The Slow-Carb Diet Explained | Tim Ferriss & Dr. Andrew Huberman
Could you give us just a brief top contour of what the slow carb diet is? Sure, yeah. The slow carb diet is
intended to be a simple, easy to adhere to diet for people who have perhaps failed other diets that allows you to recompose your body. So improve muscle mass,
decrease body fat percentage. And the rules are really simple and that's part of what makes it work. It's not ideal for every
sport in every circumstance, but broadly speaking, it works for a lot of people who've had trouble
with dieting in the past. So, rule number one, don't drink calories. That's it, very simple. So black coffee, unsweetened tea, great. Juice out, anything with calories out, you could add a little bit of heavy cream to your coffee, let's say. But that's also bending the rules in a way that I don't like.
So in the beginning it's
like, follow the rules so you can break them later. So in the beginning, let's just say you can't drink calories. Number two, don't eat anything white. Sounds pretty basic, right? Just don't eat anything
that is the color of white, or that could be white, basically, that means you're going
to be avoiding starches. And things that are similar to starches. That includes things like oatmeal. That includes things like oatmeal.
So roughly speaking, just avoiding things that are white or that could be white will get you pretty far. And yes, there are exceptions,
like cauliflower are fine, you can have cauliflower, but
again, don't get fancy, right? It's very easy to outsmart yourself when it
comes to behavioral change. Keep it simple. So for at least two weeks, forget about the exceptions, right? Don't drink calories,
don't eat anything white, and then eat 30 grams of protein within 30 minutes of waking up. Okay, we got that. And then there are a few buckets you can choose from, right? So you have vegetables,
beans, and lentils, and then some type of protein. So you're going to come up
with meals that you can follow without deviating for a
period of one or two weeks, just come up with the same meals.
And that's going to sound boring. Yes, but guess what? You do it already. You just might not realize it. And the lentils and the beans,
specifically as a pre-req, we can get into some of the
reasons, but add a lot of fiber and also inhibit appetite, right? So that's actually a very important component of these meals. And there may be a handful of other rules, but those are the basics. And then the redemption is take one day off per week
and just go fucking crazy. That's cheat day. There are some epic cheat days out there, some I've captured for myself. And anything goes, when I say
anything, I do mean anything. So if you want to consume multiple
pizzas, pints of ice cream, whatever, indulge, I left one
out, no fruit during the week. So avoid fruit, avoid
fructose, so, agave, nectar, anything that is sort of hidden sugar. Avoid all that. It's a no added sweeteners obviously, but avoid fruit and fructose. And again, it's not going to kill you.
Guess what? If you're from European ancestry, your ancestry did not
have like blueberries in the middle of winter,
generally speaking, right? So you'll be fine for a few weeks and then there's that cheat day and cheat day, anything goes. The amount of damage
you can do on cheat day is pretty limited and there are ways you can mitigate that. There's a whole chapter
called damage control in before our body. But focusing just on that diet and having one day off where you know you can do anything means when you're controlling yourself for those six days of the week, you're not giving up your
favorite foods forever.
You can even keep a list of all things you want
to eat on cheat day, and then you have free
license to eat on cheat day. And that provides you with a release valve so that you can build in
the cheating as opposed to having it occur as a failure point. And there are a handful
of other things there. If you have domino foods
in the house, for instance, if you eat a lot of almonds or mixed nuts and you're just going to sit
there compulsively eating them while you're sitting at
your laptop, don't have what I call domino foods in
the house, which are going to really create some
portion control issues. But broadly speaking, don't drink calories, donate
things that are white. Take from three categories
and build your meals out. And those are the meals that you follow.
Do not eat fruit or fructose
and then cheat one day a week. And Saturday's a nice day
for cheat day for most folks. And just to answer some questions that people are going to have. No, that doesn't mean 24 hours that you can spread out over two days, that will actually set you back. But the amount of fat that you can store in a handful of sittings over 24 hours, which legitimately is more like 12 to 18
hours, pretty limited. So that's a slow carb diet.
