The All-Day Fat-Burning Diet: The 5-Day Food-Cycling Formula That Resets Your Metabolism To Lose Up to 5 Pounds a Week (16 page)

Here’s when you get to make up for all the carbs you were missing on the Low-Carb Day. If any part of you feels guilty even thinking about
this,
don’t. Your 1-Day Feast is a full-on “eat until you’re happy” day. (Technically, you should eat only until you’re 80 percent full so you don’t feel bloated or totally overload your digestive system.) The main thing here is that you shouldn’t worry about eating more than usual. It’s fine, and in fact, it’s encouraged! As counterintuitive as it sounds, eating more serves a very important purpose in pursuit of faster fat loss.

Having a 1-Day Feast once a week, especially with carbohydrates and fruits thrown back into the mix, is tremendously rewarding. It gives you something to work toward and allows you to let loose and enjoy some of your favorite foods. I can’t overstate how helpful this is for your overall morale. It goes a long way toward keeping you on track the other days of the week. More important, this gives your body an opportunity to reestablish proper hormone signaling, damaged by the dysfunctional diet that has left you in your current state. The aim is to load up on healthy food and nourish yourself back to your ideal weight.

Today, that means eating a lot more than you normally would—a full 50 percent more. If you normally eat 2,000 calories a day, on your 1-Day Feast you would aim for about 3,000 calories, with at least 250 grams (or 1,000 calories) coming from carbohydrates. I don’t advocate counting calories—which I’ll discuss more later in the book—so a really easy way of doing this is to increase your serving sizes by 50 percent. The best way is to simply use bigger cups, bowls, and plates. Or, you can refill your plate or bowl with a second serving, if you still have room in your tummy.

I can’t stress this enough, however: Feast only 1 day every 5 days. Attempting to incorporate more than one 1-Day Feast into your week will totally wreck everything you’re working toward. And I hate to be an even bigger party pooper, but this is not the “cheat day” that you’ll find in other diets. This is not a 24-hour excuse to rip into pizza, ice cream, and cheeseburgers. You’re not “allowed” to feast on potato chips and cheesecake. Pigging out on extremely harmful foods filled with sugar, refined wheat, and trans fats will derail any progress you make during the week.

Here’s
why you don’t want to go down that tasty yet terrible road.

1.
Real foods will taste like cardboard.
You’ve trained your taste buds to respond positively to loads of sugar, salt, and trans fats. Keep it up, and your taste buds won’t adapt completely and you won’t be able to experience the same satisfaction from real foods.

2.
You’ll become a junk food junkie.
Junk foods are downright addictive. If you keep eating them, you’ll
crave
more of them. It’s that simple. These foods are engineered to light up the reward center in your brain, which means you’ll go to great lengths to get more of that good feeling. Abstaining from sugar and junk is the only thing that works for addiction, period.

3.
It’s not rocket science: Junk food is bad for you and makes you fat.
Other than to soothe emotional needs and cave into cravings, why else do we eat junk foods? Do they serve any real purpose? Knowing how bad these foods are, no logical human being would willingly eat them. Unfortunately, we are irrational creatures and we do things even when we know they’re bad for us.

Junk food normally has a high amount of carbs and a high amount of fat. If you get in the habit of eating crap food on your 1-Day Feasts, your body will be more prone to pack on body fat thanks to the combination of high blood sugar, high blood insulin, and high blood fat. Not to mention that you will mess up your fat-burning hormones even further. You’ll end up wasting the time you put into getting in shape and even the money you spent on this book.

There are still plenty of ways you can indulge yourself. In fact, I do it every week. In my house, everyone looks forward to Crepe Saturdays. It sounds sinful, but our crepes are actually quite good for you, as they’re 100 percent gluten and dairy free and contain no sugar. We load up each crepe with goodies like banana and almond butter, applesauce and cinnamon, or the occasional sweet treat, such as Nutella (yes, I know) with strawberries, banana, and shredded coconut.

Whatever you choose to eat today, just make sure you eat more of it than you usually would, as long as it’s within the day’s healthy guidelines. After your Low-Carb Day, your glycogen stores will be depleted
and
you will naturally be hungrier than usual. Therefore, you need to eat more than usual—ideally, a full 50 percent more. To do so, you can:

•
Eat bigger meals more often throughout the day.

•
Snack throughout the day.

•
Add some liquid nutrition (i.e., a smoothie) between your main meals.

•
Enjoy a healthy dessert.

If you need to be sold further on the idea that eating more (plus eating carbs) is actually healthy for you, then consider just what kind
of
impact it has on your hormones. No matter what you eat or how much you exercise, if your hormones are out of whack, you’ll never lose weight. By eating in this fashion, you’re restoring hormonal balance, especially of your precious thyroid hormones, which will help restore your body to its ideal weight.

Without going too deep into the science of why eating more carbohydrates (occasionally) is good for you, here’s a quick overview.

•
It prevents thyroid function from plummeting, which is important for keeping your metabolic rate highly active to help you burn fat.

•
It helps prevent hypothalamic amenorrhea in women—a starvation-related response that impairs normal hormone function, which can result in increased body fat, lower bone density, and impaired fertility.

•
It maintains testosterone levels and prevents cortisol from increasing due to extended periods (a few days) of low caloric intake, which helps prevent muscle loss and thus metabolic decline.

•
It helps to ensure optimal levels of leptin, the hormone that tells your brain you’re full, which prevents you from overeating. Conversely, with caloric restriction, leptin levels fall and you end up bingeing because your brain believes you are starving.

