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The Slow-Carb Diet
The Slow-Carb Diet
The Slow-Carb Diet
Diet
It is possible to lose 20 pounds of body fat in 30 days by optimizing any of three factors:
exercise, diet, or a drug/supplement regimen. Twenty pounds for most people means
moving down at least two clothing sizes, whether that's going from a size 14 dress to a
size 10 or from an XXL shirt to a large. The waist and hips show an even more dramatic
reduction in circumference.
By April 6, 2007, as an example, I had cut from nearly 180 pounds to 165 pounds in six
weeks, while adding about 10 pounds of muscle, which means I lost approximately 25
pounds of fat. The changes aren't subtle.
The diet that I'll introduce in this chapter-the Slow-Carb Diet-is the only diet besides the
rather extreme Cyclical Ketogenic Diet (CKD) that has produced veins across my
abdomen, which is the last place I lose fat. There are just ve simple rules to follow:
Avoid any carbohydrate that is, or can be, white. The following foods are prohibited,
except for within 30 minutes of nishing a resistance-training workout like those
described in the "From Geek to Freak" or "Occam's Protocol" chapters: all bread, rice
(including brown), cereal, potatoes, pasta, tortillas, and fried food with breading. If you
avoid eating the aforementioned foods and anything else white, you'll be safe.
Just for fun, another reason to avoid the whities: chlorine dioxide, one of the chemicals
used to bleach our (even if later made brown again, a common trick), combines with
residual protein in most of these foods to form alloxan. Researchers use alloxan in lab
rats to induce diabetes. That's right-it's used to produce diabetes. This is bad news if you
eat anything white or "enriched."
Don't eat white stuff unless you want to get fatter.
RULE 2: EAT THE SAME FEW MEALS OVER AND OVER AGAIN.
The most successful dieters, regardless of whether their goal is muscle gain or fat-loss,
eat the same few meals over and over again. There are 47,000 products in the average
U.S. grocery store, but only a handful of them won't make you fat.
Mix and match from the following list, constructing each meal with one pick from each
of the three groups. I've starred the choices that produce the fastest fat-loss for me:
Proteins
*Egg whites with 12 whole eggs for avor (or, if organic, 25 whole eggs, including
yolks)
*Chicken breast or thigh
*Black beans
*Beef (preferably grass-fed)
Pork
*Fish
Legumes
*Lentils (also called "dal" or "daal")
Pinto beans
Red beans
Soybeans
Vegetables
*Spinach
*Mixed vegetables (including broccoli, cauliower, or any other cruciferous vegetables)
*Sauerkraut, kimchee (full explanation of these later in "Damage Control")
Asparagus
Peas
Broccoli
Green beans
Eat as much as you like of the above food items, but keep it simple. Pick three or four
meals and repeat them. Almost all restaurants can give you a salad or vegetables in place
of french fries, potatoes, or rice.
Surprisingly, I have found Mexican food (after swapping out rice for vegetables) to be
one of the cuisines most conducive to the Slow-Carb Diet. If you have to pay an extra
$13 to substitute at a restaurant, consider it your six-pack tax, the nominal fee you pay
to be lean. Most people who go on "low"-carbohydrate diets complain of low energy and
quit because they consume insufcient calories. A half-cup of rice is 300 calories,
whereas a half-cup of spinach is 15 calories! Vegetables are not calorically dense, so it is
critical that you add legumes for caloric load.
Eating more frequently than four times per day might be helpful on higher-carb diets to
prevent gorging, but it's not necessary with the ingredients we're using. Eating more
frequent meals also appears to have no enhancing effect on resting metabolic rate,
despite claims to the contrary.
Frequent meals can be used in some circumstances (see "The Last Mile"), but not for
this reason.
The following meal schedule is based on a late sleep schedule, as I'm a night owl who
gives up the ghost at 2:00 a.m. at the earliest, usually with wineglass or book still in
hand, la heroin addict. Adjust your meals to t your schedule, but make sure to have
your rst meal within an hour of waking. Meals are approximately four hours apart.
10:00 am - Breakfast
2:00 pm - Lunch
6:30 pm - Smaller second lunch
8:009:00 pm - Recreation or sports training, if scheduled.
