My take on the Slow-Carb Diet

I don’t believe in dieting.  When someone is “on a diet,” they are temporarily restricting the amount and/or types of food they eat for the purpose of losing weight.  But if the restriction is temporary, the weight loss will be temporary.  Diets, almost by definition, are doomed to failure.

That’s why I wasn’t looking for a diet to go on — I was looking for a permanent lifestyle change I could make.  I had heard of Tim Ferriss — I even met him briefly at South by Southwest in Austin a few years ago — but I had never read any of his books.  To be honest, the titles (“The 4-Hour Work Week” and “The 4-Hour Body”) sounded scammy to me.  But every once in a while, I would hear a recommendation from someone I trusted.  Last October, after reading a recommendation from Ramit Sethi, I decided to give The 4-Hour Body a chance.

The bottom line: it’s amazing.  I don’t believe that there is only one way to lose weight successfully, and I don’t think there is any one way that will work for everyone.  But what I know for sure is that the Slow-Carb Diet, as laid out in The 4-Hour Body, is the only thing I’ve found that works for me.

You can read a summary of the plan here, or you can buy the book here.  (Note about the book: it is almost 600 pages, but I have only read the first 150 or so, because that is the part that talks about the things I care about.)

Basically, the Slow-Carb Diet has five rules.  I’ll list the rules, tell you what Tim says about each, and give you my take on them.  (I’ll have the most to say about #5, because it’s my favorite and it’s the one that makes it possible for me to follow the others.)

RULE 1: AVOID “WHITE” CARBOHYDRATES.

Avoid any carbohydrate that is, or can be, white. The following foods are prohibited, except for within 30 minutes of finishing 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 flour (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.

Here’s a partial list of my favorite foods: lasagna, mac and cheese, ice cream, burritos, pad thai, Cap’n Crunch Crunch Berries … well, you get the picture.  A lot of the things I love are listed by Tim as foods that will make me fat.  Not coincidentally, I used to weigh 400 pounds.  Could the two be connected?

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 1–2 whole eggs for flavor (or, if organic, 2–5 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, cauliflower, 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 $1–3 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 insufficient 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.

Just remember: this diet is, first 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.

The theory behind this, as far as I can tell, is that it’s easy to get frustrated if you try to find too many meals that fit within these parameters.  So if you go in with the expectation of being bored, you won’t be disappointed or frustrated when it is boring.  (Don’t worry, the fun part is coming up.)  I plan on doing a whole post about the few meals I have repeatedly, so I won’t go into much detail here, but I will try to remember to come back here and link to that post once it is up. (Hey look, I remembered! Here is the link to the post about my repeat meals.)

RULE 3: DON’T DRINK CALORIES.

Drink massive quantities of water and as much unsweetened tea, coffee (with no more than two tablespoons of cream; I suggest using cinnamon instead), or other no-calorie/low-calorie beverages as you like. Do not drink milk (including soy milk), normal soft drinks, or fruit juice. Limit diet soft drinks to no more than 16 ounces per day if you can, as the aspartame can stimulate weight gain.

I’m a wine fanatic and have one to two glasses of red wine almost every evening. It doesn’t appear to have any negative impact on my rate of fat-loss. Red wine is by no means required for this diet to work, but it’s 100% allowed (unlike white wines and beer, both of which should be avoided). Up to two glasses of red per night, no more.

If you’re a Mormon like me, your best bet on this plan is water.  Lucky for me, water has always been my beverage of choice anyway.  Tim says diet soda is allowed in small amounts, but I generally avoid that for other reasons.  (Short version: I think it will kill you, and I feel gross when I drink it.)  The concept here is not new — I’ve heard of people losing massive amounts of weight just by cutting out soda.

(One interesting thing that is only implied here but is stated explicitly in the book is that dairy is off-limits, with the exception of occasional cottage cheese.)

RULE 4: DON’T EAT FRUIT.

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 efficiently 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.

This is the part that can be confusing or counterintuitive.  When it comes to nutrition, fruits and vegetables are usually used interchangeably.  “Eat five servings of fruits or veggies every day.”  It had literally never crossed my mind that fruit might be part of the problem.  But as I’ve researched it, I think the science behind it is solid.  Simply put, your body turns sugar into fat, and the sugar in fruit — fructose — is the most easily converted form of sugar.  Fruit has a ton of good stuff in it, too, but nothing that you can’t get by eating lots of veggies.

RULE 5: TAKE ONE DAY OFF PER WEEK.

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 five days before your designated cheat day. If you choose Saturday, for example, I would suggest starting your diet on a Monday.

In case you’re doubting what he said, here it is: you can eat anything you want on cheat day (or Cheaturday, as my brother calls it), as much as you want.  If you want to start eating ice cream the moment you wake up and not stop until you go to bed, you can do that.  There are literally no restrictions.

