The All-Day Fat-Burning Diet: The 5-Day Food-Cycling Formula That Resets Your Metabolism To Lose Up to 5 Pounds a Week (13 page)

Do you think 1,000 calories of broccoli has the same effect in your body as 1,000 calories of French fries that have been deep-fried in rancid oil? Sure, they both have the same
quantity
of calories, but the
qualit
y of these calories is a universe apart. Broccoli provides a vast spectrum of nutrients like sulforaphane and indole-3-carbinol, both of which improve detoxification, aid in weight loss, and even prevent some cancers. What health benefits do French fries provide? When you find an answer, please let me know because I’ve yet to find one.

I’m not a food Nazi. I’m not here to tell you that you can never have
French
fries, pizza, or ice cream again. I’ll indulge in those “treats” myself on occasion, but certainly not on a daily or even weekly basis. If you’re really serious about shedding that weight, I’d strongly suggest that you follow the “clean and lean” eating principles I’m about to share with you—at least for the following 21 days. After that, you can decide how to proceed. In case you’re wondering, I’ve seen some people follow the 5-day plan you’re about to discover while still eating common junk foods throughout, everything from pizza to brownies. Although they did lose some weight, it wasn’t much compared to the weight lost by those who stayed “clean and lean.”

The Fantastic Four:

Why “Clean and Lean” Foods Speed Fat Loss

Eating isn’t just about avoiding artery-clogging, fat-building foods; it’s about eating foods that turn your body into the Concorde. “Clean and lean” foods provide four essential benefits that we rely on in this program. They will drastically lower inflammation in your body, stabilize your blood sugar levels, speed toxins out of your body, and—in the case of most of the vegetables—alkalize your body.

Your body cannot become a healthy, 24/7 fat-burning machine without these four elements in place. That’s why the foods that provide these beneficial effects are at the very foundation of the All-Day Fat-Burning Diet. They are essential for reversing the litany of problems I shared with you in the first section of the book.

THE ALL-DAY FAT-BURNING DIET

“CLEAN AND LEAN” FOODS

Every food contains fat, protein, and carbohydrate in addition to hundreds of smaller micronutrients. For that reason, it’s not quite accurate to classify one food as just “fat” and another as “protein.” For our purposes, however, I’ve put the foods into each category based on their predominant macronutrient. For instance, certain high-fat nuts are in the Fit Fats section, while other high-protein nuts are listed as Clean Proteins.

Fit
Fats

Most of the best sources of healthy, “clean and lean” fats come from the plant kingdom. (An exception: the highly inflammatory vegetable oils on our earlier “fat and filthy” list.) Here are the fit fats you will eat more of on this plan.

The “But” in Butter

You’ll recall that I don’t recommend drinking milk or eating cheese or yogurt made from cow’s milk, as dairy products create inflammation inside the body. If you absolutely must have some yogurt or cheese, then choose a goat’s milk version since most people seem to tolerate it better. You can also easily replace cow’s milk with almond milk, hemp milk, or even coconut milk, all of which are much healthier for you. The only exception I’ve made to the dairy rule in this book and in my life is butter.

Butter is essentially milk fat with smaller amounts of protein, which means it does still contain allergy-causing proteins, however, so if you have a milk allergy or sensitivity, you may want to steer clear. In such cases, choose healthy coconut oil or even clarified butter.

Clarified butter (also known as
ghee
), most commonly used in Indian cuisine, is produced by melting butter and allowing the components to separate. The water evaporates, some solids float to the surface and are
skimmed
off, and the remaining milk solids sink to the bottom and are left behind when the butter fat (then on top) is poured off. Because of this, ghee has negligible amounts of lactose and casein, making it a better butter option for most people. As with anything, the source is most important. Whether choosing regular or clarified butter, please do your best to find a grass-fed and organic source. After all, the butter is a reflection of what the cow ate. You certainly don’t want to be ingesting years’ worth of pesticide residues and hormone injections.

And if you’re scared about the fat in butter, don’t be. First, you won’t be eating buckets of the stuff on a weekly basis but instead using it (optionally) in some of the recipes in this book. You’ll also use it for general cooking purposes since it’s very stable under heat. Second, butter and pretty much all saturated fats got a bad rap due to one
flawed
study by the famous American scientist Ancel Keys more than 50 years ago, which triggered the entire low-fat craze that still persists to a great degree today.
¹

Keys’s “Seven Countries Study” showed that the risk and rates of heart attack and stroke were directly and independently related to the level of total serum cholesterol, which was, according to Keys, largely caused by saturated fat and cholesterol from the diet. The study was so popular that his findings and suggestions were adopted by the American Heart Association and even the American government. Keys also found himself on the cover of
Time
magazine in 1961, celebrated as the leading light in the world of diet and health.

