• 2 eggs, over easy.
• 3 turkey sausages cooked in water.
• 1 piece of rye toast.
• 1 cup of tea.

• Joined a gym and have been spending some time there. I’m working on my thighs, abs and biceps/triceps. My thighs are especially sore.
• Have been working towards Couch to 5K. I’m halfway there but I’ve been doing it slowly.
• Have been trying to eat healthier. No coffee, not so many sweets. No carbs and sugars after 2PM. Less binging.

Let’s hope this is the right track.

Carbs to Choose Often

Fruits (about 60 calories per serving)
Apple, orange, pear, nectarine: 1 small (tennis ball size)
Banana: 1 small (5 inch)
Peach, plum: 1 medium (fist size)
Grapefruit: 1/2 whole fruit
Canteloupe: 1 cup
Berries: 1 cup
Fresh pineapple: 3/4 cup
Canned fruit (in its own juice): 1/2 cup

Low-Starch Vegetables (about 25 calories per serving)
Carrots, celery, cabbage, brussels sprouts, broccoli, cauliflower, eggplant, leeks, onions, green beans: 1 cup raw or 1/2 cup cooked
Green pepper: 1 whole
Asparagus: 7 spears cooked or 14 spears raw
Lettuce/raw greens: 1 cup 100-percent vegetable juice: 1/3 cup

Carbs to Choose with Caution (watch those portions!)

High-Starch Vegetables (about 80 calories per serving)
Beans (lima, navy, pinto): 1/3 cup
Corn: 1/2 cup
Peas/lentils: 1/2 cup
Baked white or sweet potato with skin: 1 small (tennis ball size)

Pasta/Rice (about 80 calories per serving)
Couscous (cooked): 1/3 cup
Brown or white rice (cooked): 1/3 cup
Noodles/pasta (cooked): 1/2 cup
Bulgur (cooked): 1/2 cup

Breads/Cereal/Crackers (about 80 calories per serving)
Tortilla (white or wheat): 1
100-percent whole-wheat bread: 1 slice
Mini-bagel: 1
English muffin: 1/2
Pretzels: 3/4 ounce or 8 sourdough nuggets
Popcorn (air popped): 3 cups
Saltine crackers: 6
Rice cakes (all varieties, large): 2
High-fiber cereals: 3/4 cup
Oatmeal: 2/3 cup cooked or 1 instant packet

BASICS OF THE SLOW-CARB DIET

Rule #1:  No White Devils. Yeah, you guessed it—no white bread, rice (including brown), cereal, potatoes, pasta, tortillas, etc.

Rule #2:  Eat the Same Meals Over and Over

Each meal needs a lean protein (organic eggs or egg whites, chicken, grass-fed beef, fish, pork), a legume (lentils, black beans, pinto beans, red beans, soybeans) and a veggie (spinach, broccoli, cauliflower, sauearkraut, kimchee, asparagus, peas, green beans). Aim for 20 grams of protein per meal; try for 30 grams for breakfast.

Eat meals four hours apart.  For me, that would be:

7:00 am – breakfast (eat this within an hour of waking, preferably within 30 minutes)

11:00 am – lunch

3:00 pm – second lunch

7:00 pm:  dinner

Rule #3:  Don’t Drink Calories

Have as much water, unsweetened tea and coffee and other no-cal drinks.  NO milk (not even soy milk), no sugary soda, no fruit juice.  Tim avoids aspartame; he says it can “stimulate weight gain”.  Tim also has one or two glasses of red wine a day; he says it doesn’t seem to interfere with fat loss.  I say spot yourself on this; if drinking wine makes you eat crap, avoid.

Rule #4:  No Fruit

Tomatoes and avocadoes are okay.  Tim says the fructose in fruit leads to fat storage.

Rule #5:  Take one Dieters Gone Wild Binge Day a week.

Anything goes here.  No calorie counting.

SOME REFINEMENTS:

Potassium/Calcium/Magnesium: Apparently you lose more water/electrolytes on this diet, so Tim suggests supplementing.  Check with your doctor.  I’m going to be vigilant about taking my multivitamin.

Expect “Massive Weight Fluctuations” after Cheat Day. Up to 8 pounds for women!

No Whole Grains or Oats

DAMAGE CONTROL FOR BINGE DAYS:

• Make sure the first meal isn’t a binge meal
• Drink a small glass of grapefruit juice before your second meal—the first crap meal
• Use the supplements
• Consume citric juices
• Drink caffeine and yerba mate tea so you poop more
• Do 30 or so air squats, wall presses, and chest pulls BEFORE you binge

RULE 1: AVOID “WHITE” CARBOHYDRATES.

