So I have to admit I have never been on a diet in my life. The whole idea of depriving myself sounds agonizing. I would rather try to eat healthier and get more active. However the pounds started sneaking up on me in the last few years as I started to work from home and spent too much time in front of the computer.
Recently I stepped on the scale at my rock climbing gym and I weighed in at over 200 lbs. This definitely made me take notice. I think as guys we can really fool ourselves when it comes to how much weight we have gained. Suck it in a little more and loosen the belt another notch; men can gain 15-20 pounds fairly easily and not even need to buy new clothes.
One of my favorite bloggers and author of The Four-Hour Work Week, Tim Ferris had posted on his blog a while back How to Lose 20 lbs of Fat in 30 Days without doing any exercise. I said to myself “This month I am going to try this experiment and get back to my ideal weight.”
Not only did I lose 16lbs this month on this plan, I was never hungry, did not do any workouts beyond my normal activities, and I ate donuts, cupcakes, garlic fries, and drank like a fish in a beer aquarium.
The Diet
Pick a few meals and stick to them. Don’t try to get fancy or test the boundaries with what you can and can’t eat. The best success will come from sticking to the same meals for the month. Boring… Yes, but effective.
Lean Protein:
Chicken
Egg whites with 1 egg for flavor
Chicken
Lean Pork
Grass fed beef
Salmon or Tuna
Tofu
Vegetables:
Spinach
Salad greens
Broccoli
Brussel Sprouts
Baby Carrots
Artichoke Hearts
Zucchini
Summer squash
Peppers
Snow Peas
Green Beans
Just about any vegetable is fine
Eat high sugar/calorie content vegetables in small amounts like Tomatos, Peas, Beets, & Chick Peas.
Legumes:
Lentils
Soybeans (edamame)
Pinto Beans
Black Beans
Lima Beans
Mix and match all you want and eat until you are full but don’t over eat. If you get hungry again feel free to make a another meal. Be aware of the difference between hunger, and the feelings that can often be interpreted as hunger such as being thirsty or sugar and alcohol cravings. Fill up by eating more vegetables always. Veggies are so low in calories you can eat all you want.
Avoid all sugars and carbs. No fruit, wheat, bread, pasta, sweets, fried foods and try to keep your fat calories you ingest as low as you can. Also avoid milk due to lactose, a sugar as well. I avoided cheese as that was one of my major fat sources.
Feel free to have one glass of red wine an evening as the health benefits far outweigh any negatives on blood sugar.
The idea is that you are going to deprive your body of carbohydrates forcing it to burn fat. Even a small amount of sugar or carbs can ruin your entire days worth of work so don’t cheat!
Snacks:
Baby carrots
Edamame
Small amount of Hummus
Stevia sweetened hot coca
Unsweetened Chai tea with soy milk
Drink a lot of water. Burning fat will release a lot of metabolic waste and stored toxins in your body. You have to flush that out to keep your weight loss rate high. I tried to drink at least a half gallon of water a day or more.
Cheat Day!!!
One day a week have at it. Eat and drink whatever! This resets your metabolism and gets your body to forget that it is on a diet. After your cheat day is done your body goes back to burning fat even faster cause it hasn’t gotten used to the lack of carbs yet.
My first cheat day I ate five doughnuts and two cupcakes and was almost sick to my stomach I ate so much sugar. I didn’t want to see sugar for days afterwards and for the first time in my life i craved vegetables.
Stick to this plan and you will drop at least fifteen pounds. I lost 16 pounds in the month and feel and look fantastic. One of my weeks I didn’t lose a pound and these are the things I think I did wrong:
Avoid fake sweeteners other than stevia. I found out that the sugar free chocolate I was eating had maltodextrin and maltitol as sweeteners. Both while supposedly not affecting blood sugar, actually do have a glycemic response. Avoid splenda because of the maltodextrin. I was also even trying Truvia a mix of stevia and erythritol as a sweetener that week and that may or may not have contributed. Avoid anything with fructose or dextrose in it, they are also sugars. The other issue that week was I wasn’t drinking enough water and I really do believe this was a major cause of not losing any pounds.
Of course the weeks I was a bit more active I lost weight quicker so combining this with some light exercise will make it even more effective but for the sake of the experiment my exertion was limited to biking to where I was going a couple times a week, my weekly salsa class, and a couple outings of frisbee golf. The month overall was not that active physically for me.
If you do add exercise to your month then you can introduce some complex carbs in within 30 min of the end of your workout. Something like a no cheese whole grain crust pizza or a turkey sandwich on 7 grain bread. See Tim’s post for more on that.
Example Meals:
Eggwhite Veggie Omelette with tofu and salmon, with a side of Trader Joes cuban style black beans (my favorite of all the canned beans)
Grilled chicken (on the george forman grill), vegetable medley (frozen from TJ’s, Fat free Refried Pinto Beans
Canned Salmon in a salad with tofu, grilled tempe, red peppers, carrots, snow peas, artichoke hearts, heart of palm, with a little low fat Italian dressing. Side of black beans
Lean piece of grilled pork with asian style vegetable mix from TJ’s (omitting the sauce) and fat free refried black beans.
I pretty much ate those four meals the entire month mixing it up a bit with spices like cumin and balsalmic vinager or a curry powder.
Going out to eat can be challenging but I managed to go out at least a couple times a week to eat and even date a couple girls. There was a great custom sandwich salad place that I ate at on one date and I went on a picnic for another date bringing a grilled chicken and two pre-made salads with hummus and veggies for dipping (and crackers and a cupcake for her). Mexican places are another great place to eat because you can often swap rice for veggies and pass on the tortillas. If anywhere I cheated it was an occasional second glass of red wine.
The sugar cravings were the worst part of it for me but I found a killer way to beat those as well. I made a great hot chocolate chai sweetened from stevia. Stevia is one of the only completely natural non chemical sweeteners that doesn’t affect blood-sugar. Avoid the ones that are mixed with maltodextrin. I got the SweetLeaf brand Stevia because it doesn’t have the bitter after taste sometimes associated with Stevia. I would steep the chai first then add a spoonful of Cacao powder and sweeten to taste with Stevia.
The only other difficulty on the diet is handling beans three meals a day. Get yourself some Gas-X or Bean-o and you won’t be as gassy after your first week. In fact by the end of the month it was only my cheat days that actually gave me digestive difficulties. I also tended to find I was not as regular as I should have been so I would recommend a fiber supplement to help keep things moving as well as don’t slack on drinking enough water.
I affectionately called this my Trim-Down program since us guy’s don’t like saying we are on a diet. Over the course of a month I can’t imagine an easier way to make yourself look and feel better. I ate when I was hungry, still drank my irish heritage fill of alcohol each week, and just when I was getting sick of it my cheat day would come around and make me forget I was even on a diet.
Want to get more dates and more beautiful women? Losing that gut certainly will help a lot!
