The 8-Hour Diet (18 page)

6:00 PM
Arriving home, Deb doesn’t hesitate. There’s so much delicious food to choose from. Perhaps tonight she and her husband will talk about their day over a juicy, freshly ground sirloin burger smothered in caramelized onions. No, this isn’t dinner at the local watering hole, and it isn’t cheating. This is her creation, made in a matter of minutes on her stove top (see
this recipe
). This isn’t a diet that trades butter for margarine, Cheddar for cottage cheese, steak for alfalfa sprouts. These recipes are made with real ingredients for people who love to eat. And even though Deb has already hit all her nutritional notes for the day, she tosses a quick green salad on the side for an extra crunchy health kick.

Wait! Where’s dessert? Since Deb wants to eat all she can before her 8 hours are up, she follows dinner with a scoop of ice cream covered with warm chocolate sauce and salty peanuts.

8:00 PM
Deb and her husband put on a movie (hey,
Modern Family
is a rerun tonight) and let the last few hours of the night slip quietly away. Normally they might be grabbing popcorn or a bowl of cereal right now, but having eaten so much during the day, Deb is happy to settle for a cup of tea with a small cheat–some low-fat milk and a drizzle of honey. And she didn’t just eat, she ate well: burgers and bacon, chips and salsa, turkey and guacamole—all the foods she loves. She can rest easy tonight, knowing her body has everything it needs to keep her full and burning calories until tomorrow morning.

In
Chapter 8
, we lay out 51 mouthwatering recipes that will keep you sated and burning calories all day long. Here we’ve put some of those into a weeklong plan, so you get a full sense of all the great food that awaits.

BREAKFAST/BRUNCH:
Huevos Rancheros

SNACK #1:
cantaloupe and ham

LUNCH:
The Ultimate Burger

SNACK #2:
oatmeal cookie and a glass of 2% milk

DINNER:
Loaded Alfredo with Chicken and Vegetables

BREAKFAST:
Papaya Berry smoothie

SNACK #1:
pear and slices of Brie

LUNCH:
Chicken Salad Sandwich with Curry and Raisins

SNACK #2:
cup of tomato soup

DINNER:
Shrimp Scampi

BREAKFAST:
Sunrise Sandwich with Turkey, Cheddar & Guacamole

SNACK #1:
sliced tomato with fresh mozzarella

LUNCH:
Spinach & Ham Quiche

SNACK #2:
square of dark chocolate

DINNER:
Seared Sirloin with Red Wine Mushrooms

BREAKFAST:
The Caffeinated Banana smoothie

SNACK #1:
whole wheat toast with peanut butter

LUNCH:
Pesto-Tuna Melt

SNACK #2:
Triscuits with ham and Swiss

DINNER:
Chili-Mango Chicken

BREAKFAST:
Oatmeal with Peanut Butter and Banana

SNACK #1:
Greek yogurt with chopped strawberries

LUNCH:
Chinese Chicken Salad

SNACK #2:
chips and salsa

DINNER:
Honey-Mustard Salmon with Roasted Asparagus

BREAKFAST:
Yogurt Parfait

SNACK #1:
pita with hummus

LUNCH:
Turkey, Bacon, Guacamole Sandwich

SNACK #2:
almonds and grapes

DINNER:
Super Supreme Pizza

BREAKFAST/BRUNCH:
Blueberry Pancakes

SNACK #1:
bowl of Cheerios with sliced banana

LUNCH:
Chicken–White Bean Chili

SNACK #2:
chips and guacamole

DINNER:
Grilled Fish Tacos with Mango Salsa

I
f life came with a remote control, losing weight would be easy. Need time for the gym? Just hit “pause” on your boss’s latest irrational rant and sneak away for a leisurely hour-long workout. Hungry kids in the back seat clamoring for Sonic burgers? Press the “mute” button until you can figure out a healthier eating option. Overdo it on birthday cake?

“Rewind” that slice into a half portion.

But in today’s world, control is the ultimate luxury—something all of us crave, but few if any of us really have. Being out of control leads to stress, frustration, and eventually, bad choices. We don’t do the things we need to do for ourselves because we can’t find the time or the will, or we become overtaxed by all the demands on us and wind up doing dumb things—like skipping greens and doubling down on comfort foods. Either way, the more we feel out of control, the harder it becomes to look good, feel good, and truly enjoy life.

So when faced with the challenge of eating only during a set time period each day, it’s easy to conjure scenarios that make it seem impossible. Some meetings need to be breakfast meetings, with an important new client or an even more important old friend. Some dinners need to be late dinners, because the bus was delayed or the first draft of the lasagna came out charred.

And that’s when you’re planning just for your own meals. Add in kids who need breakfast at 6:30, a hungry spouse who wants dinner at 8, and a gaggle of friends who bring over ice cream at 10—suddenly the 8-Hour Diet looks more like the 18-Hour Diet.

So, no, you’re never going to be able to stick to this plan every day. It can’t be done, unless you’re going into full hermit mode. But that’s okay: You don’t need to stick to this diet plan every day. In fact, on the 8-Hour Diet, you can cheat as freely as a Mad Man and still lose the weight like crazy. (You devil, Roger!)

As you’ve read in previous chapters, people have lost 10, 20, 30 pounds or more following the 8-Hour Diet a mere 3 days a week! The more you follow it, the better your results—but this is a plan that’s designed to conform to your real life.

While I certainly don’t follow the eating schedule every day, I know that when I do, I feel sharper, more energetic, and even less hungry than I would otherwise. Indeed, if I’ve got a serious meeting or a looming deadline, I throw myself into the 8-Hour Diet with abandon, because I know it will sharpen my mind and amp my energy levels.

