Before we launch into Phase One of the 30-Day Reset, I need to give you a virtual high-five and congratulate you for plowing through what is clearly a lot of material. If you’ve picked up a fraction of what is covered in the book, you now have a remarkably better picture of how food and your environment influence your health and wellness.
As you now know, we have a bit of a challenge as we begin our health and weight loss journey, in that our normal human tendencies (eat more, move less) are quite at odds with our modern world. This is a legitimately complex problem. Therefore, our simple solutions must address this reality and involve eating, sleeping, moving, and loving in a way that works with, instead of against, our genetic wiring.
Easy, right?! It may not seem so at first, but it is. It may be different than what you’ve done before, and it may require going outside your comfort zone or changing some habits, but trust me, this is doable. The nice thing about this change is that although there may be challenges, there are immediate rewards. You will look, feel, and perform better from the get-go.
Clearly this is a book and not a one-on-one consult, which means I need to strike a balance between offering general information and providing a sufficient framework to help you customize this plan for your individual needs. That said, our approach will likely be fairly familiar for most folks, at least in the beginning. We will focus on nutrient-dense whole foods to rewire your appetite, heal your metabolism, and get you looking and feeling your best.
EATING ON THE 30-DAY RESET
Phase One of the program primarily deals with discovering where you are on the insulin resistance spectrum, which will be important for weight loss as well as a number of other factors. The problems associated with insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes are enormous, but also remarkably easy to fix if we can get folks eating, sleeping, and moving better. As we learned in Part One of the book, our eating is governed by the neuroregulation of appetite. Our brain and our hormones are the real players in determining if we eat to a reasonable satiety level or we take on the job of Professional Eater. Along with the lifestyle considerations of sleep, stress, and exercise, there are three primary dietary components we can control that govern our neuroregulation of appetite:
1. Protein
2. Fiber
3. Appropriate carb content
Protein, particularly protein from lean animal sources, is remarkably satiating. Not to say you should avoid fat from animal products, but things like chicken breast and pork loin are difficult to overeat, as they send a very strong “done” signal to the brain.
Fiber is satiating for several reasons beyond simply the “bulk” of the food, but likely relating to the feeding of our gut microbiota and the intrinsic nutrients found in these plant products. Finding the “right” carb intake allows us to dial in our specific carb tolerance and therefore keep our hormonal profile in a state that is favorable for fat loss while repairing our metabolism. There are anthropological examples of pre-Westernized folks who ate both the high and low end of the carbohydrate spectrum. This is interesting and should tell us there may be very different approaches we can take depending on our unique situation. By paying close attention to our subjective measures of satiety, energy, and mental clarity, we can dial in the amount and types of carbs that work best for us.
Appropriate carb content is a bit variable, but I find the 75 to 150g range to be a good place to start for most folks. What does that look like? If we are talking about white rice, it’s about three cups, which may sound like a lot, but it’s not. Most people can easily down that much rice in a sitting. If we are talking about fruits and vegetables, getting 75 to 150g of carbs requires eating a remarkable amount of food. This is why sticking with Paleo carbs in the beginning of your reset is so important. These foods are nutritious and filling, which makes them hard to overdo.
Given all of the above, for the next thirty days, you will eat three meals per day (crazy, right?) built around the following:
• 4 to 6 ounces of protein at every meal (larger folks may do a bit more; smaller folks will likely stay on the lower side of that general recommendation)
• 75 to 150g of carbohydrates per day, from as wide a variety of fruits, vegetables, and roots as you can manage
• Added fat for flavor. Don’t be afraid of fat, but don’t drink it through a straw.
If your primary goal is fat loss, or if you are prediabetic, Phase One will help you lose weight quickly and easily. This is due to the fact that this plan is highly satiating and reduces insulin load, yet provides relatively few calories relative to the volume of food consumed. Although the calories in, calories out idea has many flaws, there is a reality that if we reduce caloric intake (assuming our hormonal profile is favorable), we can lose weight, specifically body fat, relatively easily. So, the “fat for flavor” recommendation is to provide variety and nuance to your meals while not overdoing the calorie intake.
Before we get to the meal plans and basic meal construction, we need to cover a few more things to set you up for success.
GETTING STARTED
I’ve mentioned a few times that facts only motivate a few folks to change. To really see a new behavior stick, we usually need some kind of motivator that touches us at an emotional level. Similarly, a major roadblock to effecting change is the lack of a plan, which leaves us only one option: defaulting to what we know. The old cliché “Failure to plan is planning to fail” may seem trite, but it’s true. The following tips and tricks are as important as blood work or a spiritual aha moment.
Clean Out the Pantry
If you don’t want to get into street fights, don’t go to biker bars. If you don’t want to be tempted by junk food, don’t have it in the house. Clean out all the bread, cookies, pasta, juice, snacks, ice cream, and your secret stash of treats, whatever those may be. Bag this stuff up and give it to a food bank or homeless shelter. I’m not clear as to the ethics of feeding other folks this stuff, but it seems a waste to throw it away, and we can discuss the moral nuances in the afterlife. I cannot sufficiently emphasize how important it is to not have dodgy food options in the house. We are not wired for self-control, so if you want to make things as easy as possible for yourself, don’t have trigger foods on hand. Of equal import is what should be in your pantry, refrigerator, and freezer. We should have as many spices and spicelike options you can think of. I’ll explain why this is important in just a moment when we look at the Food Matrix.
You need to keep lots of varieties of protein in the freezer. In my house we have a medium-size chest freezer so we can buy beef, lamb, fish, and other items in bulk and freeze them for future use. This saves money and allows us to always have good options on hand. The refrigerator should be stocked with perishable items like fruit, veggies, and smart condiments. Again, it’s hard to give you specifics here as I do not know what your particular tastes are, but you should shop in bulk and cook in bulk (as is described in the meal plans) so you save money and always have food readily available. Getting caught with no food is an easy way to derail your process, but if you keep your provisions topped off, this will be easy to navigate. If you live in a larger urban area, you can order a lot of groceries to your door with programs like Amazon Fresh. Regardless of where you live (so long as it’s in the US) and for nonperishable items, I recommend you check out Thrive Market (thrivemarket.com), as you can order most of what you’d get from a higher-end grocery store but at 30 to 40 percent off retail.