As you can see, carbohydrates play multiple important roles in your body, so they’re not something you can simply go without. Choosing to go low carb indefinitely is certainly an option, and you will likely lose a lot of weight, but there’s a strong chance you’ll end up feeling pretty miserable in the process and regain any lost weight if you choose to reintroduce carbs back into your diet.

1-Day-Feast Food Guidelines

•
Eat healthy feast foods ad libitum—as you desire, without feeling guilty.

•
Don’t binge or stuff yourself; eat until you’re 80 percent full, not to the point of discomfort.

•
Ideally, eat your biggest meal after you work out.

•
If you can’t eat more at any given meal, then graze throughout the day (in between meals) on nuts, fruit, or other healthy foods.

The
hardest part of this 1-Day Feast is for you to be okay with eating at least 50 percent more food than you’re used to. Please remember that this day serves a very important role in keeping your thyroid and hunger/satiety hormones happy.

Examples of 1-Day-Feast Foods

Gluten-free grains
like quinoa, millet, amaranth, buckwheat, or oats. With these options you can prepare delicious pancakes, oatmeals, hearty salads, and more. See the recipes in
Chapter 10
for examples.

Starchy carbs
—sweet potato, potato, carrots, beets, parsnips, rice, brown rice, gluten-free grains (see above)

Fruit
—I generally recommend eating more low–glycemic index fruit like berries, apples, and pears. But for your feast day, feel free to have any fruit you like. Yes, you’ll be taking in more sugar (both fructose and glucose), but as long as it’s in the form of whole fruit (not juiced), you’ll be fine. These fruits can also serve as great postworkout refueling options.

Nuts
—almonds, walnuts, cashews, pecans, pistachios, etc.

Legumes
—black beans, chickpeas, lentils, etc.

Healthy fats
—avocado, olive oil, coconut oil, butter, fish oil, flax oil, hemp oil

Proteins
—lentils, beans (kidney, navy, etc.), grass-fed beef, free-range chicken, wild fish, eggs, bacon (sure, why not?), hemp seeds, chia seeds, protein powder

Any feast foods you enjoy should
ideally
be gluten free, dairy free, caffeine free, nonalcoholic, unprocessed, and whole-food based. Even though this is a feast day, you still want to ensure good health by eliminating inflammatory foods from your diet. In case you’ve forgotten, I’ve included a whole host of delicious recipes in the next part of the book. You don’t have to reinvent the diet wheel; I’ve already done it for you.

If you do lose control and splurge on a pizza night with friends, don’t be too hard on yourself. Yes, you will most definitely have set
back
your weight-loss progress, but hopefully, you’ll feel the difference in your body and be compelled not to do it again.

1-Day-Feast Exercise Guidelines

If possible, do a full-body and/or interval-training workout 1 to 2 hours before you begin your feast day or before you have your biggest meal of the day.

Your muscles are most receptive to the uptake of carbohydrates (for refueling purposes) and nutrients immediately after a workout. In general, your biggest meal should come after you work out in order to replenish depleted glycogen while minimizing any fat spillover. Please bear in mind that, due to lower glycogen levels from the previous Low-Carb Day, you’ll likely feel more lackluster than normal. Do your best to get in a great workout in spite of that.

DAY 3: THE 1-DAY FAST

Pick up a Bible, Quran, or Torah or look into the annals of religious history and you’ll come across many mentions of fasting, and with good reason: It’s one of the world’s oldest and most effective healing and weight-loss modalities. This might run counter to what you’ve been told, and almost definitely conjures up thoughts of starvation and suffering. After all, it’s not commonly practiced today, but that’s a shame, as temporarily abstaining from food can not only give your body a rest but also provide some time for contemplation.

Fasting is not necessarily easy and, in fact, can be considered a form of stress, as it has been shown to increase cortisol levels. Much like exercise, however, it’s a positive form of stress with many wondrous benefits. If you find yourself suddenly horrified by reading this, don’t be: I’m not asking you to embark on a 40-day or even a 40-hour fast. For this program, you can experience the benefits of fasting by giving your body a rest for up to 24 hours after the indulgence of your 1-Day Feast. This readjusts your tastebuds, reduces cravings, and puts you back in control of the food you eat. Furthermore, it can give you tremendous insight into why you eat the way you do.

Before
I continue, let me say that if you suffer from reactive hypoglycemia or diabetes, you may want to consider eating something small every 2 to 3 hours throughout your 1-Day Fast. For you, it won’t actually be a fast day, but rather a low-calorie day. However, if you’re relatively healthy, even if you’re overweight, I would strongly encourage you to follow the plan as it’s laid out. This 1-Day Fast will change your life!

According to a 2005 study in the
Journal of Nutritional Biochemistry
, the beneficial effects of intermittent fasting (and caloric restriction, for that matter) result from at least two mechanisms: reduced oxidative damage and increased cellular stress resistance.
⁴
Basically, that means that it helps your body to deal with stress! And it gets better—just have a look at the multitude of health benefits documented to occur with repeated 12- to 24-hour fasts.

•
Decreased body fat and body weight

•
Maintenance of skeletal muscle mass

•
Decreased blood glucose levels

•
Decreased insulin levels and increased insulin sensitivity

•
Increased lipolysis (breakdown of fats) and fat oxidation

•
Increased uncoupling protein-3 mRNA (important for the production of energy inside the cell)