Great, thank you for that. I also want to ask, is it okay to take the day after cheat day and fast, or do one meal that day? When I followed the slow carb diet, I benefited from it tremendously. Lost fat, gained muscle, tons
of energy, sleeping great, required less caffeine, all sorts of wonderful things, stable blood sugar. I felt so, so good. Really enjoyed the cheat days. I really, really enjoyed the cheat days. That's so fun. So much fun. At some point there's
some gastric distress that comes from not regulating intake, which led me to not want
to eat the next day. So I tended to do the cheat
days on Sunday in my case, and then I would fast
most of Monday just water, black coffee, tea, and then I might have a small meal in the evening. And then by Tuesday I was
back on the slow carb diet.
Does that seem like a sort of a detrimental deviation from the plan? I think that if that
is what works for you, then that is what works for you. So this is the slow carb diet template for me is a starting point. And generally I'll say, I think
this is from Picasso, right? It's like learn the rules as an amateur so you can break them as a professional. But it's like, I recommend
most people kind of stick with the format for a handful of weeks and measure the results, right? So there are guidelines for how to measure the scale is a bit of a blunt instrument. So there are other ways, but
if you're extremely overweight, you can just use the scale
and fasting I think is fine. Or just ratcheting back your caloric consumption significantly. And what happens over
time for most people also is for the first say
four weeks on cheat day, you're going to go completely insane. And I remember I was doing
something much stricter called the cyclical ketogenic diet, which is a whole separate thing.
It's much more limiting in
terms of what you can eat. But I was training for
ultimately the nationals in Chinese kickboxing. This was happening in '99,
so I was training super hard. I was following a cyclical ketogenic diet, which meant I could eat very few things, but I did have this one cheat day and I would do a glycogen
depletion workout beforehand, which is one of the things you can do to limit the damage on cheat day, do a glycogen depletion
workout beforehand. And then I would just go crazy. I mean, I would drive to like
Krispy Kreme, buy 12 donuts and they would be gone
by the time I got home and it wasn't an hour away, it was like a 10 minute drive. Donuts would be gone, right? I would go to Safeway and I would buy a bag of
those fun sized Snickers and that would be just a
tiny portion of my calories.
Of sweet stuff for you, huh? A lot of sweet stuff, I
also did the savory stuff. I mean, I had my favorites. Nothing was safe. Pizza, nothing was safe, nothing was safe. My paws got into everything. And then over time, because the
next day you're going to feel like you got hit by a diabetic dump truck, you start ratcheting back and you're like, okay, maybe
I don't need to do that. Maybe cheat day will just be two meals, or maybe cheat day will
just be like the pastries in the morning with the coffee and you start to regulate
a bit, generally.
You don't have to, but over
time you generally will. And I think after you've
followed it to the T, just follow the commandments
for say four to eight weeks, then you can certainly deviate. And I'm not saying if you're
not hungry, don't eat. However, in many cases people have, they have acclimated to
not eating in the morning and then they end up
overeating later in the day. If you have that habit, right? If you're consuming 50% of
your calories or more at dinner and you want to lose body fat, I would say get some cottage cheese or something that will give you 30 grams
easily in the morning. Worst case scenario, use
a protein of some type. Just don't make it hyper caloric. You mean powdered protein like? Could be powdered whey protein, whole food is going to do a lot more. And no calorie counting, correct? No calorie counting. It tends to be self-limiting. When you're eating this much fiber and this much protein, it
tends to be very self-limiting what you'll want to consume
and what you can consume.
Yeah, once again, I had great experiences
with slow carb diet and I'm going to go back on. Yeah and nobody needs to buy anything to figure it out. If you just search on
tim.blog "Slow Carb Diet," there, you'll get everything
that you need to get started. No purchase necessary. [Music Playing].
