want to find out more about this the 4 Hour Body book and blog by Tim Ferriss is a great resource, and there's also a very interesting community called Quantified Self.


However, the devil is in the detail as they say, and most people want some basic instructions.  As I mentioned before the main battleground is that of refined carbohydrates and sugars.  My aim is to reduce these down to as little as possible, similar to an Atkins or Paleo diet approach and as recommended in books such as The Diet Delusion by Gary Taubes, Body by Science by Dr. Doug McGuff.  I'm taking some of the advice from 4 Hour Body as well as the amount of self-experimentation Tim has done is spectacular and pretty inspiring!


So here's my rules:

• No "white" carbs
• No grains
• No fruit
• No dairy
• No calories via drink
• One "cheat" day per week

"What's left?" I hear you ask...  My diet is primarily made up of:

• Meat and fish
• Lentils, beans and pulses
• Vegetables
• Nuts and seeds
• Herbs and spices
• Water, teas and coffee

"Why would you do that!?!"

Well, the aim is hormonal control.  Most people have heard of insulin and associate it with diabetes.  This hormone regulates blood sugar levels, and in short, when it needs to it will convert excess sugars to fat.  At the same time, it will lock down fat metabolism.  This means that when you are active (even in the gym on the cross-trainer in your "fat burning" zone!!) you will not use fat as an energy source as the body is trying to use up the excess sugar to power your activity.  If your aim is to lose weight, it simply won't happen with insulin active in your system!

The other things about this approach mean that your energy levels and vitality will be better regulated during the day, which is something most of us struggle with.  It breaks the cycle of eating refined carbs, feeling tired and hungry, eating more refined carbs and caffeine as a pick-me-up, so on and so forth.  This puts a lot of strain on your endocrine system and therefore your health.  Speaking of health, the ability to reduce your risk of diabetes, obesity and subsequent heart disease can only be a good thing, right?  Also, when you consider most people's food allergies they are related to higher concentration of sugars in processed foods.  Gluten intolerance?  Think refined white grains.  Lactose intolerance? Think pasteurised dairy products (people often find they can tolerate raw dairy, because the heating process used in pasteurisation degrades the milk proteins and increases the availability of the milk sugar "lactose").

In order to control insulin response it is worth considering two measures; glycaemic index/load (GI/GL) and Insulin Index (II).  These measures are of the speed with which foods affect blood sugar levels and the speed of insulin response respectively.  White carbs and grains are out due to their high GI/GL scores, whilst dairy is out because despite not scoring too highly on GI it is disproportionately high on the II scale.  Calories via drink are out as by the very nature of them being in liquid form they are easy to digest, and therefore are as above.  This applies to fruit juice particularly, which many people consider to be healthy.  The fact is that by juicing the fruit you remove all the fibre and leave mainly the fruit sugar fructose in particularly high concentrations.

Fructose is particularly bad for you as it is metabolised in much the same way as alcohol.  This puts tremendous strain on the liver, and some research suggests it can be responsible for liver cirrhosis just like alcohol.

Cheat day:

This is important!  Mainly for your sanity.  I don't know about you, but if I were to say I'm never going to eat a cake, bread or pancakes ever again, I'd be setting myself up to fail.  Never going to happen.  Having a cheat day once a week allows you to be good the majority of the time, but not deprive yourself of your favourite naughties entirely.  It also prevents your body going into a starvation mode and slowing your metabolism down.  This concept comes from the 4 Hour Body, which goes into more detail about it and is a great all round resource.  I agree with it entirely.  I will implement it, but possibly be a little more flexible.  If I have a particular social event on a day that isn't my designated cheat day, I'll swap it.  This isn't license to end up with 2, 3 or 4 cheat days a week on particularly social weeks though.  Stick to the plan as best you can and prioritise.  I'm not a fan of being precious or evangelical in a social setting, so do the best you can, and offset losses.  If it's unavoidable to have two cheat days in a week, then the following week don't have any.

That's the plan, let's see how it goes!  Questions and suggestions are welcome as always.