Authors: Yuri Elkaim
The All-Day Fat-Burning Diet: The 5-Day Food-Cycling Formula That Resets Your Metabolism To Lose Up to 5 Pounds a Week (17 page)
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Increased norepinephrine and epinephrine levels
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Increased glucagon levels
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Increased growth hormone levels
I don’t know about you, but I’ve never seen a drug that can do so much good for the human (and animal) body. Each of these benefits contributes to weight loss, and they’re all completely free. Plus, giving yourself a break from food for a day or two a week will save you money on your grocery bills. Fasting will not only help you lose weight but allow you to really tune in to your body’s hunger messages. After doing a few of these fasting days, you’ll feel more in control of your body and your relationship with food. Now, from a weight-loss perspective, this 1-Day Fast coincides with an optional low-intensity car
dio
workout to create a massive caloric deficit while your body is primed to burn fat. This might actually be the most important day of your weight-loss week.
Understanding Your Hunger Hormones
I must warn you in advance: The first time you do a 1-Day Fast, you’ll probably feel pretty miserable. It’s to be expected. It’s quite like exercise: The first time you work out, you’re guaranteed to feel sore for a few days. But just like exercise, your 1-Day Fast will get a lot easier over time.
The reason it’s so uncomfortable is because you’re literally reprogramming your main hunger hormone—ghrelin. Ghrelin controls your body’s hunger response and serves as a short-term regulator of body weight. Your body’s levels of ghrelin are primarily regulated by food intake, increasing when you’re fasting or hungry and decreasing when you’re fed. Thus, whenever you feel hunger pangs gnawing at your stomach, that’s ghrelin getting to work. Ghrelin is also the driving force behind enhanced growth hormone (GH) secretion during fasting, which you’ll see throughout this book is a very important hormone for fat loss and muscle preservation.
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Under conditions of nutritional restriction, GH levels are high, leading to the breakdown of fat to provide the calories your body requires to function.
Thus, GH plays a fundamental role in maintaining metabolic homeostasis and body composition. And GH levels are greatly dependent on the presence of ghrelin. Both hormones play a vital role in maintaining healthy blood sugar and energy balance during fasting. This happens because your body perceives hypoglycemia (low blood sugar) as a stressor. Thus, it mounts a “stress response,” which includes the release of the adrenal hormones cortisol and adrenaline, along with growth hormone, to raise blood glucose back to normal levels. Ghrelin helps in this process, as it senses low blood glucose and drives growth hormone release.
Because of these hormonal responses, short-term fasting closely mimics high-intensity exercise. That’s one of the primary reasons there’s a 1-Day Fast built into your 5-day cycle; every hormonal trigger activated by your 1-Day Fast works in your favor to burn more fat and
preserve
muscle. I personally find that fasting is also a great opportunity to learn a great deal about why you eat the foods you do. Many times the discomfort of fasting is not physiological but psychological. This 1-Day Fast will help you identify some of your conditioned ways of eating and lead to true dietary freedom as you work through them.
Stine’s Story
“The start of this diet seems like a lifetime ago. For a lot of years I had been stuck in what felt like most areas of my life. I was in a relationship that I knew wasn’t right for me but still was hard to end. Over the 14 years of the relationship, I gained a lot of weight. At the worst I was 240 pounds. I managed to get to 192 pounds by myself; however, after ending the relationship a year ago, all those years of stress, the stress of the actual breakup, and a stressful job left me with adrenal burnout. It was so bad I could barely string a sentence together or stand up without severe dizziness, and I ended up being sick for almost 5 months, so any thought of diets was forgotten.
“During this time, I came across the All-Day Fat-Burning Diet, and it just felt right. I am a nutrition student, but due to the stress, I just haven’t been able to consistently apply my knowledge. I have been wanting to go wheat and dairy free for a long time, but was not able to take the step.
“What I love about Yuri’s programs (not just this book) are that they make sense and are thought through in great detail, especially this
one
with the combination of diet and exercise.
“The recipes are fantastic, and I never felt like I was on a diet at all. I have made the recipes for guests several times, and they have always been well received. Even my 4-year-old son is happily eating the food.
“When I started the diet, I was severely addicted to sugar and wheat, but very quickly the cravings subsided. I felt I gained a control I had lacked for years over my diet. It felt like a knot that was loosening, giving me a more relaxed relationship with food. I finally feel like I can hear my body telling me what it needs.
“After 9 weeks on the diet, I can’t see myself ever ending it. I love the way both the exercise and diet can easily fit into a busy life. I love the variety of the diet with the mix of low-carb, feast, fast, regular-, and low-calorie days, where you don’t get stuck in a rut. This food-cycling plan helped me avoid wanting to rebel against a strict structure (often found in most diets).
“I am now lighter than I’ve been in more than 10 years. I’ve gone down two clothes sizes and lost almost 30 pounds! I also feel great and have lots of energy. And I have reopened the lines of communication with my body and feel ready to move on with my life.
“This has been a life changer, not only due to the weight loss, for which I get lots of compliments, but mainly because I have found myself and regained the energy to get out of the rut I was stuck in. Thank you, Yuri, for this opportunity. It has been an amazing journey, which has really just begun.”