There are physical benefits to cheat day.  As a lifelong yo-yo dieter, I am used to the mindset of “If you want to lose weight, you need to eat less.”  Even on this diet, that mindset has crept in, and I’ve found myself thinking, “You know, if I am losing weight even with a huge cheat day, imagine how much I’d lose if I didn’t eat as much on cheat day!”  And guess what?  It doesn’t work.  Not for me, anyway.  I don’t know exactly why, but I know that when I have a weak cheat day, my weight loss is less.  When I have a killer cheat day, the numbers are better.

Tim talks about metabolic rate downshifts and stuff like that, but I think what he’s really saying is this: cheat day lets your body know it’s not starving.  When your body thinks it is starving, it holds on to everything it can get.  When you reassure it every week, “Don’t worry, we still get to eat plenty of junk,” it doesn’t feel the need to hold on.

So yeah, there are physical benefits.  But for me, the psychological benefits are so much bigger.

I used to think the only way to lose weight and keep it off was to never eat ice cream again.  And you know what?  That thought generally made me think, “Forget that, I’ll stay fat.”  But not being able to eat ice cream until Saturday?  Sure, I can do that — I’m not an animal!  I spend the week eating the things I am supposed to eat, and I keep mental notes of the cravings I have.  I’ve actually written them down a few times.  And then, when Saturday rolls around, I let loose.  Corn dogs and ice cream for breakfast?  Sure!  More ice cream later?  Of course!  Mac and cheese for lunch?  Why not?

Let me talk a little bit about ice cream.  Here’s how my cycle used to go: I’d be good for a while.  Then I’d decide to only have frozen yogurt instead of ice cream because it’s healthier.  After a while, I’d see that Dreyer’s has a ton of different flavors of frozen yogurt, so I’d get a few to have at the house.  I’d start with just one scoop a couple times a week.  Then I’d be unable to decide which flavor I want, so I’d have two half-scoops, which soon turned into two scoops.  A couple times a week would become every day.  Then I’d notice that Dreyer’s slow-churned ice cream doesn’t have many more calories than the yogurt, and there are more flavors and it tastes better, so I’d get that.  And because there are more flavors, it’s harder to decide, and next thing you know I’m having a big bowl of ice cream every single night.

You see, moderation is not my strong suit.  If I try to eat something I love in moderation, I will be successful in the short term, but I will eventually fall off the wagon.  Part of being honest with myself was admitting that and figuring out a solution.  Cheat day is that solution.  I never have to eat anything in moderation — I either don’t have it at all (Sunday through Friday), or I have as much of it as I want (Cheaturday).

The magical part is, I never have to tell myself “no.”  The answer is always either “yes” or “not today, but soon.”  If I have a good cheat day, Sunday is easy, because I never want to see food again.  Monday, I’m still satisfied.  It’s not until Tuesday that I start having any cravings at all, and nothing too bad until Thursday or Friday, by which point IT’S ALMOST CHEAT DAY AGAIN!!!

Here’s something else that has happened, something I didn’t expect: my relationship with food has gotten better.  In the past, I ate a ton of junk, but I never really enjoyed it, because it was always accompanied by guilt.  Every bowl of ice cream came with the nagging knowledge that I was killing myself.  I would wait until after my wife and kids went to bed, then I’d make a pan of “secret mac and cheese” to eat while I watched TV.  It tasted good, but I never really enjoyed it.  But now, every bowl of ice cream or plate of mac and cheese is part of my healthy new lifestyle!  I can eat whatever I want and lose weight and be healthy!  It’s a fat person’s dream!

Dr. Phil has said that willpower is a myth, and I pretty much agree.  I think it’s possible to have periods of willpower, but if you try to lose weight just by using willpower to stop eating junk, you’re probably setting yourself up for failure.  The people who successfully stop eating the junk do it because they replace it with something else — they start doing triathlons or marathons or (on the more negative end of the spectrum) harmful drugs.  The person who can just stop eating foods they love cold-turkey, without replacing them with anything else, is a very rare person indeed, and statistically speaking, it’s probably not you.

That’s what I love about this plan: you never need more than six days of willpower, and really it’s more like two or three days if you have a good cheat day.  And in a way, it hardly even qualifies as willpower to say, “I’m gonna have a huge bowl of ice cream in 37 hours,” ya know?

So that’s the Slow-Carb Diet.  That’s what I have been doing for the past nine months.  I’ve been able to stick to it completely, because everything I need is built right into the plan.  There are challenges, and I know I undersell and downplay how hard it can be at times, but it is totally doable.  And the best part, for me, is that I can do it forever.  That thought doesn’t scare me or make me sad or anything negative.  In fact, knowing that I can have ice cream and mac and cheese every Saturday for the rest of my life without feeling guilty or getting unhealthy is pretty much the most wonderful thing in the world.