It’s a pity his studies were thoroughly unsound. He pegged saturated fat and cholesterol as the villains in the modern diet but somehow forgot to look at other important cardiovascular enemies, like sugar. Furthermore, Keys based his studies on just six countries out of 21 for which data were available. Analysis of all 21 countries made the link between fat intake and heart disease far from significant. He omitted it anyway.

It’s shocking that the medical community and food industry adopted their low-fat recommendations based on such misleading science. Thankfully, we now know better. Take, for instance, a 2014 review of his studies, which found that “current evidence does not clearly support cardiovascular guidelines that encourage high consumption of polyunsaturated fatty acids and low consumption of total saturated fats.”
²
So fat isn’t the problem. The
wrong kind
of fat is.

Butter isn’t the bad guy when it comes to heart disease. Trans fats and rancid vegetable oils (canola, corn, soybean, etc.) are the true culprits because of the inflammation they create inside the body, which leads to elevated levels of dangerous LDL cholesterol.
³
Funny enough, butter is actually good for you.

Butter, especially from grass-fed cows, is a significant source of conjugated linoleic acid (CLA), a special type of fat shown to have powerful anticancer, antidiabetic, and weight-loss-promoting benefits.
⁴
Butter is also the highest source of butyric acid, or butyrate (from the Greek word for butter
, boutyron
), a very short-chain fatty acid that gets
fermented
in the small intestine and feeds your healthy gut bacteria, reducing inflammation and doing wonders for the health of your gut.

When fed a high-fat diet of lard and soybean oil, some strains of mice overeat, gain fat, and become insulin resistant. However, a 2009 study in the journal
Diabetes
showed that the simple addition of butyrate to their diet eliminated the harmful metabolic effects of the high-fat diet on such mice. The butyrate-fed mice remained lean, avoided metabolic problems, and showed increased energy expenditure via increased body heat production. The butyrate also substantially increased the function of their mitochondria, the tiny powerhouses of each cell in the body.

Butyrate lowered blood cholesterol levels in these mice by approximately 25 percent and their triglycerides by nearly 50 percent. It lowered their fasting insulin by nearly 50 percent and increased their insulin sensitivity by nearly 300 percent. And it even caused their food intake to decline by roughly 20 percent after 10 weeks. The mice simply didn’t want to eat as much food.
⁵

This is obviously my own anecdotal theory, but maybe butter plays a role in why French people don’t seem to gain as much weight as Americans. I lived in France when I played pro soccer in my early twenties. I can tell you that butter is like oxygen to them. They aren’t fussing about it. On this side of the Atlantic, we’ve been scared off butter and told that man-made, trans fat–laden margarine is healthier for us. It is not. Butter really will not make you fat, especially when consumed in the small quantities that you’ll enjoy in this plan’s recipes. And it has many health benefits.

Clean Proteins

We’re on a mission to restore you to your most natural state; for this reason, the meat in your diet should meet the same standards. You don’t want to be overburdened, stressed out, and pumped full of medication, so the animal that ends up on your plate shouldn’t have been either. Whenever possible, choose animal proteins from organic, wild, free-range, or grass-fed sources. Most commercially raised animals are pumped full of hormones and antibiotics and fed unnatural foods like
soy
and grains, which degrade their health and end up adding to your body’s toxic load.

Although this list does contain a lot of animal protein options, I would strongly encourage you to seek out more vegetarian protein sources. Plant-based proteins are less acidic and usually contain a greater array of nutrients than their animal counterparts. The only dilemma with plant proteins is that they also come with more carbohydrates. For the most part, that’s not a problem, but when the program calls for you to eat fewer carbs than usual, you’ll want to cut back a bit. We’ll address this further in the next chapter. Meanwhile, here are your clean proteins.

*Indicates a higher presence of starchy carbs in addition to its protein content.

Starchy Carbs and Fruits

These are the healthy starchy carbs and fruits that I recommend. Obviously, you would limit them on your Low-Carb Days.