Last week my wife and I started a new diet. It is a combination of a low carb and low fat diet with some wrinkles (I think it is actually considered a slow carb diet). I plan on posting every 1-2 weeks on our progress, but first I need to describe the plan. The goal is that we would lose 20-30 pounds in a 30 day period. On top of that, I do also want to get into better shape in preparation for backpacking and more energy throughout the day.

The plan is based on a blog post by Tim Ferris, which he based on the diet of Dean Karnazes. Check out this video on Dean Karnazes, which some say is the most fit man in the world.

Below is the diet we eat from Sunday through Friday. The general idea is you choose one item from every category. We do seem to bend this rule with vegetables (so we may eat 2+ different vegetables per meal).

Meats
Chicken
Beef (Roast, Steaks or Hamburger meat)
Pork Chops
Salmon

Legumes
Pinto Beans
Black Beans
Lentals

Vegetables
Brocolli
Spinach
Peas
Tomatoes
Onions
Etc…

The only type of oil we use is olive oil and we try to avoid any kind of breading at all costs. We don’t drink any kind of calories (so no milk or juices). Tim Ferris also recommends avoiding fruit to help with the weight loss process.

The kicker with this diet is that on the 7th day in the week, you can eat whatever you want. If you read the article from Tim Ferris, he goes out of his way to eat as many candy bards and other “vice” items to prevent the desire to eat these during the week. There is evidence that spiking your calorie intake on a limited basis like this helps your metabolism burn more fat during the week and is a healthy habit.

We took his advice last week and on Saturday evening, we had the following as a snack:

We actually didn’t eat all of this. I ate one whole package of the Reeses and my wife ate a very small amount of Hershey bar. I did make myself a milkshake. 🙂

In the first week we lost about 5-7 lbs each. We aren’t exactly sure how our 7th day eating is going to effect our diet, but we do know that our weight loss falls somewhere in that range.

One other thing worth mentioning is that if you have problems going to sleep on a hungry stomach, eating a spoonful of Almond Butter helps tremendously.

What are we going to do different this week?

The first thing is to avoid aspartame as much as possible because we read that you want to do this when trying to burn fat. We also are going to drink a protein shake every morning that has about 25g of protein. We did this after reading a comment from Tim Ferris that recommended you get at least 20 grams of protein within 20 minutes or so of waking up (which helps in weight loss).

I did exercise about three different times last week. I am going to increase this by running about 1.8 miles everyday and doing lunges, leg exercises and crunches every other day this week. I don’t care about muscle mass, but I do want to get into better shape and I’m sure this will increase my fat loss.

As we did enjoy looking forward to the 7th day of absolute freedom, we are going to take it a step back. In other words we aren’t going to go crazy. I may have a candy bar or two, or maybe some ice cream, and we probably will eat some bread, but we are not going to take this to such an extreme to minimize the effect that has on our weight loss (at least for now).

Do you have any tips on losing weight? Please share these in the comments!