Man 2.0 Engineering the Alpha (21 page)

CHAPTER 7

The End of Dieting

WHY INTERMITTENT FASTING WILL CHANGE YOUR BODY AND YOUR LIFE

“What some call health, if purchased by perpetual anxiety about diet, isn't much better than tedious disease.”

—
ALEXANDER POPE

I
f you're like us, then you probably love the title of this chapter.
Well, that's good, because it might be the most powerful, controversial, and
accurate
title in the book. We are going to put an end to dieting.

Sound far-fetched? Don't worry, we like it when people doubt us. But before we get into why
not dieting
is going to lead to the fastest fat loss you've ever had, let's create context. Here's how most fitness and nutrition experts like to handle the subject of what you eat:

 

It's not a diet, it's a lifestyle.

Diet
is a four-letter word.

Organic diets are the only healthy diets.

Shop the perimeter and eat more real food.

If it's Paleo, it's not good.

 

Okay, maybe we made that last one up.

Let's clear something up fast: everyone has a diet. A diet, by definition, is what you eat. So unless you're starving and never eating, then you have a diet. What people are really talking about is diet
ing
—the idea of altering what you eat to follow a few simple, or not-so-simple, rules designed to help you be healthier, lose weight, or just not have terrible allergic reactions to some dangerous foods.

The problem with dieting—well, one of the many problems—is that men don't respond to food like women do. After training thousands of clients, a few things are exceedingly clear to us: men aren't successful when they subsist solely on frozen entrees; they don't adapt to vague recommendations like “eat low carbs.” Instead they want specific guidelines; and they most certainly don't avoid pleasures like pizza, beer, and burgers. Once you acknowledge these things, it's pretty hard to imagine a “diet” on which men can be successful—unless you look at the science.

Conventional dieting wisdom posits that you need to change your lifestyle, that you need to eat prepackaged meals to fit your busy lifestyle, and that you need to avoid pizza and burgers. Conventional dieting wisdom says that you're not
supposed
to be able to eat those unhealthy foods and still lose fat each week.

But the science of dieting has made the concept of food restriction almost obsolete—only few people have paid attention enough to realize how much flexibility actually exists.

Forget about good foods versus bad foods; that argument no longer matters. Read that again: from a body composition standpoint,
^*
it doesn't matter
if you eat dry grilled chicken or a juicy burger; it doesn't matter if you choke down cottage cheese or pound some Ben & Jerry's. Whatever you're thinking, it doesn't matter.

All that matters . . . is timing and calories.

The nature of your endocrine system is incredibly complicated—but once you understand it, eating becomes easier than ever. Manipulate the times that you eat and you can eat and drink whatever you want and still look like a Greek god.

How? It's all locked in the secrets of the hormones leptin and ghrelin (see chapter 5 for a reminder) and the anabolic nature of the foods you eat.

Normally, when people go on a diet, they don't eat
as much
bad stuff . . . but they still eat it pretty consistently. They're making progress, but they're not there yet. It's an undergraduate approach to eating: one foot in, one foot out. While this approach can work, as you're (hopefully) reducing calories, it's incredibly limited. In fact, it's one of the least effective approaches for fat loss (trumped only in inefficacy by nonsense like cabbage soup and cayenne pepper).

Here's why: when you diet hard and drop calories significantly for a few days, leptin begins to drop. Again, leptin is a master hormone, and it's partly responsible for regulating your thyroid. And your thyroid is integral to your ability to lose weight. So when your leptin levels drop, so too do thyroid hormones T3 and T4. When this happens, your metabolism slows down dramatically, and you lose
less
weight.

Think about that for a minute—you eat less and your weight loss slows down. That hardly seems fair. But that's what happens when your hormones work against you. Thankfully, there's a way to make them work
for
you.

Remember, leptin levels have a direct relationship with caloric intake. This means that just as leptin levels fall when you take in fewer calories, they rise when you take in more calories—and they rise a lot when you take in a ton of calories all at once. And, with very few exceptions, it
doesn't
matter where those calories come from.

So to prevent fat-loss stagnation and the dreaded weight-loss plateau, we need to make sure that we consistently spike your leptin levels when it drops too low. The way to do this is so awesome that it's hard to believe: you spend an entire day once per week eating whatever you want. Your nutritionist might call it a strategic overfeed 'cause they like to act all fancy, but colloquially, this is known as a cheat day.

The cheat—er, strategic overfeed—bumps your leptin levels up, allowing you to lose fat again. This means that you'll actually lose fat faster than if you had no cheat day at all. So even though you take in a ton of calories, the hormonal impact from the cheat offsets what you eat in a way that has a much greater benefit than if you avoided the splurge altogether.

And when we say a ton of calories, we mean men should be eating what they want. Enjoy pizza and burgers. Then grab dessert. Go crazy because it's an essential part of the plan. And it'll make any of the normal hardships of dieting nonexistent.

All told, in a very real sense, it's better to eat this stuff all at once in a single day than to have a little bit every day. We know, we know—that sounds crazy. It runs counter to all conventional nutritional wisdom. Well, sorry it doesn't make sense, but we didn't invent the science—we just report it and make it work.

But this dream situation only works with a specific approach: intermittent fasting.

 

WHAT IS INTERMITTENT FASTING?

The most accurate definition is the simplest one: intermittent fasting is merely alternating intervals of not eating (fasting) with times when you are allowed to eat.

We'll admit that most people usually freak out over this concept.

What? No eating? But what about starvation mode? What about feeding my metabolism? What about going into a severe catabolism so great that I have no energy and I can't build muscle?

