intermittent fasting, motherhood, Uncategorized, weight loss

My 4-Hour Body Couldn’t Wait for Cheat Day…

In 2010 Tim Ferriss released The 4-Hour Body. I thoroughly enjoyed his first book, The 4-Hour Work Week, and loved his concept of Lifestyle Design, so I was excited to see what gold nuggets Ferriss would offer in this new book. Not surprisingly, Ferriss did not fail to deliver. In The 4-Hour Body, Ferriss introduced the concept of the Minimum Effective Dose or MED. I…was…HOOKED!

As new mom with more than just myself to think about, this concept was exactly what I was looking for. I no longer had time to work out for several hours a day or the budget to buy fancy, expensive protein bars and powders. According to Ferriss, I could do some squats and wall-presses, and eat very economically to drop weight FAST. The Slow Carb Diet that he outlined in the book only had 5 very simple rules, which were much less restrictive than what I’d been trying to do. Best of all…you could eat as much as you wanted of the approved foods and indulge in a weekly cheat day, which he referred to as Dieters Gone Wild (DGW) day. This truly was a dieter’s dream come true!

I wasted no time stocking up on eggs, lentils, spinach and chicken to get started on my new diet plan. Unfortunately, Ferriss insisted that people must eat “within one hour of waking” and that forgetting to do so, (or skipping breakfast altogether,) would result in fat-loss failure. It was also critical that each meal supplied “at least 20 grams of protein.” Gag! I already didn’t enjoy eating breakfast so early, but eating eggs with spinach and lentils made it so much worse. I’d drive to work feeling so bloated and nauseated from having a full stomach. To make downing 20 grams of protein easier, I later tried chugging a small protein shake instead. Big mistake. <Cue face palm>

Despite my abhorrence to eating beans and lentils for breakfast, I followed the diet strictly throughout the week. Unfortunately, I never felt satiated after eating a slow-carb meal as the book described. And just like every other diet I tried, the ended up feeling stuffed, bloated and still hungry! My saving grace was my DGW cheat day…or so I thought.

I don’t know why I thought it would be different this time around. I could barely handle a daily reward meal years before, let alone an entire cheat day! As I should have guessed, Friday nights were hard to stick to my diet plan. If I went out to eat, I didn’t want to eat meat, beans and greens for dinner. So I’d “give in” and eat what everyone else was eating, figuring Friday would be my cheat day. Then came Saturday, my original cheat day, when I’d feel cheated out of not having a full cheat day and end up cheating some more on that day too! By Sunday, I could care less about eating an early breakfast or no/low/slow carbs. I would simply have a big mug of coffee with sugar-free creamer and tell myself that I’d start again on Monday. As much as I admire Tim Ferriss, the slow-carb diet just wasn’t for me.