Avoid any carbohydrate that is, or can be, white. The following foods are prohibited, except for within 30 minutes of finishing a resistance-training workout like those described in the “From Geek to Freak” or “Occam’s Protocol” chapters: all bread, rice (including brown), cereal, potatoes, pasta, tortillas, and fried food with breading. If you avoid eating the aforementioned foods and anything else white, you’ll be safe.
Just for fun, another reason to avoid the whities: chlorine dioxide, one of the chemicals used to bleach flour (even if later made brown again, a common trick), combines with residual protein in most of these foods to form alloxan. Researchers use alloxan in lab rats to induce diabetes. That’s right-it’s used to produce diabetes. This is bad news if you eat anything white or “enriched.”
Don’t eat white stuff unless you want to get fatter.

RULE 2: EAT THE SAME FEW MEALS OVER AND OVER AGAIN.

The most successful dieters, regardless of whether their goal is muscle gain or fat-loss, eat the same few meals over and over again. There are 47,000 products in the average U.S. grocery store, but only a handful of them won’t make you fat.
Mix and match from the following list, constructing each meal with one pick from each of the three groups. I’ve starred the choices that produce the fastest fat-loss for me:

Proteins
*Egg whites with 1–2 whole eggs for flavor (or, if organic, 2–5 whole eggs, including yolks)
*Chicken breast or thigh
*Black beans
*Beef (preferably grass-fed)
Pork
*Fish

Legumes
*Lentils (also called “dal” or “daal”)
Pinto beans
Red beans
Soybeans

Vegetables
*Spinach
*Mixed vegetables (including broccoli, cauliflower, or any other cruciferous vegetables)
*Sauerkraut, kimchee (full explanation of these later in “Damage Control”)
Asparagus
Peas
Broccoli
Green beans

Eat as much as you like of the above food items, but keep it simple. Pick three or four meals and repeat them. Almost all restaurants can give you a salad or vegetables in place of french fries, potatoes, or rice.
Surprisingly, I have found Mexican food (after swapping out rice for vegetables) to be one of the cuisines most conducive to the Slow-Carb Diet. If you have to pay an extra $1–3 to substitute at a restaurant, consider it your six-pack tax, the nominal fee you pay to be lean. Most people who go on “low”-carbohydrate diets complain of low energy and quit because they consume insufficient calories. A half-cup of rice is 300 calories, whereas a half-cup of spinach is 15 calories! Vegetables are not calorically dense, so it is critical that you add legumes for caloric load.
Eating more frequently than four times per day might be helpful on higher-carb diets to prevent gorging, but it’s not necessary with the ingredients we’re using. Eating more frequent meals also appears to have no enhancing effect on resting metabolic rate, despite claims to the contrary.
Frequent meals can be used in some circumstances (see “The Last Mile”), but not for this reason.
The following meal schedule is based on a late sleep schedule, as I’m a night owl who gives up the ghost at 2:00 a.m. at the earliest, usually with wineglass or book still in hand, à la heroin addict. Adjust your meals to fit your schedule, but make sure to have your first meal within an hour of waking. Meals are approximately four hours apart.

10:00 am - Breakfast
2:00 pm - Lunch
6:30 pm - Smaller second lunch
8:00–9:00 pm - Recreation or sports training, if scheduled.
10:00 pm - Dinner
12:00 am - Glass of red wine and Discovery Channel before bed

Here are some of my meals that recur again and again:

Breakfast (home): Scrambled Eggology® pourable egg whites with one whole egg, black beans, and mixed vegetables warmed up or cooked in a microwave using Pyrex® containers.
Lunch (Mexican restaurant): Grass-fed organic beef, pinto beans, mixed vegetables, and extra guacamole.
Dinner (home): Grass-fed organic beef (from Trader Joe’s), lentils, and mixed vegetables.

Just remember: this diet is, first and foremost, intended to be effective, not fun. It can be fun with a few tweaks (the next chapter covers this), but that’s not the goal.

RULE 3: DON’T DRINK CALORIES.

Drink massive quantities of water and as much unsweetened tea, coffee (with no more than two tablespoons of cream; I suggest using cinnamon instead), or other no-calorie/low-calorie beverages as you like. Do not drink milk (including soy milk), normal soft drinks, or fruit juice. Limit diet soft drinks to no more than 16 ounces per day if you can, as the aspartame can stimulate weight gain.
I’m a wine fanatic and have one to two glasses of red wine almost every evening. It doesn’t appear to have any negative impact on my rate of fat-loss. Red wine is by no means required for this diet to work, but it’s 100% allowed (unlike white wines and beer, both of which should be avoided). Up to two glasses of red per night, no more.

RULE 4: DON’T EAT FRUIT.