By now, we hope we've convinced you—with science and real life results—that those are just myths. That line of thinking is why so many people struggle to look and feel better. This is about remembering that you need to step outside of the Ordinary World in order to create an unreal life.

But when you take a closer look at the reality of intermittent fasting, you quickly realize that the concept isn't crazy or uncommon. In fact, everyone practices a variation of intermittent fasting each day. When you sleep, you fast. When you awake, you eat. That's intermittent fasting. Not so bad, right?

And it also happens during your typical workday. When you're stuck in meetings all day and don't have a meal for five hours, that's technically fasting. The only difference is that you aren't on a structured timetable of meals in which the window of fasting is constant, so rather than fasting intermittently, you're fasting
haphazardly
—and there's no benefit.

All we're going to do is teach you how to ever so slightly expand your fasting window so you can experience the benefits of burning more fat, building more muscle, improving aging, boosting your sex drive, fighting off disease, looking more attractive, and strengthening your overall health. Oh yeah, and when you fast intermittently, you have rules, but
you
are in control.

It's a simplified approach. And while it's detailed and calculated, everything revolves around one easy-to-follow principle: eat by your clock. You set the hours that you eat. And then you have enhanced food freedom unlike any program you've ever tried before.

There are several variations of intermittent fasting, and we're going to show you how to integrate each one during the four phases of the program for the best results. The fasting period you'll use can range anywhere from sixteen hours all the way up to thirty-six hours (with several stops in between), and each of those plans has specific benefits. In the diet part of the program, we'll show you exactly when you need to apply each form of fasting and make it simple for you to make this new form of eating feel effortless.

 

INTERMITTENT FASTING IS THE ANSWER

If intermittent fasting is the answer, you're probably wondering about the question. It's really the only question any guy wants to ask when it comes to dieting: Is there an eating approach that puts me in control and actually works?

If you look at all the research, compare the high-fat diets to low-fat, the high-carb programs to low-carb, and the protein to more-protein (because every diet needs protein), you discover something that would surprise most people. Many diets work. There is no magic bullet. There is no “killer” food that ruins your eating plan. That's just not how our bodies work. But what causes diets to fail are psychological and social limitations that men don't deal with—no booze, no late-night eating, or no burgers. You need something with rules that work but also flexibility that allows you to have a life you can enjoy—and a body you can enjoy looking at.

On the most basic level, only two things matter: the calories you eat and taking in some balance of macronutrients—proteins, carbs, and fats. The manipulation of those macronutrients and calories on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis is the special sauce that allows for progress. In our program sometimes you'll find that you'll eat fewer carbs. Other times it'll be fat. And in other situations you will need
more
protein . . . and carbs . . . and fats to reach your goals.

So if all foods are fair game and eating some bad foods is actually okay, then why do so many people struggle with their diet?

It's because the system of eating is broken. It's based on mistruths, mistakes, and dogma. People are taught that eating can only be done
one
way, and their indoctrination creates a system in which their body always wants and expects food. They burn less fat because they spend too much time eating. And they struggle with binges because they're told to resist the foods they love—which of course only results in them eating
more
of those foods than they would otherwise.

This
is why intermittent fasting is so successful. It eliminates all the problems that cause you to fail. We'll walk you through the different forms of intermittent fasting soon, but before we do, it's important that you understand why it works and why it's not only the most flexible plan you could find—but also much healthier than most believe.

 

DIET FIX #1: MORE FLEXIBILITY TO CHOOSE WHEN YOU EAT

People's first reaction whenever we bring up intermittent fasting is always the same: don't we
need
breakfast?

Most people on an intermittent fasting plan forego eating during traditional breakfast time; instead of eating first thing in the morning, they have their first meal in the afternoon. (Although as you'll see, you can still follow an intermittent fasting schedule and eat early in the morning.) This advice is exactly the opposite guidance bestowed by every authority from registered dietitians to MDs.

For years, we've been told that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. In fact, physicians are notorious for scolding patients who skip breakfast—particularly people who are embarking on a plan to lose weight.

There
is
some credence here, by the way: a study conducted by researchers at Virginia Commonwealth University in 2008 showed that participants who ate a calorically dense breakfast lost more weight than those who didn't. The espoused theory was that the higher caloric intake early in the day led people to snack less often throughout the day and lowered caloric intake overall. There are also some epidemiological studies that show a connection between skipping breakfast and higher body weight.

However, the crux of the breakfast study is ultimately that a larger breakfast leads to lower overall caloric intake. That is, the argument for a larger breakfast ultimately boils down to energy balance; if that study is reliant on the position that weight loss comes down to calories in versus calories out, then the makeup of the food shouldn't matter. If we've learned anything from Mark Haub's Twinkie Diet, it's that you can eat garbage and lose weight; so clearly, something else is going on.

The only real argument the breakfast crowd has is insulin sensitivity. As you've learned by now, the more sensitive your body is to insulin, the more likely you are to lose fat and gain muscle. Increasing insulin sensitivity almost always leads to more efficient dieting.

The pro-breakfast folks declare that because insulin sensitivity is higher in the morning, eating a carbohydrate-rich meal early in the day is the greatest opportunity to take in a large amount of energy without the danger of weight gain.

There's only one tiny problem with that theory: insulin sensitivity is
not
higher in particular hours of the morning. It's higher after a minimum of eight hours of
fasting
. It just so happens that you fast when you sleep, so the information is misleading. More specifically, insulin sensitivity is higher when your glycogen levels (the energy stores in your body) are depleted, like after your sleeping fast.