You should always have a mix of nuts such as almonds, cashews, walnuts, and pistachios on hand. Your palate will shape what you stock in this regard. Not everyone likes canned fish, but this is a staple in our house. We always have tuna, salmon, and sardines in the pantry, and I recommend you do the same. Sardines are inexpensive and can be incredibly tasty if you find the right varieties. Look for options packed in water or olive oil instead of soybean oil.
Take this seriously, as your moments of indecision, fatigue, or frustration will make defaulting to old habits easy. What will the kids eat? Same stuff as you. They need the crap formerly living in your pantry even less than you do.
Go Shopping
Take the book with you and reference the shopping list in the appendix or print out the shopping guide at robbwolf.com/shoppinglist. And get shopping. Now that you have no food in the house, you have a choice: either do an extended fast, or provision your digs with chow that is tasty and healthy. What to buy? Follow the recipes and foods that fit with the plan, and remember, we do not want to stock the house with items that are going to derail your process. Don’t “Euroshop” (buy tiny amounts of food that you run out of in a day), as this will again leave you with inadequate options and increase your likelihood of throwing in the towel before you even get started. Stock up for at least a week—pack the freezer with meat, seafood, and even frozen veggies.
THE FOOD MATRIX
Here is a chart I call the Food Matrix to give you a sense of what most meals will look like. You can download the full Food Matrix chart at robbwolf.com/foodmatrix.
This is by no means meant to be an exhaustive list, but it will give you a pretty good idea of how your meals should go together. Protein, veggies, fats, spices…BAM! The recipes in this book largely follow this format. Just as a side note: If you made a meal with one item from each column, you would have 81,000 meal options from this short matrix. Some people complain that changing their eating is boring. I’m not sure how 81,000 meal options are boring. It may not be ice cream and pizza, but it’s not boredom. Let’s build a few sample meals so you can get a sense of how easy this is and how much variety is waiting for you.
For our first example meal, we’ll simply take the first item from each of the columns: chicken breast + asparagus + coconut oil + allspice
Here’s how you put it together:
Heat some coconut oil in a skillet, add the chicken breast (cut into cubes or chunks), then add the asparagus and allspice and cook until the chicken is cooked through, about 5 minutes.
From start to finish this is perhaps a 10-minute process at most. If you cook a double portion (which I highly recommend) and pack some for later, you will save yourself the time of preparing another meal. Want a totally different meal experience? All you need to do is tweak the seasoning from allspice to the next item down the list, basil. Or ginger, or garlic, etc. The Food Matrix is helpful both in getting you going and also in helping you over the long term. The most spartan of kitchens likely has a couple hundred food combinations when we look at the cooking process through the lens of the Food Matrix.
The real magic, though, is not in the proteins or the veggies; it comes with things like herbs and spices. I use some fairly off-the-beaten-path items like ancho chiles, green and red curry paste (available at your local Asian grocery or in the Asian food section of most supermarkets), and fish sauce. All this is in addition to the old standbys: salt, pepper, garlic, ginger, mustard, etc. I also lean heavily on things like salsa and taco sauces, as they impart amazing flavor and pack a powerful antioxidant punch. Let me give you an example of how having these items on hand can enhance a meal: Scrambled eggs and cantaloupe is not a bad breakfast by any means, but what if you add a zingy salsa to the eggs and sprinkle some herbes de Provence (savory, marjoram, rosemary, thyme, and oregano) on the cantaloupe? There is no comparing the two meals, and with just a little twist you have completely changed your taste experience, transforming a somewhat ho-hum meal into “hell yeah!”
I released the Food Matrix idea many years ago, and it has helped a lot of people navigate their eating from the kitchen to the restaurant, as the basic format is how we construct most of our meals. Once you “get” that we always have a protein, lots of veggies, and some good fat, the rest is easy. Although there is an outstanding assortment of recipes and meal plans in this book, I have both an option and a suggestion for you. It would be a fantastic idea for you to spend several weeks, if not the entire 30-Day Reset period, building your own meals using the Food Matrix. My reason for suggesting this is twofold: it will get you in the kitchen (not a bad skill to have) and you will understand on a deeper level how easy it is to make (or order) simple, tasty meals. Let’s build this up from scratch and see how it works.
I have listed five different proteins, veggies, fats, and spices, which give us 625 different meals. This is a remarkable amount of variety, and I think you have to admit that a kitchen/pantry with only those ingredients would look pretty skinny.
To put this into play, let’s build a few more meals, starting with breakfast. As you will learn in the meal plans, it’s wise to lose the arbitrary idea that there are certain foods that “must” be eaten for any given meal. People usually get excited about breakfast because it often looks like dessert wrapped in the guise of healthy eating. Breakfast cereal, croissants, and the like are certainly tasty, but when consumed regularly are doing nothing good for you. All that said, I get that people are creatures of habit and we need to take all this in baby steps. With that in mind we will focus on egg and sausage options for breakfast. Looking at our chart, let’s go straight across the top:
egg + carrot + olive oil + salt
Let’s get started: Shred a carrot or two on the large holes of a box grater (might as well get a pre-breakfast workout, right?). Heat a generous amount of olive oil (say 1 to 2 tablespoons) in a skillet. Add the grated carrots and cook, covered, for about 5 minutes.
In a bowl, whisk together a few eggs and add them to the skillet. You could mix all this as it cooks and end up with a scramble or you can cook it covered and end up with an open-face omelet (or frittata). As to the salt, you can add it at the end or at any point in the cooking process.
Simply doing a scramble versus an omelet or frittata changes the whole meal…the experience is entirely different. Now let me add another simple tweak: Instead of scrambling the eggs, just crack them on top of the carrots and cook, covered, until the eggs are over-medium or over-hard, you call it. We now have three simple meals that are remarkably different, and we have not even changed a single ingredient, just how we handle them. Not a fan of eggs? No problem—use Italian sausage and add it at the same point you would the eggs.
I’ll digress a moment and shine a spotlight on how easy this process is. This is also how you can order meals when you are eating out. Not sure what is compliant on a given menu? Ask to have some veggies cooked in a pan with eggs on top, either scrambled together or cooked over-medium. Or ask for sausage instead of eggs. Or bacon. Or chicken. Or steak. Have some fruit on the side with a cup of coffee. Or two. That’s it. People will occasionally complain this way of eating is “boring.” It’s not boring. I find that folks who complain of boredom are really just cookie addicts, or pining for bread and cereal. I get it, but let’s be honest and call all this what it is. Boredom is defined as “the state of being weary and restless due to lack of interest.” If meals like this do not appeal to you, it’s because we need to do some basic rewiring of your palate. People do not get “bored” with cocaine; they do, however, need more and more of it to reach the same psychological highs they have achieved in the past. Same deal with refined carbs. We will talk later about how and when you can kick your heels up and have some items that do not follow this basic template, but you need to understand not every one of your meals is going to be like a Julia Child cover band. Not if you want to get a handle on your health and waistline. You can and will rewire your palate to appreciate simple meals like this—heck, I dare say you’ll even come to love them!
What about lunch and dinner? Follow the same process. If you need hard guidelines to follow, make sure you have all the ingredients listed in the chart above (five each proteins, veggies, fats, and spices) available at all times. Use only those ingredients for a few weeks to a month, then start adding other items, particularly spices (or jump into the meal plans on this page), preparing them in the same basic way. If you find the options from the chart not to your liking, make sure you have at least five items you do like from the protein, veggie, fat, and spice categories. The Food Matrix has many more ingredients than I have listed here, so please do use that as a starting point. Something to consider: I’m keeping all this perhaps overly simplistic. You can clearly go wild and use both salt and pepper in a meal! Or pepper and basil, or broccoli and asparagus. I’m not saying that every meal you ever eat must follow this exact format, but I am making the point that there is a staggering amount of variety awaiting you even if you just stick to a stripped-down meal prep strategy like this one. I can think of a number of ways to make this process more complex and cumbersome. I cannot think of any way to make it easier and more effective. The Food Matrix is interesting in that it is both training wheels and “teaching a person how to fish instead of giving them a fish.” If cooking is a challenge, I’d stick to this degree of simplicity for several weeks to a month. Like I said, you could easily run your entire 30-Day Reset using the Food Matrix alone. However, if you’re handy in the kitchen and not intimidated by slightly more complex meals, the meal plans that follow are a great place to start.
MEAL PLANS
A quick note on meal plan structure: Most people will follow the basic Phase One meal plans as outlined here. This approach is incredibly powerful for losing weight, reversing insulin resistance, and getting healthy. If you have an autoimmune disease or suffer from chronic inflammation or serious GI problems, you might consider jumping into the Autoimmune Paleo (AIP) plan, which I’ve also included here. It is a bit more restrictive than the basic plan, but is also exactly what some folks need to address more complex issues. Alternatively, you could follow the basic plan, then reassess, and if the results are not optimum, step up to the AIP protocol. People have followed both paths and had good success. Two additional meal plans can be found in the Ketosis chapter. This includes the Transitional Ketosis plan, which allows for a modest amount of low-glycemic load carbs to be consumed alongside generous helpings of MCT oil, which helps folks achieve a therapeutic level of ketosis. There is also the nutritional ketosis plan that can be used for serious health concerns including certain types of cancer, neurodegenerative disease, or weight loss that has not responded to the Phase One approach, due largely to an inability to fully resolve issues related to the neuroregulation of appetite. If you have eaten a Standard American Diet for years, you may find jumping straight into ketosis to be as pleasant as rolling naked on broken bottles. It might be a good idea to follow the basic Paleo approach for 2 to 4 weeks, then use the transitional ketosis and nutritional ketosis plans as appropriate. Since relatively few people will need those tools, I have put all that material in a later chapter and explain the pluses and minuses of the various options in much greater detail.
There are lots of folks out there begging for meal plans. Having things explicitly spelled out—“eat this today, eat that tomorrow”—can be helpful to get some people going, but it is also a very rigid process. For each person that approach helps, however, there are ten people asking what they can substitute for the recommended meal. I’m going to provide you with some loosely based concepts and some killer recipes to help you with what to put in your pie hole. To that end, I’ve taken a middle-of-the-road approach here and instead of telling you that you must eat salmon for dinner on Monday! I’m giving you a template to help you plan your week, subject to change based on your life and your schedule. There are some nifty websites and apps out there that can help you stay sane with your shopping lists and favorite recipes. I particularly like the free app called Wunderlist. You can share your lists with significant others and make coordinating your shopping a breeze. People who have food to come home to—either something already made or something they can easily put together—will see the most success and will be a little more apt to avoid dodgy food choices.
A few things to keep in mind:
1. If you don’t like a recipe, don’t make it. Don’t try to force yourself to eat salmon if you know you don’t like it. Along that same vein, if you have a thousand appropriate recipes pinned on Pinterest, use those! What I’ve provided here is a loose template to help those who need some hand-holding along the way.
2. A word on breakfasts: At our house, we don’t pigeonhole certain foods into only being for certain meals. That might mean Thai coconut soup for breakfast or scrambled eggs for dinner. If you simply must have eggs and “breakfasty” foods for breakfast each day, then go for it. But a leftover burger with some slaw for breakfast is pretty darn tasty and satisfying. Think outside the huevos.
3. Sit down at some point during your week (many people do this on Saturdays or Sundays) and plan your meals for the week. Once you have a plan, do your shopping so you aren’t running to the store eighty-seven times during the week or, worse, resorting to SAD foods.
4. “The best is the enemy of the good.” I think Voltaire said that. If you’re struggling with finding time to cook, get a rotisserie chicken. If your budget constrains your grocery shopping, do the best you can. It’s great to have pie-in-the-sky aspirations, but not if it means completely derailing you. Do what you can, where you are, with what you’ve got.
5. Portion sizes. Here’s where things can get a bit dodgy. If you’re John Welbourn (a 300-pound NFL lineman), you should be eating a heck of a lot more at a meal than one of the Olsen twins. For all intents and purposes, and for your sanity and mine, too, let’s figure on an average of 4 to 6 ounces of protein per meal (about the size of your palm). It’s super easy to increase your portion sizes at a meal: just eat more. However, when it comes to planning, if you and someone else in the house are eating like Mr. Welbourn, you’re likely going to need to double or triple recipes as needed. These weekly plans assume two grown people in the house. Got kiddos running around? Maybe double some of the recipes.
Regarding the recipes, all the nutritional estimates are just that—estimates—based on the website Calorie Count. Recipes were not sent to an independent lab for analysis. This info serves as a rough guideline for you to estimate your macros if you are following things that closely and whether you need to dial up or dial down certain things in your meals. In my opinion, it’s super easy to up your calorie/fat intake by adding some avocado or an extra dollop of coconut oil, butter, or ghee. If a particular recipe has you not quite hitting your macros, adjust as you need. Carb counts reflect net carbs (total carbs minus dietary fiber). A benefit of eating this way is that it’s generally difficult to overdo either calories or carbs. Dense carb sources like bread and rice are pretty easy to overdo, whereas Paleo carb sources (as we use in this plan) are naturally satiating.
NOTES ON INGREDIENTS: GRASS-FED SOURCES, PASTURED, ORGANIC?
Ideally I’d like to see everyone eating grass-fed meat, organic produce, and sustainably caught fish. If you have the bandwidth to take that extra step, great. If not, don’t let this be a deal breaker for you. Conventional meat and produce are still better for you than soda, bagels, and sugar.
Okay, now on to the weekly templates. Let’s operate with the understanding that there are twenty-one meals in a given week (breakfast, lunch, and dinner). Now, I’d say that the average person probably eats about five or more of those meals away from home (see this page for some dining-out options). These plans figure on sixteen to eighteen meals consumed at home each week. If you eat fewer meals at home, then now you have more leftovers to tide you over in your next week, or you can freeze some portions for emergency use—think homemade Lean Cuisine.
These plans help guide you for two weeks, and we just repeat this template to round out the thirty days. I’ve included handy shopping lists for each week in the Appendix, so be sure to copy those when you’re planning for the week. If you’re the kind of person who can eat the same thing every single day, then do what works for you. On average, you have five different “main courses” each week and some sides to tinker with. That means if you cook up two or three of the meals over the weekend, you’re only back in the kitchen two other times the whole week (not counting reheating leftovers). If you watch one hour of television every day, maybe swap that out for some cooking time, or better yet, cook while you watch TV!
PHASE ONE—WEEK 1
Here you go. Your first week at eating in Phase One. If you’re coming from a typical standard American diet, you may need to up your carbs more than what’s listed here to keep you from feeling wonky. Add a baked sweet potato, some roasted winter squash, or a banana or other fruit to help you make this transition. Please keep in mind that the recipes listed here are suggestions. You can use this same basic format and pick other recipes. I’m trying to strike a balance between giving you enough structure to succeed and not overwhelming you with rigid details. All that said, these recipes were developed by Julie and Charles Mayfield, authors of the bestselling Paleo Comfort Foods and other cookbooks. They are fantastic, and I think you will love them.
On the Menu
• Chicken Tikka Masala served with Cauliflower Rice—yields 6 servings
• Flank Steak served with Twice-Baked Sweet Potatoes (or plain baked sweet potatoes), Roasted Broccoli and Cauliflower—yields 8 servings
• Cioppino—yields 8 servings
• Sausage and Egg “Sandwiches”—yields 4 servings
• Rotisserie-Like Chicken with Asian Slaw—yields 4 servings
• Scrambled eggs with veggies, if you just can’t stomach “non-breakfast foods” in the morning.
• Staples: Chicken Stock, made with the chicken carcass from the rotisserie chicken
Plan of Attack
It’s up to you how you want to attack this week. Could be that you do most of your planning and shopping on Saturday, then Sunday you choose to make:
• Rotisserie chicken (slow cooker) with Asian slaw
• Flank steak with sides (grill and oven)
• Cioppino (stovetop)
While you’re prepping veggies and items for what you’ll be cooking that day, might as well chop up what you’ll need for the Chicken Tikka Masala. Then, later in the week on a night you know you have more time, cook up the Tikka Masala, and cook the Sausage and Egg “Sandwiches” on a morning that works for you. After the rotisserie chicken is cooked, remove the meat from the chicken carcass, place it in a container, and refrigerate it, then use the carcass to make the chicken stock overnight. In one day, you have cooked enough food to get you and one other grown person through ten meals this week, and you’re on your way to making stock. Feel like you’re going to need to eat more this week? Increase how much you make of the recipes.
PHASE ONE—WEEK 2
On the Menu
• Chicken Alfredo—yields 8 servings
• Guac-Stuffed Burgers with Mashed Cauliflower and Bacon-Wrapped Asparagus—yields 8 servings
• Thai Coconut Soup—yields 8 servings
• Tomato Meat Sauce served with zucchini noodles—yields 8 servings
• Satay Skillet—yields 8 servings
Plan of Attack
On Sunday, brown the ground beef for the tomato meat sauce and make the sauce, put the Thai coconut soup in the slow cooker, and make the guacamole and the guac-stuffed burgers, mashed cauliflower, and asparagus. Later in the week, make the chicken alfredo one night and the satay skillet another. You’ve just been cooking in the kitchen three times in one week, but you’ve created enough food for about twenty meals for you and someone else. And again, if you won’t eat a burger for breakfast, fry or scramble up some eggs and bacon, maybe with a nice sweet potato hash.
AUTOIMMUNE PLAN—WEEK 1
Now’s the time to eliminate nightshades, eggs, and a whole host of things that could be causing an inflammatory response in folks with autoimmune disease or serious GI problems. While that task might seem daunting, these recipes will show you that despite those omissions there is still a lot of flavor in the world.
On the Menu
• Weeknight Chicken Breasts or Thighs with Mashed Cauliflower and Sautéed Greens—yields 8 servings; you can use some of the cooked chicken to make a salad with the Caesar-Like Dressing
• Shepherd’s Pie—yields 8 servings
• Kitchen Sink Sauté—yields 8 servings
• Fish Packets with Lime-Coconut Sauce—yields 4 servings
• Greek Kabobs with Tzatziki Sauce with Mashed Cauliflower—yields 8 servings
Plan of Attack
Fire up the grill and cook up those chicken breasts and kabobs, along with the fish packets and mashed cauliflower. Brown the ground beef you’ll use later for the kitchen sink sauté. Later in the week, use some of the chicken along with the Caesar-like dressing to make a basic Caesar salad (just get some romaine leaves and toss everything together). Make the shepherd’s pie and kitchen sink sauté on days that fit your schedule.
AUTOIMMUNE PLAN—WEEK 2
On the Menu
• Beef Tacos using AIP seasoning with Guacamole—yields 6 servings
• Chicken Soup—yields 8 servings
• Pork Chops with Peach Chutney and Roasted Okra—yields 6 servings
• Shrimp Stir-Fry—yields 4 servings
• Prime Rib with Sautéed Mushrooms and Roasted Broccoli and Cauliflower—yields 8 servings or more
Plan of Attack
Prime rib screams “Sunday night” to me. While that’s cooking, brown the ground beef to use later in the week for some tacos, and get that chicken soup cooking (slow cookers are always great if you don’t want to use the stove). Go ahead and prep the vegetables that you’ll need for the stir-fry and pork chops—this will make cooking those on a given weeknight super fast.
HOW MUCH SHOULD I EAT?
In my early years of coaching folks, I had a client who took my recommendation to eat “Paleo foods to satiety, regardless of amount” to a remarkable extreme. The guy started with us at more than 400 pounds, and although he was making some progress on the program, it was not at the pace I’d expected. When I looked at his food log, I noticed that he had a mid-afternoon snack of “nuts.” I asked him how many nuts he was eating and he said, “Oh, you know, one of those Costco containers of cashews…” Yeah, that tub of nuts contained almost 3,500 calories! The same number of calories many hard-training athletes consume in a given day. This was on top of his breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I acknowledged that I’d perhaps provided too much latitude on this plan and instructed him to weigh out a few ounces of nuts and stick with that. Almost immediately he began losing weight at a good clip, and we got him back to his athletic high school weight of 220 pounds. In general, folks can eat to satiety with these types of foods, but clearly, a heroic effort to consume massive amounts of food may derail weight loss efforts.
Keeping Track
You may find it odd that a biochemist (that would be me!) is not generally a fan of weighing and measuring food. I mean, that’s what chemists do—weigh and measure stuff, right? From a psychological perspective I’ve found the process of weighing and measuring food to be, well…a bit neurotic. I’ve relied on general guidelines with most of the folks I work with and we have achieved incredible results ranging from profound fat loss to elite-level athletic performance. I really like this “seat-o’-the-pants” approach, but there are compelling reasons to get both specific and quantifiable about not just our food but many areas of our lives.
If we want to effect change, sometimes we need to be a bit meticulous and set up our process such that we know what our inputs and outputs are. Without an understanding of inputs and outputs—that is to say, what we are doing and what type of results we produce—our results are at best a guess. If things are going well, no problem. But if we are getting subpar results, not having a plan means we can’t know how to fix things. One of my mentors, Coach Greg Glassman (the founder of CrossFit), drove this point home in an interesting way. At nearly every CrossFit seminar, someone would ask Coach Glassman, “How do I get more pull-ups?” To which Greg would reply, “How many do you have currently?” Without fail, the person would say something like, “Well, it’s between eight and ten pull-ups.” Greg would reply, “The reason you are not making progress on your pull-ups is because you do not care about them. If you really cared you would know exactly how many you can do. You would tell me you can get eight solid pull-ups, with the attempt on the ninth being able to get your eyebrows over the bar.”
When we care about something that we want to improve or change in a significant way, we need to track what we do. Otherwise, success is at best random, and even if things are going in a favorable way, we don’t know why.
HOW ABOUT SNACKS?
For each meal, you’ll follow the guidelines I mentioned earlier, but when it comes to snacks you’ll want to literally check your gut. Ideally, you should be able to go multiple hours between meals—this is a sign of a healthy metabolism and indicates that we got the amounts of protein, carbs, and fats “right.” We should not need food the way someone with emphysema needs an oxygen tank. So, if you really need a snack, by all means go for it, but first ask yourself the following: Why do you need the snack? Is this just fidgety eating due to boredom, or are you really hungry? If you are truly hungry, what type of hunger are we talking? Are you hungry but functional (good cognition, clear headed), or are you hangry (nervous, shaky, foggy headed, ready to kill someone and eat them).
Hangry means we might not have our air/fuel mixture quite right yet. So before you reach for the snack, consider this:
1. Did you eat enough in total at your last meal? If you are a bit hungry but functional, you likely got the carb amount right but did not eat enough.
2. Did you eat too many carbs? If you are hangry, this is most likely the problem.
Although insulin is far from the sole controller of appetite, it plays a big part, particularly if an individual is insulin resistant. I don’t want to belabor the hunger point too much, but I have some perspective on this that I think is helpful, even though it may seem a bit counterintuitive. On one hand, folks need to learn to be comfortable with a little hunger. It won’t kill us and if we can get a handle on that process we become more resilient and life is just easier. Our genetics and metabolism are designed to withstand frequent, small bouts of fasting ranging from a few hours to several days. This is not a comfortable situation, but it should not be crippling. Under these conditions our bodies should easily transition into and out of ketosis, which, as you learned in the previous chapter, offers such amazing benefits when food or carbohydrate are scarce.
If we are insulin resistant, however, we do not seamlessly transition into ketosis, and the blood sugar crashes we experience are of a magnitude and type that are almost druglike. They are superphysiologic. Our brains do not like blood sugar swings, and the low blood sugar one experiences while insulin resistant produces a profound drive to “fix” the problem. This is “hanger.” I experienced this process for the better part of twenty years and, to be blunt, it sucked. I was planning my next meal before my current meal was eaten, because I was so anxious about what would happen if I found myself going more than a few hours without eating. I now have fantastic resilience in this regard, and if I get really busy, I may not get in breakfast and only do late lunch at two P.M. and then a dinner at five or six. I don’t do this every day, as it is a bit stressful, but when I need to do that or if I’m traveling and my food options are terrible, going without a meal for many hours is no big deal. I get hungry, but this is not the panicky, dysfunctional state you find when you’re hangry. So, if you are hangry between meals, dial down your carbs and dial up your fats, or possibly even do a system reset using a period of ketosis.
ROBB, ABOUT THOSE SNACKS!
So you understand that we should generally not need snacks, but what if the spirit grabs you and you just want a little something around midday? Jerky (make sure it’s gluten-free—watch out for varieties that contain soy sauce!), nuts, and fruit are fantastic options. It’s hard to overdo jerky due to jaw fatigue, but as we learned on this page, folks can easily overdo nuts, so weigh out 1 to 2 ounces and call it done. With fruit, use your good judgment. I’m hard pressed to eat two apples, but I can sit down and eat just about a whole watermelon. That does become somewhat self-limiting, as afterward I’ll use every square of toilet paper in the house, but for weight loss, eating huge amounts of fruit is not going to help your cause. Dried fruit of all kinds needs to be treated like nuts: weigh out an ounce or two and call it good. As I said, I can barely eat two apples, but I could easily eat ten apples’ worth of dried apple chips. In a perhaps surprising suggestion, given my caveman predilections, I think dark chocolate is a great occasional option. Here is the caveat: That dark chocolate needs to be dark—at least 80 percent cacao—and you should limit it to a few squares per day. Yes, you can have some dark chocolate daily, as long as it is not a gateway drug to bagels and ice cream every day.
BEVERAGES, BOOZE, AND BEYOND
So, what should you drink to support your new way of life? In general, we are talking about unsweetened beverages like coffee, tea, and this amazing stuff called water. How much of that should you drink? With water, my wacky suggestion is to drink when you’re thirsty, and stop when you’re not. The health industry is fraught with quasi-mystical information surrounding water. Our thirst is generally a good indication of when we need to drink—let’s rely on that. With regard to caffeinated beverages such as coffee and tea, the scientific literature is pretty clear that these beverages offer a host of health benefits, likely due to their antioxidant content. The only real caveats I have here are to try to develop a taste for these beverages without sweetening them (I’ll tackle sweetened beverages in a moment), and be mindful that caffeine can and does negatively affect sleep in some folks. Recent genetic research indicates some people clear caffeine from their system almost as fast as they can drink it. Other people may take thirty-six hours to fully remove the caffeine from one cup of coffee. You likely intuitively know where you are in this story but just be mindful that too much of a good thing is still too much.
How badly a given person freaks out about the recommendation to ditch sweetened beverages gives me immediate insight into how much of a battle this change will be overall. Sweetened beverages seem to be on par with cocaine and heroin with how “frisky” folks are in their consumption. You now know how powerfully processed foods can hijack our neuroregulation of appetite, and drinking calories is a fantastic way to catch an Uber to downtown Chubbyville. Consider this: What is a common practice among bodybuilders, strength athletes, and folks who want to be big? Shakes. Liquid calories. Using liquid calories, these folks can consume far more than if they stuck with chewable food. If you want to be big, take in lots of calories in liquid form. Otherwise, stick to water, plain tea, and black coffee.
ARTIFICIAL SWEETENERS AND SUGAR
Sigh…I’ve had the sugar-and-artificial-sweetener conversation many, many times. I’ve mellowed a bit in my old age, but part of that is just getting tired of arguing with folks. In my experience, sweetened beverages, be they artificial, natural, or supernatural, are “gateway drugs.” They contribute to poor compliance. So my recommendation is to avoid these items until you are at a point where you are happy with how you look, feel, and perform. Even then you need to moderate your intake lest you spin out and make other poor food and lifestyle choices. You likely know if sweetened beverages are a trigger item for you, so use your best judgment.
ROBB, WHAT ABOUT BOOZE?!
Alcohol is not particularly healthy, but let’s face it: it’s a lot of fun. The big problems I see with booze (aside from liver failure) are calories and sleep disturbance. Stick with hard alcohol with a bit of lemon or lime juice, floated in some soda water. My NorCal Margarita (2 shots of tequila, juice of 1 lime, soda water) has become pretty popular in the past five years; if you have not tried it, give it a shot. Beer is problematic due to the calories it contains and its gluten content. This makes me incredibly sad, as I truly love beer, but if you are gluten-reactive, I suggest steering clear. Dry wines are not a bad option, and I love the folks at Dry Farm Wines (robbwolf.com/dryfarmwines).
As we learned in chapter six, alcohol is not a sleep aid. It makes you unconscious, but it does not promote restful sleep. The best I can offer in this regard is to consume your booze as far away from your sleep as possible. Some see this as a recommendation to have booze with breakfast. I can’t really get behind that, but it’s a better idea for your health than a nightcap right before bed.
ASSESSING PROGRESS
How do you know if this nutty (and meaty) schtick is working? In addition to the objective and subjective measures we discussed in the previous chapter, I’d like you to do the following:
1. Take before pictures and update those every two weeks. Take these in the same clothes (or none—just keep those off the Internet!) in the same light and in the same relative positions. If you need to do a selfie to pull this off, I won’t begrudge you that. Take a picture showing your front, side, and southbound profile. The transformations folks have achieved on this program are nothing short of amazing. If you spend a little time documenting this process, it’ll be a hell of a motivator when you face your moments of doubt.
2. Pick a performance goal. I’ll talk about the specifics of movement and exercise later, but I want you to think about a goal that is easy to measure and that you actually find more fun than threading barbed wire through your nose. I hate running, unless you are talking about doing sprints. I’m kinda fast twitch, so a goal for me might be to see how many 100-meter repeats I can do in 10 to 15 minutes. Your goal could be as simple as doing a short walk to your mailbox. Time that walk as you begin the program and just try to consistently improve on that time. Never been able to do a push-up or pull-up? Those are all worthy goals. When that goal gets too easy, pick a new goal. I’m okay with you picking more than one goal; just don’t overwhelm yourself when you’re getting started. What we are trying to do is give your brain that little cocainelike hit of dopamine we get from achieving a goal. I’m writing this book with a program called Scrivener, and I can set a little box in the corner with a daily word count goal. At the beginning of the day, the box is an angry red. As I make progress, it shifts to orange, then yellow, and I get to wrap up my day with a dopamine-gasm of a little green box telling me I’ve met my goal. It may sound lame, but it works! Similarly, if you see consistent improvements in your performance goal, it’ll help keep you in the fight.
WHAT IF MY RESULTS ARE NOT UP TO PAR?
After about thirty days, you should see some significant changes in your health and physical appearance. A small percentage of people will not get the “brochure experience.” This means they are not losing fat or experiencing improved sleep, energy levels, and performance. Perhaps blood work is not improving. This is where we will need to do a little investigation to figure out where the problems may lie. Here are a few common problems I see again and again:
Are you really following the plan?
I’ll ask folks this question and usually get an emphatic yes, but upon further digging I find that maybe one meal per day was from the plan, while the birthday cake at lunch and “special treat” from a family member have popped up consistently.
If you are in debt and want to get out of debt, you have only two options: make more money or spend less. Often a combination is smart, as it pushes things from both ends. Similarly, if you want to look and feel better while losing weight, you will need to alter your eating, especially in the beginning. When you get to a healthy place with your metabolism, eating, and lifestyle habits, you will have a little latitude in what you can get away with, but in the beginning we need to gain momentum, and eating food not on the plan will simply not facilitate that goal. I wish I could sugarcoat this, but I’d be lying to you, and hey, no one needs more sugar!
How much sleep are you getting?
I’ve thought about writing a book called Sleep Your Way Skinny, as this can be the most important part of the whole story. If you are not getting into bed reasonably early, waking up without an alarm (ideally), and getting at least eight hours of sleep (not just time in bed), weight loss is going to be hard, if not impossible. Be honest with yourself. Have you prioritized sleep? If not, this is a good place to look.
Are you actually insulin sensitive?
There is interesting literature that suggests that folks who are insulin resistant do better on lower-carb diets. Folks who are insulin sensitive (but still overweight) likely do better on lower-fat diets. This program is designed with the assumption that you are insulin resistant, as a remarkable swath of the population is insulin resistant, either from poor diet, sedentariness, gut issues, poor sleep, or an unholy combination of these. If you are insulin sensitive (which can be determined by your fasting insulin levels, A1C, and a generally favorable waist-to-hip ratio), you will need to tweak the dietary plans toward more whole, unprocessed carbs and add less fat to your meals.
What If You Need More Help?
The vast majority of people following the plans detailed in this book will see dramatic improvements in their blood work, energy, and waistline. But some may have specific issues that go beyond the ability of any book to address. If you find that you are not making the progress you want, or if you have lab values that are confusing or just not moving in a favorable direction, it’s time to get additional help. Go to robbwolf.com/healthresources for a list of practitioners and further testing options.
GET A BUDDY, AND OTHER STRATEGIES FOR SUCCESS
Misery loves company! Seriously, though, accountability is important, and if you can find a friend or coworker to do this with you, that will keep both of you on track. If you falter, this is your person to lean on for support. Join a CrossFit gym, martial arts class, yoga studio, or walking group and bamboozle someone into doing this program with you. If you can rope a spouse or significant other into doing the program, that’s great, but I find this to be a tough sell at times. Marriage and relationship counseling are unfortunately outside the scope of this book, but I’ll just throw this out there: If this person who theoretically loves you is a pain in the ass about helping you live a better life, is this person friend or foe? Really. Think about it.
KNOW YOURSELF
Most dietitians tell us to simply “eat in moderation.” Although it’s unclear what exactly that means, it is clear that this advice fails more often than it succeeds. Bestselling author Gretchen Rubin provides some insight on this topic in her book Better Than Before, as she details that people tend to fall into one of two camps: abstainers and moderators. Abstainers need to steer clear of a certain food or behavior, like playing video games, or they tend to slide into unhealthy patterns. Moderators, by contrast, can take or leave a food or activity. This is a great book, and I can’t recommend it enough. Gretchen also has a fantastic website to support the book, which can help you figure out if you are an abstainer or moderator by taking a simple quiz.
Gretchen makes the point that the population is about 50/50 with regard to the moderator/abstainer categories, but interestingly, about 90 percent of registered dietitians are moderators. In an act of incredible confirmation bias: these well-meaning RDs make a recommendation (eat in moderation) that is set up to fail at least 50 percent of the time. When considering food, particularly hyperpalatable food, this story likely changes even more in that ice cream, pastries, and other hyperpalatable foods bypass our neurological “off switch” while we are consuming the food, and we tend to fixate on those foods if they are at all available. Adding another wrinkle to this: I have noticed that folks can be either a moderator or an abstainer depending on the food at hand. My wife will eat any and all chocolate in the house in quick order. I’ll have a piece every couple of weeks. By contrast, a bag of potato chips will meet a quick end at my hands (or teeth), whereas Nicki barely touches them. The point here is that the general recommendation of “clean out your pantry” is a good one, but it’s particularly important to keep trigger foods out of the house. We can moralize, hand-wring, and argue about this topic until the chocolate-covered cows come home. Or we can understand how we are wired to eat and make plans that set us up for success.