Humans don’t need fruit six days a week, and they certainly don’t need it year-round. If your ancestors were from Europe, for example, how much fruit did they eat in the winter 500 years ago? Think they had Florida oranges in December? Not a chance. But you’re still here, so the lineage somehow survived.
The only exceptions to the no-fruit rule are tomatoes and avocadoes, and the latter should be eaten in moderation (no more than one cup or one meal per day). Otherwise, just say no to fruit and its principal sugar, fructose, which is converted to glycerol phosphate more efficiently than almost all other carbohydrates. Glycerol phosphate p triglycerides (via the liver) p fat storage. There are a few biochemical exceptions to this, but avoiding fruit six days per week is the most reliable policy.
But what’s this “six days a week” business? It’s the seventh day that allows you, if you so desire, to eat peach crepes and banana bread until you go into a coma.

RULE 5: TAKE ONE DAY OFF PER WEEK.

I recommend Saturdays as your Dieters Gone Wild (DGW) day. I am allowed to eat whatever I want on Saturdays, and I go out of my way to eat ice cream, Snickers, Take 5, and all of my other vices in excess. If I drank beer, I’d have a few pints of Paulaner Hefe-Weizen.
I make myself a little sick each Saturday and don’t want to look at any junk for the rest of the week. Paradoxically, dramatically spiking caloric intake in this way once per week increases fat-loss by ensuring that your metabolic rate (thyroid function and conversion of T4 to T3, etc.) doesn’t downshift from extended caloric restriction.
That’s right: eating pure crap can help you lose fat. Welcome to Utopia. There are no limits or boundaries during this day of gluttonous enjoyment. There is absolutely no calorie counting on this diet, on this day or any other.
Start the diet at least five days before your designated cheat day. If you choose Saturday, for example, I would suggest starting your diet on a Monday.

That’s All, Folks!

If the founding fathers could sum up our government in a six-page constitution, the above is all we need to summarize rapid fat-loss for 99.99% of the population. Followed to the letter, I’ve never seen it fail. Never. When you feel mired in details or confused by the latest-and-greatest
contradictory advice, return to this short chapter. All you need to remember is:

Rule 1: Avoid “white” carbohydrates (or anything that can be white).
Rule 2: Eat the same few meals over and over again.
Rule 3: Don’t drink calories.
Rule 4: Don’t eat fruit.
Rule 5: Take one day off per week and go nuts.

$1.34 PER MEAL?

Andrew Hyde is community director at TechStars, a well-known start-up incubator in Boulder,
Colorado. He is also an Internet-famous big bargain hunter. I use “big” in both the figurative and literal senses: Andrew is 6’5” and 245 pounds. I should say that he was 245 pounds. In his first two weeks on the Slow-Carb Diet, he lost 10 pounds and, perhaps more impressive, racked up incredibly unimpressive costs:

Total per-week food cost: $37.70
Average per-meal cost: $1.34

And this was including organic grass-fed beef! If he’d eaten a big salad three times a week instead of a few proteins, his weekly cost would have been $31.70. He repeated four meals:

BREAKFAST: Egg whites, one whole egg, mixed vegetables, chicken breast Mixed vegetables, peas, spinach (salad)
LUNCH: Mixed vegetables, peas, spinach (salad)
SECOND LUNCH: Chicken thigh, black beans, mixed vegtables
DINNER: Beef (or pork), asparagus, pinto beans

His exact shopping list was simplicity itself. The prices are the per line totals:

1x Eggs (12 pack) $1.20
4x Mixed vegetables (1-lb bags) $6
1x Chicken breast $2
1x Organic peas (2-lb bag) $2
2x Spinach (3-lb bags) $6
3x Chicken thigh $9
2x Grass-fed organic beef (0.5-lb cuts) $4
2x Pork (1-lb cuts) $3
2x Asparagus bundles $2
1x Pinto beans (1-lb bag) $1.50
1x Black beans (1-lb bag) $1

Getting these prices didn’t require a degree in negotiation or dozens of hours of searching. Andrew looked for discounted items near expiration date and shopped at smaller stores, including a Mexican grocery store, where he bought all of his dried beans.
Just to restate an important point: Andrew is an active 6’5”, 245-pound, 26-year-old male, and he exercised three times a week during his Slow-Carb Diet experiment. He’s not a small organism to feed. He’s also not unique in his experience.
Though you might not get to $1.34 per meal, his two-week experiment shows what thousands of others have been surprised to learn about the Slow-Carb Diet: it’s damn cheap. The myth that eating right is expensive is exactly that: a myth.

THE FORBIDDEN FRUIT: FRUCTOSE

Can fruit juice really screw up fat-loss?
Oh, yes. And it screws up much more. Not to speculate, I tested the effect of fructose in two tests, the first during a no-fructose diet (no juice, no fruit) and the second after one week of consuming 14 ounces-about 1.5 large glasses-of pulp-free orange juice upon waking and before bed. The orange juice was the only thing distinguishing diets A and B. The changes were incredible.

