My Diet

Like everyone says you need diet and exercise to really accelerate weight-loss. For the exercise part I use F4X and alternate with a few other workouts every 4-6 months, to keep things interesting and progressing. All done in my home gym !

For the eating part, my “goto” diet actually hasn’t changed much in the last 5 years. I just occasionally fall off the wagon and get back on every once in a while 😉

The Diet

I have tried many many many diets over the years. I am also genetically prone to diabetes and high blood pressure (both my parents have both) … well that and bad vision (entire family has glasses) but that isn’t really relevant here 😄

That is to say I’m prone to a few health issues and this way of eating has worked for me.

There are a LOT of diets out there:

* Low carb
* High carb
* Raw 
* Vegan
* Paleo
* gluten free
* Mediterranean
* DART
* protein shake

the list goes on and on… and I’ve tried a good portion of them.

Here is what has worked for me.

After years of trials and tribulations the only real, long lasting fat loss results came from 2 principals:

• Eat Less
• Cut out starches

That’s it.

Eat Less

I tried the counting calorie method and I was miserable. I couldn’t keep it up.

I eventually stumbled across the concept of skipping meals. (aka intermittent fasting, which I didn’t know was called that, at the time.)

My wife (who has been thin her entire life, she even bounced back to her normal weight after pregnancy, in 8 months…) never eats breakfast and hates exercise.

Me on the other hand have to diet and exercise year round or else I get large(-r)…

So I tried skipping breakfast along with my wife and eventually I found that I lost weight and didn’t crave breakfast… So I decided to research it (I am a nerd…) and found the fancy name for skipping meals is called: intermittent fasting

While researching Intermittent fasting (I will use IF from now on to save on typing) two names kept coming up. They have both been studying it for far longer than I have and have pedigrees longer than my arm.

Martin Berkhan - Swedish author, nutrition consultant and personal trainer.

• His book The Leangains Method
• His site leangains.com

Brad Pilon - Canadian author, nutrition researcher and co-creator of science backed fitness regimens.

• His book Eat, Stop, Eat
• His site bradpilon.com

Both have great information on their sites.

After my research I decided to skip breakfast every day and ALSO skip lunch on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.

Brad Pilon’s book as well as a BBC Horizon’s documentary on diet and aging convinced me of IF’s safety.

So that was the Eat Less part squared away. But I found I had plateaued after about 10 lbs of weight loss.

This is when I changed what I ate.

Cut Out Starches

I had done the Atkins' Diet before and had quite a bit of success. But I also found that cravings for carbs eventually got to me (specifically bread and french fries!!!) So based on that, I looked for alternatives.

I eventually came across two books by Dr. Barry Groves’ Eat Fat, Get Thin and Trick and Treat: how healthy eating is making us ill where he advocates a slightly different version of a low carb diet than Dr. Atkins.

Dr. Groves’ version is instead of just removing carbs, you should replace them with fat! So a high fat, medium protein, low carbohydrate diet. He goes into the science exhaustively in Trick and Treat .

Very similar to Keto which has become so much more mainstream now adays.

His Eat Fat, Get Thin book is more about detailing the diet without so much science. Dr. Groves credits his own weight-loss and the diet described in his book to William Banting who published a booklet on this subject back in 1863!

On Dr. Grove’s diet - I feel full for much longer, making IF SO much easier!

I find Dr. Groves’ version of low carb to be MUCH easier to stick with than Dr. Atkins’, more fruits and veggies as well as just occasionally eating a plate of fries, if I really really need to (and sometimes I really really do!)

So to Recap: