Eat Man Food and Lose Weight: A Primer On Flexible Dieting

When you hear the word “diet” what’s the first thing that comes to mind?

If you’re like most men, you probably think about tiny portions of bland, boring diet foods. A small chicken breast with some steamed broccoli. Plain oatmeal. Cottage cheese. And, of course, salad. Lots and lots of salad.

Or perhaps you thought about one of the many trendy diets that have succeeded in grabbing the public’s attention over the years: Atkins, The Zone, South Beach, or Paleo. It’s likely that you’ve even tried one of these diets in the past.

“Don’t eat carbs, they make you fat!” exclaim the Atkins devotees and other low-carb zealots.

“Cavemen didn’t eat bread or cheese – so neither should you!” shout the Paleo experts, while stirring sticks of butter into their morning coffees. Yes, that’s a thing now.[amazon asin=031623480X&template=*lrc ad (right)]

You see, this is the common element among nearly all of these fashionable diets: food exclusion. You invariably have to stop eating certain types of food that you really enjoy.

To get around this, some diets have incorporated “cheat days” where you get to eat whatever you want on one day of the week. But the innocent idea of a cheat day often leads to dieting disaster. People use these days as an excuse to cram in as much junk food as they possibly can. After all, “It’s part of the diet.” I’ve even known people to literally set their alarms to 12:00 a.m. so they can start cheating the very first minute of the day. Clearly, this is a recipe for failure.

But we’re men. We love to eat, and specifically, we love to eat man food. Stuff like bacon, pizza, guacamole, and steak sandwiches. And telling us that we can’t eat our favorite foods is only going to lead to short-term success at best. If we can’t find a way to incorporate a dieting strategy that works, then the unfortunate truth is that sooner or later, we’re going to fail.

Now for the good news. You don’t actually have to give up any of your favorite foods in order to lose weight. Not a single one.[amazon asin=1930448589&template=*lrc ad (right)]

Don’t believe me? Here’s a short list of just a few foods that I ate during a recent cutting phase where I lost 10 pounds and reached 7% body fat:

• chicken with pasta and Italian bread
• chicken pad thai
• a whole Domino’s cheese pizza
• beef burrito with a side of chips and guacamole
• cheeseburger and fries
• ice cream, Oreos, Nutella, Pop Tarts, and other sweets

Now you really don’t believe me. But that’s okay, because I’m going to prove it to you, and in the process, show you exactly how you can lose as much weight as you want while eating the foods you enjoy the most.[amazon asin=0871318156&template=*lrc ad (right)]

The Weight Loss Secret Worth Billions Of Dollars

I’m about to reveal to you one of the most highly guarded secrets in the weight loss industry. It’s mind-blowingly simple, yet if it were known and fully accepted by the general population, the weight loss industry would literally lose billions of dollars of revenue each year.

Are you sitting down?

The secret is this: in order to lose weight, you have to eat fewer calories than your body burns, on a regular basis.

Hmmm. Doesn’t sound like much of a secret, does it? Even though it’s been proven again andagain and again, the reality is, most people haven’t really accepted this simple truth as scientific fact.[amazon asin=1623150310&template=*lrc ad (right)]

How else do you explain the multi-billion dollar weight loss industry, filled to the brim with diet books, gurus, surgeries, pills, and potions?

Mark Haub, a professor of human nutrition at Kansas State University, set out to prove that successfully losing weight is only about energy balance – consume fewer calories than you burn, and you’ll lose weight. He went on a “convenience store diet,” eating primarily junk food: Twinkies, Hostess cupcakes, Doritos, cereal, and Oreos. But he limited his intake of these foods to less than 1,800 calories per day.

The results? He lost 27 pounds in 2 months. Not too shabby.

Now before you suddenly stop reading this article and race off to the nearest convenience store to start your own Twinkie diet, let me first point out that this is not what I’m recommending to you. It’s just an extreme example to show you that weight loss is purely a function of caloric intake.

What I am going to show you, though, is how to use this principle to go on a healthy diet that doesn’t exclude any of your favorite foods, and how a flexible diet like this can offer tremendous psychological advantages in terms of long-term success.

Read the rest of the article