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I wrote recently about the great success I’ve had with a low-GI diet. I mentioned there how I feel that the optimum diet for anybody is one that is six days on and one day off. That is, six days of eating clean - i.e., as per your diet - and one day of anything goes. But how does this work in principle?
Each day, I consume five meals - three main courses and two snacks. For six days of the week, I eat a low-GI diet. This is pretty clean - it means no rice, normal pasta, potatoes of any kind and definitely no white bread.
For breakfast, I’ll have 1-2 slices of light wholewheat bread (i.e., Warburton’s, or Nimble) or a wholewheat bagel, usually with organic peanut butter, a bowl of muesli with soy milk and a small glass of orange juice.
For lunch and dinner I’ll usually have a portion of very lean protein - lately this has been fish, turkey or chicken (I’m avoiding beef and pork as I want to drop more weight), legumes, a small amount of cheese, some nuts, vegetables and fresh fruit.
For snacks I usually eat nuts. I like to keep things interesting with a rich variety, but my favourites include macadamia nuts, cashews, almonds, brazil nuts, hazelnuts, pecans and walnuts.
I also drink lots of water, aiming for three litres per day, as well as black coffee with sweetener (1-5 cups per day, depending on whether I’m doing a night shift or not) and Diet Coke. Sometimes before a run I’ll have one can of normal Coke.
So that’s five meals per day. Over the course of a week, that totals 35 meals.
One day per week - usually a Saturday - I’ll have a day off where I will eat literally anything I want.
Yesterday, for example, I had two slices of cheese on toast for breakfast. This was mature cheddar (and lots of it) on two inch-thick slices of wholemeal bread, buttered, and a large glass of orange juice. For lunch, I was at my youngest son’s school fete and had a hamburger there, a few small cakes, and half a litre of Pepsi. For dinner we had Chinese. At work, I ate 58.5 grams of Maltesers.
As soon as the clock rolled over midnight, I resumed my normal, lean diet. This meant a 2am meal (at work) of lean turkey, macadamia nuts and a small amount of cheese. Because I then slept from 10am through 3pm, this meal becomes effectively my lunch for the following day.
From now until next Saturday, I will eat my low-GI diet.
So, over the course of any given week, my thirty-five meals will consist of thirty clean meals, and five meals where I eat whatever I want.
Despite our good intentions, it’s not a perfect world - there are always 1-2 occasions each and every week where, for whatever reason, you have to eat something you weren’t planning on. For example, it might be late and we may have ran out of a certain food (i.e., nuts), or at the last minute I may be called into work or to some other function where I will then need to eat something different to that which I had planned.
This system assumes a failure rate of a maximum of two meals per week. So, that gives us 28 out of a maximum 35 meals per week where we’re eating clean.
28 as a percentage of 35 is 80 per cent.
If you can manage to eat 80 per cent clean for your entire life, you’ll reach a pretty amazing standing of health. Perhaps more importantly, maintaining this 80-20 split is surprisingly easy. The 20 per cent ‘anything goes’ makes the 80 per cent ‘diet’ part a lot easier to (ahem) swallow, simply because you know it’s only six days until you can have a donut again. Or a cookie, or a muffin, some ice cream, some fries, a hamburger, a milkshake or a bottle of wine.
The day off does not hurt your diet at all. In fact, it helps it, as the spike in calorific intake stops your metabolism resting, getting used to the routine (of eating the same kinds of clean, healthy foods each and every day) and, worse, going into ‘starvation mode’, where it starts hording fat and actually makes you gain weight.
What you’ll also find as you lose weight and approach an optimum level of health is that you’ll only want certain things on your day off - your body will crave them, to some extent - and you really won’t gorge at all. You might in the first week or two, but after a while you’ll realise that because you only get one day off per week you’ll want to make sure that the things you have as treats have to be the very best they can possibly be. Don’t waste your day off eating garbage when you could be having fillet steak. And don’t be satisfied with cheap vanilla ice cream when you could be enjoying Ben and Jerry’s Cookie Dough. Ask yourself: is this the thing I want the most in the world right now? If it’s not, choose something else. Choose something better.
Couple this approach with one very clean day each week (or every two weeks), where you eat less calories than normal, and you’ll have a similar effect, albeit in reverse. It keeps the body guessing.
This principle can be applied to any diet - you don’t have to eat low-GI for 80 per cent of your meals. It would work with Atkins, South Beach, low-fat, high-protein, or even a semi-vegetarian diet. Just don’t have more than one day off per week, and try to make sure your day off takes place on one day only. If you try to break it down into ‘cheat’ meals - i.e., breakfast, lunch and dinner - and place those at different points in the week (as opposed to on one single day), you’ll find yourself blurring the clean/less-than-clean nutritional line far too often. You only get two blemishes outside of your day off per week, remember, and these need to be minor.
Give it a try - psychologically, it’s an easy and effective way to do something that will benefit the rest of your life, for the rest of your life.
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