But I’m as vulnerable to life’s curveballs as anyone. So let me walk you through some of the pitfalls I’ve experienced as I’ve followed this plan. Many will resonate with you, and you’ll see just how easy it is to customize this program to fit your own schedule and needs. And as I walk you through the chaos that is our daily lives, I’ll distill eight great rules for cheaters to help you thrive on the 8-Hour Diet.

You see, when I began working on this book, I gathered up a posse of about 2,000 of my closest friends—readers of
Men’s Health, Women’s Health,
and
Prevention
magazines—and asked them to turn themselves into skinny guinea pigs for the 8-Hour Diet. They responded with incredible enthusiasm, no doubt because they’d never seen “eat what you like” and “lose weight” credibly linked in the same sentence before.

But within just a few days, the emails began coming in: “Do I, um, really have to stick with it every minute of every day? See, my brother-in-law and his wife are coming into town, and we always go to this breakfast buffet …”

I knew where they were coming from. The story of my life can pretty much be summed up in four words: “Been there, ate that.” It led me down the path of precocious pulchritude as a chubby teenager, and it challenges me now on a weekly schedule that can often veer between a 5 a.m. wakeup call for an appearance on the
Today
show to a late-evening meeting with an author that can drag out over more than one bottle of red wine. Indeed, my “schedule” is no schedule at all.

And while you may not have to face Matt Lauer in the morning, your challenges are just as real—and just as difficult to balance. Like that loyal dieter who wanted to do the right thing and observe the breakfast-buffet tradition with his brother-in-law, we all need to cheat sometimes. Here’s how.

Early in these pages I described the mechanism whereby your body, during a 16-hour break from eating, quickly burns through the supply of glycogen in the liver and then begins selectively burning body fat.

Awesome, right?

The even better news is that, once you start engaging that mechanism on a regular basis, the health and weight-loss benefits that come with it stick with you, even when you’re not doing it all the time. Keep in mind that some of the earliest research done on this approach—the studies that first brought to light the extraordinary health benefits of intermittent fasting—focused on Mormons, who fast
once a month
as a religious observance. A 2008 study published in the
American Journal of Cardiology
found that this practice slashed practitioners’ risk of coronary artery disease by 16 percent and significantly reduced their incidence of diabetes, even after adjusting for other healthy habits like abstaining from nicotine and alcohol. So they were doing a version of the 8-Hour Diet, but they were doing it for a total of only 12 days in a year and still enjoying a remarkable health transformation. Devout Muslims observe a daylight fast for the month of Ramadan and return to a typical pattern of eating the other 11 months of the year. They too show health benefits that extend beyond the period of their altered meal plan.

So you can see why this is just about the most flexible diet plan ever created. You shouldn’t feel the need to stick to the 8-Hour Diet on a 24/7/365 basis. If you know that Thursday through Sunday will be a forced march of client breakfasts, room-service meals, and bottomless peanut bowls in sports bars, no worries—you’ll still be deriving the benefits of the days when you did follow the plan.

The 8-Hour Diet has a kind of momentum of its own, so if you stick with it most of the time, it sticks with you, as well.

If you fall, it catches you.

The one place you don’t want to find yourself in the morning is between me and a pot of coffee. If caffeine is a real addiction, then my name is Dave, and I’m a coffeeholic.

But starting the day with coffee or tea, even if you take a little milk or sugar in it, is fine. Caffeine is a mild appetite suppressant, so it helps to see you past the doughnut tray. Plus, it’s energizing and helps you concentrate—two of the key mental tricks that keep you from succumbing to any insistent demands sent up from your digestive tract. And coffee and tea are both excellent sources of antioxidants—again, coffee is the number-one source in the American diet. One caveat, though: You’re not on the 8-Hour Diet if you’re starting your day by drinking down a sugary, high-calorie latte drink. A medium Dunkin’ Donuts Coffee Coolatta with Cream is 660 calories and 39 grams of fat. A cup of joe with a little whole milk and sugar is more like 40 calories, and that’s an acceptable cheat.

Even if you’re not a caffeine lover like me, make sure you start your day with plenty of fluids. Says food researcher David Levitsky, PhD, from Cornell University: “The most important thing about fasting is that you have to have fluids. We can live up to a month without eating calories, but we can’t do anything about the fluids. We have to have fluids.”

Both hunger and thirst are controlled by a brain region called the hypothalamus. As a result, we often misinterpret thirst as a cry for food. As you contemplate employing Cheat #2, I’d suggest that you turn that common misconception around and drink any time you think you’re hungry. Explore some of the new calorie-free beverages out there. For instance, the emergence of Izze sodas on the market, along with SmartWater and every flavor of seltzer under the sun, gives you and me a ton of great-tasting, calorie-free options that weren’t available to the Pepsi Generation. In fact, you should learn to indulge in them, savor them, keep them chilled in the fridge and easily at hand. I even keep a refrigerator in my office now, so I can hear that satisfying psssssccchhhht! whenever thirst tries to trick me into thinking I’m hungry.

The best part about the 8-Hour Diet is that you don’t have to think about it while you’re on it. Instead of deciding whether your meal qualifies as healthy under some sort of arcane point system or zone program, you just look at the clock: Time to eat? Okay, eat—whatever you want, as much as you want. And by adding the 8-Hour Powerfoods into your daily diet, you guarantee maximum nutrition without having to worry about calorie counting or carb-to-fat ratios or other arithmetical gymnastics.

But in weight loss, as in comedy, timing is everything. And even as the leading obesity researchers in the world are telling everyone it’s time to cut down on the number of meals, some chain restaurants—that’s you, Taco Bell—are trying to convince us that there’s something called a “Fourth Meal” that comes sometime between dinner and Jimmy Kimmel. (I’ll check the gospels, but I’m pretty sure the Last Supper wasn’t followed by the Last Midnight Snack.)