The Easiest Way to Fast
I’m very aware that the mere mention of the term
fasting
terrifies many people, conjuring up images of intense suffering and starvation. They picture themselves waking up in the morning and starting their 24-hour timer, anxiously counting down the milliseconds until they can have the first bite of their post-fast meal. Others can’t even fathom the idea of going a full day without food.
It really doesn’t have to be so awful, and there’s an approach that actually makes it quite doable. In fact, it’s what I do. It’s a bit of a cheat, but it doesn’t lessen the benefits of your fast, so I say give it a go. The day before your 1-Day Fast is your 1-Day Feast. On that day, about 3 hours after you’ve enjoyed the last bite of your last meal for the day,
start
the timer on your 1-Day Fast. For example, if you had a big dinner around 7:00 p.m., your body would be in a “semifasted” state by the time 10:00 p.m. rolls around. Consider that the kickoff of your fast. Hit the sack and sleep for 7 to 8 hours. By the time you wake up, you’ve completed one-third of your day’s fast without batting an eyelash, literally.
If you’re anything like me, you might not feel hungry in the morning. There’s a good chance this will happen considering how much you stuffed yourself the day before. So much for breakfast. If you can make it to lunch on a few glasses of water, then you’ve just knocked out 14 hours of your fast. And if you can make it to at least 4:00 p.m., that’s 18 hours. You’re really on fire at this point. Maybe you can have a cup of peppermint tea as a reward. After all, this is when the massive health benefits from your short-term fast really start to kick in.
At this point, if you really can’t take it, you can have a smoothie or smaller meal to break your fast. However, if you really want to win, power through to dinner without taking a bite. Once you reach 10:00 p.m., you’ve made it. You’ve successfully completed your fast, and you can go to bed dreaming about breakfast. If you can’t wait until morning to eat, I recommend a protein shake with a few carbs about an hour before you go to sleep. That way, you provide essential proteins to your muscles, while keeping your tummy satisfied until morning. The 1-Day Fast isn’t easy, but it’s not impossible either, and when you stay focused on the benefits, it becomes a lot more doable. Can you do this? I bet you can.
What makes it all a whole lot easier is simply making the decision to do it. Most people have a tough time without food because they’re constantly thinking about what they’ll eat next. In the middle of a stressful day, fasting just feels like too much to handle, as the satisfaction that comes from a delicious meal—even one that’s not good for you—helps people soothe their blues away. When that food isn’t there, they start panicking.
When you consciously make the decision that tomorrow will be a fast day, you activate a new mechanism inside yourself. You’re forced to let your innards recharge while you reflect on the bad eating habits
with
which you’ve been self-medicating. Fasting is such a profound tool for deep change. No wonder people have been turning to it for centuries.
Sebastian’s
Story
Of all the suggestions in this book, it’s likely the fast day that concerns you the most. Here’s the thing: Choosing not to eat for an entire day often has some astonishingly pleasant results beyond losing weight. Consider Sebastian’s story.
Deskbound at his job in New York City and superstressed day in and day out, he admits that he was an emotional eater, finding solace and satisfaction in all manner of junk. However, of all the things that helped him lose weight on this program—an astonishing 23 pounds—it’s the fast day that he says helped him the most.
“Fasting was a revelation to me,” says Sebastian. “I would never have thought that with all of the cravings I’d usually have, or with the dip that comes each afternoon that sends you running to the snack machine or for a coffee or pastry to sweeten your life. When you start doing the fast, you realize you can go for 18, 19, 20 hours without any food. Of course, you feel a little hungry, but it’s not that uncomfortable, and it actually helps you get your mind focused.”
Sebastian credits the 3-week time frame of the program, the tasty meals, and the plan’s simplicity for his dramatic weight loss but remains wowed by the power of the fast day, a practice he plans to carry forward beyond his time on the plan.
“When breaking fast, I also profoundly realize that my body wants fresh food (salad, greens, fruit, berries) and is not attracted to greasy or sweet stuff. And that first food tastes so good!”
1-Day-Fast Food Guidelines
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On your fast days you will consume nothing but water or herbal tea. It’s that simple.
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If you’re taking any supplements (multivitamins, fish oil, etc.), give your body a break for a day.
1-Day-Fast Exercise Guidelines
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Take the day off and let your body work its magic.
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Or, engage in a longer-duration (1 hour or more) activity or very-low-intensity active recovery (walking, biking, etc.) that will rely on fat as its main fuel source.
DAY 4: THE REGULAR-CALORIE DAY
Surprise, surprise: There’s nothing special about this day. After the roller coaster of not eating carbs, eating nearly anything you like, then not eating at all, you’re simply going to eat a regular diet today. That’s it. The only rule, if you can call it that, is that you should do your best to eat real, whole foods.
Regular-Cal Food Guidelines
The following Serving Size Simplifier should be used as a portion quantity guideline for each meal. Its intuitive approach is customized to your body size and will help you put calorie counting to rest for good. It was originally inspired by the amazing work done by my friends at Precision Nutrition.
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Fibrous veggies:
2 to 4 handfuls
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Clean protein:
1 palm-size portion for women, 1 to 2 palm-size portions for men
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Starchy carbs and fruits:
1 handful for women, 1 to 2 handfuls for men