10:00 pm - Dinner
12:00 am - Glass of red wine and Discovery Channel before bed
Breakfast (home): Scrambled Eggology pourable egg whites with one whole egg, black
beans, and mixed vegetables warmed up or cooked in a microwave using Pyrex
containers.
Lunch (Mexican restaurant): Grass-fed organic beef, pinto beans, mixed vegetables, and
extra guacamole.
Dinner (home): Grass-fed organic beef (from Trader Joe's), lentils, and mixed
vegetables.
Just remember: this diet is, rst and foremost, intended to be effective, not fun. It can
be fun with a few tweaks (the next chapter covers this), but that's not the goal.
Humans don't need fruit six days a week, and they certainly don't need it year-round. If
your ancestors were from Europe, for example, how much fruit did they eat in the winter
500 years ago? Think they had Florida oranges in December? Not a chance. But you're
still here, so the lineage somehow survived.
The only exceptions to the no-fruit rule are tomatoes and avocadoes, and the latter
should be eaten in moderation (no more than one cup or one meal per day). Otherwise,
just say no to fruit and its principal sugar, fructose, which is converted to glycerol
phosphate more efciently than almost all other carbohydrates. Glycerol phosphate p
triglycerides (via the liver) p fat storage. There are a few biochemical exceptions to this,
but avoiding fruit six days per week is the most reliable policy.
But what's this "six days a week" business? It's the seventh day that allows you, if you so
desire, to eat peach crepes and banana bread until you go into a coma.
I recommend Saturdays as your Dieters Gone Wild (DGW) day. I am allowed to eat
whatever I want on Saturdays, and I go out of my way to eat ice cream, Snickers, Take 5,
and all of my other vices in excess. If I drank beer, I'd have a few pints of Paulaner Hefe-
Weizen.
I make myself a little sick each Saturday and don't want to look at any junk for the rest
of the week. Paradoxically, dramatically spiking caloric intake in this way once per week
increases fat-loss by ensuring that your metabolic rate (thyroid function and conversion
of T4 to T3, etc.) doesn't downshift from extended caloric restriction.
That's right: eating pure crap can help you lose fat. Welcome to Utopia. There are no
limits or boundaries during this day of gluttonous enjoyment. There is absolutely no
calorie counting on this diet, on this day or any other.
Start the diet at least ve days before your designated cheat day. If you choose Saturday,
for example, I would suggest starting your diet on a Monday.
If the founding fathers could sum up our government in a six-page constitution, the
above is all we need to summarize rapid fat-loss for 99.99% of the population. Followed
to the letter, I've never seen it fail. Never. When you feel mired in details or confused by
the latest-and-greatest
contradictory advice, return to this short chapter. All you need to remember is:
And this was including organic grass-fed beef! If he'd eaten a big salad three times a
week instead of a few proteins, his weekly cost would have been $31.70. He repeated
four meals:
BREAKFAST: Egg whites, one whole egg, mixed vegetables, chicken breast Mixed
vegetables, peas, spinach (salad)
LUNCH: Mixed vegetables, peas, spinach (salad)
SECOND LUNCH: Chicken thigh, black beans, mixed vegtables
DINNER: Beef (or pork), asparagus, pinto beans
His exact shopping list was simplicity itself. The prices are the per line totals:
Albumin binds to testosterone and renders it inert, much like SHBG (discussed in "Sex
Machine") but weaker. I don't want either to be out-of-range high. Bad for the manly
arts. If you said "Holy sh*t!" when you saw the iron jump, we're in the same boat. This
result was completely out of the blue and is not good, especially in men. It might come
as a surprise, but men don't menstruate. This means that men lack a good method for
clearing out excessive iron, which can be toxic. The increase in iron was far more
alarming to me than the changes in cholesterol.
Here is just one of several explanations from the research literature:
The moral of the story? Don't drink fruit juice, and absolutely avoid a high-fructose diet.
It doesn't do the body good.
Still Tasty (www.stilltasty.com) Not sure if it's safe to eat those eggs or those Thai
leftovers? Tired of calling your mom to ask? This site allows you to search the shelf life
of thousands of cooked and uncooked foods.
Food Porn Daily (http://www.foodporndaily.com) Need some inspiration for your cheat
day? Food
Porn Daily provides a delicious and artery-blocking cornucopia of bad (but tasty) eating.
Save it for Saturday.