EATING OUT
Eating out with friends and family is a nice time to kick your heels up, but it’s easy for this to turn into a “hookers and cocaine” binge versus just having something a bit different than your usual fare. That said, here are some guidelines I’d like you to follow:
1. Stick with the program for at least thirty days. You can do anything for a month—hang in there, get amazing results, then make an informed decision about how tightly you want to run things in the future. You can easily build a meal compliant with the 30-Day Reset at just about any restaurant.
2. I generally recommend that you stay gluten-free both at home and when eating out. Every day there are more and more research articles indicating that this is a smart move for many people. Is it really a terrible prospect to have a chocolate torte or ice cream instead of a pastry? This is all I’m suggesting. Once you get through your thirty days, you can kick your heels up occasionally. But more often than not, go for gluten-free options.
3. If you eat out for most of your meals due to travel or not knowing how to boil water, clearly we need to modify this recommendation. If the former, let’s limit your heel-kick-upping to once per week. If you don’t know how to cook, the Food Matrix is an amazing resource for how to navigate that forgotten room of the house called “The Kitchen.” I think a lack of cooking knowledge, as well as the lack of desire to prioritize cooking at home, is a huge problem, as it tends to leave us earlobe deep in easily accessible, low-quality food. As much as I might finger wag about needing to fix that, I am aware of the social trend toward preparing and eating less food at home. I have spent upward of thirty weeks per year on the road, for years at a time, and all this really boils down to is making better choices. Even when my options are not great, I can make better choices. You can, too.
WORK AND SCHOOL
Work and school can be places of rough peer pressure coupled with far too many bad options. The work environment really goes beyond peer pressure to outright sabotage on a scale that would make a CIA spook jealous. If you let folks know you are eating better, the person who would barely talk to you now hand-delivers cupcakes to your desk. How thoughtful! I don’t know how to say this tactfully, so I’ll say it bluntly: people are (occasionally) jerks when someone is trying to make a change, whether that change is climbing out of debt or getting healthy. Many people are helpful and supportive, but for some, the notion that one of their coworkers is trying to improve themselves is somehow interpreted as a judgment against the folks who are not participating. That is someone else’s problem—do not let them make it your problem. The best advice I can offer here is the same advice that will save you most of the time: plan ahead. Have your meals prepped and know who is going to try to undermine your efforts. The buddy system is also a good way to get some folks on your team, as is just letting people know that you are trying to make a change and you’d appreciate help, not subterfuge to derail your process.
EMBRACE THE BROWN BAG
Have nuts, jerky, and apples handy (I like apples because they are reasonably tough relative to other fruit). At the clinic, I have a couple of bags of jerky and nuts in a drawer in my office. I keep a couple of apples on the desktop so I do not forget them and find a pile of mold a few months down the road. In general, I try to bring fresh meals, but if I get busy, I know I have these foods as a fallback. I highly recommend you do the same. Additionally, figure out the restaurants you like that either deliver or are easy to get to. Have menus for those places handy, and have their numbers on speed dial! Some restaurants have apps where you can order and choose pickup or delivery in seconds. Just make those meals based around our basic Paleo template (veggies, protein, healthy fat), and you are set. Any perceived challenge to getting yourself fed increases your likelihood of making suboptimal decisions. You need to do a little preparation to make sure when those inevitable surprises pop up, you are ready to deal with them.
MEALS DELIVERED
As much as I’d like to see folks cooking more of their meals, the trends are not painting that as a likely outcome. People are eating out and ordering in more than ever in history. Fortunately, there are phenomenal programs that now offer amazing meals delivered either fresh or frozen and at a price point that is not much different than what you would spend to cook at home. I do not recommend that you rely on these services exclusively, but rather use them to help fill the gaps in your planning or to reduce stress on particularly busy days. If you keep a few frozen meals handy at home and work (if possible), you will always have an easy fallback if you get too busy to prep a meal. If you know that, say, Tuesday and Thursday evenings are particularly challenging due to family obligations, have meals delivered for those days and get signed up on an auto-ship program so at the beginning of every week you have your “big day” meals ready to go. If you are hankering for a fantastic meal-delivery option, check out the Good Kitchen: robbwolf.com/mealsdelivered.
Shortcuts?
Feeling overwhelmed by all this? I recommend that folks jump into this process with both feet, as the results are honestly amazing. People lose weight, reverse inflammation, and generally feel fantastic. But I’ll be the first to admit that this whole process can be a lot to tackle. If you are feeling overwhelmed, here is a “program minimum” that will provide huge benefits while making change as easy as possible.
Sleep: Follow every recommendation from the sleep and stress chapter to the letter. If folks did just this, they would be amazed by how much better they look and feel.
Food: Remove all liquid calories from your diet. Ditch the sugary coffee drinks, juices, and smoothies. Get a palm-size piece of protein at every meal and as many veggies as you can handle, and avoid white carbs. Potatoes, rice, and bread are the big no-no’s.
Move: I don’t care what you do, just get out and move as much as you can, as often as you can. Get sun on your skin.
If you follow these simple guidelines, you will make progress. Your palate will change and you will feel better. Perhaps this will be all you need to feel more confident about starting the 30-Day Reset.
After completing Phase One’s 30-Day Reset, you will be ready to implement Phase Two of the program: the 7-Day Carb Test plan detailed in the next chapter. For folks following the basic Paleo plan, this is your likely next step so you can see what type of latitude you have with carbs that generally do not fit under the Paleo umbrella. If you still do not have great blood glucose control or lab numbers, you might consider sticking with the basic plan until those numbers look great.