Before (10/16, no fructose) and after (10/23, orange juice):
Cholesterol: 203 -> 243 (out of “healthy” range)
LDL: 127 -> 165 (also out of range)

There were two other values that shot up unexpectedly:

Albumin: 4.3 -> 4.9 (out of range)
Iron: 71 -> 191 (!) (out of range aka into the stratosphere)

Albumin binds to testosterone and renders it inert, much like SHBG (discussed in “Sex Machine”) but weaker. I don’t want either to be out-of-range high. Bad for the manly arts. If you said “Holy sh*t!” when you saw the iron jump, we’re in the same boat. This result was completely out of the blue and is not good, especially in men. It might come as a surprise, but men don’t menstruate. This means that men lack a good method for clearing out excessive iron, which can be toxic. The increase in iron was far more alarming to me than the changes in cholesterol.
Here is just one of several explanations from the research literature:

In addition to contributing to metabolic abnormalities, the consumption of fructose has been reported to affect homeostasis of numerous trace elements. Fructose has been shown to increase iron absorption in humans and experimental animals. Fructose intake [also] decreases the activity of the copper enzyme superoxide dismutase (SOD) and reduces the concentration of serum and hepatic copper.

The moral of the story? Don’t drink fruit juice, and absolutely avoid a high-fructose diet. It doesn’t do the body good.

TOOLS AND TRICKS

The Three-Minute Slow-Carb Breakfast (www.fourhourbody.com/breakfast) Breakfast is a hassle. In this video, I’ll show you how to make a high-protein slow-carb breakfast in three minutes that is perfect for fat-loss and starting the day at a sprint.

Still Tasty (www.stilltasty.com) Not sure if it’s safe to eat those eggs or those Thai leftovers? Tired of calling your mom to ask? This site allows you to search the shelf life of thousands of cooked and uncooked foods.

Food Porn Daily (http://www.foodporndaily.com) Need some inspiration for your cheat day? Food
Porn Daily provides a delicious and artery-blocking cornucopia of bad (but tasty) eating. Save it for Saturday.

Gout: The Missing Chapter (http://www.fourhourbody.com/gout) Concerned about protein intake
and gout? Read this missing chapter from Good Calories, Bad Calories, graciously provided by stunning science writer Gary Taubes. It might change your mind.

Fats of Choice

Full-Calorie sources (about 50 calories per serving)
All oils: 1 teaspoon
Avocado (medium): 1/8 
Almonds, cashews, filberts: 6
Peanuts: 10
Pistachios: 15
Olives (green or black): 8 medium
Peanut butter (creamy or chunky): 1 teaspoon

Reduced-Calorie sources (about 25 calories per serving)
Light tub margarine: 1 teaspoon
Light mayonnaise/salad dressing: 1 teaspoon
Light cream cheese: 1 teaspoon
Fat-free salad dressing: 1 tablespoon

Protein Picks

Very lean (about 35 calories per serving)
Chicken or turkey breast (skinless): 1 ounce
Fish fillet (all whitefish): 1 ounce
Canned, water-packed tuna: 1 ounce
Shellfish: 1 ounce
Egg whites: 2 large
Egg substitute: 1/4 cup

Lean (about 55 calories per serving)
Chicken or turkey (skinless dark meat): 1 ounce
Salmon, swordfish, herring, trout, bluefish: 1 ounce
Lean beef (flank steak, top round, ground sirloin): 1 ounce
Veal or lamb (roast or lean chop): 1 ounce
Pork (tenderloin): 1 ounce
Canadian bacon: 1 ounce
Low-fat hot dogs: 1
Low-fat luncheon meats: 1 ounce

Dairy Products (about 90 calories per serving)
Fat-free or 1-percent-fat cottage cheese (calcium fortified): 1 cup
Low-fat, sugar-free yogurt: 3/4 cup
Fat-free, sugar-free yogurt: 1 cup
Low-fat cheese (all types): 2 ounces

I’m starting towards creating a rough fitness plan and food intake for myself. Why? I’m unhappy with my level of fitness and health. Sure, size does have it’s place but it’s mostly with how out of shape I’ve become. This is only has a small part to do with self-esteem, but mostly with the desire to reach a better state of health.

From this point on, I’m going to be more vulnerable with my fitness plan, weight loss issues and struggles in this area. This is going to be a journey.

Currently:

• 185lbs
• Size 12-14
• 34in waist

Goal:

• 160lbs

So how am I going to do this? How will I lose 25lbs?

• Monitor calorie intake and ensure it’s 1800 calories per day. (900 protein 450 carbs, 450 fat). 
• Create a running/eating plan.
• Complete the Couch To 5K program during this time.
• Cut down on the intake of sweets and such. 
• Ensure that all meals are being eaten at a table versus the tv or computer.
• Accountability from all of you.

If you are interested in following this journey or keeping me accountable, follow me at Portly.