Can you give us just a brief top contour of what the slow-carb diet is? Sure. The slow-carb diet is intended to be a simple, easy-to-adhere-to diet for people who have perhaps failed other diets that allows you to recompose your body. So improve muscle mass, decrease body fat percentage. And the rules are really simple.

And that's part of what makes it work. It's not ideal for every sport and every circumstance, but broadly speaking, it works for a lot of people who've had trouble with dieting in the past. So rule number one, don't drink calories. That's it. Very simple. So black coffee, unsweetened tea, great.

Juice, out. Anything with calories, out. You could add a little bit of heavy cream to your coffee, let's say. But that's also bending the rules in a way that I don't like. So in the beginning, it's like follow the rules so you can break them later. So in the beginning, let's just say, you can't drink calories.

Number two, don't eat anything white. Sounds pretty basic, right? Just don't eat anything that is the color of white or that could be white. Basically that means you're going to be avoiding starches and things that are similar to starches. That includes things like oatmeal. That includes things like oatmeal.

So roughly speaking, just avoiding things that are white or that could be white will get you pretty far. And yes, there are exceptions. Like cauliflower, fine. You can have cauliflower. But again, don't get fancy, right? It's very easy to outsmart yourself when it comes to behavioral change. Keep it simple.

So for at least two weeks, forget about the exceptions, right? Don't drink calories. Don't eat anything white. And then eat 30 grams of protein within 30 minutes of waking up. Okay, we got that. And then there are a few buckets you can choose from, right? So you have vegetables, beans, and lentils, and then some type of protein.

So you're going to come up with meals that you can follow without deviating for a period of one or two weeks. Just come up with the same meals. And that's going to sound boring, yes. But guess what? You do it already. You just might not realize it. And the lentils and the beans specifically as a prereq, we can get into some of the reasons, but add a lot of fiber and also inhibit appetite, right?

So that's actually a very important component of these meals. And there may be a handful of other rules, but those are the basics. And then the redemption is take one day off per week and just go fucking crazy. That's cheat day. There are some epic cheat days out there.

Some I've captured for myself. And anything goes. When I say anything, I do mean anything. So if you want to consume multiple pizzas, pints of ice cream, whatever, indulge. I left one out. No fruit during the week. So avoid fruit, avoid fructose, so agave nectar, anything that is sort of hidden sugar, avoid all that.

So no added sweeteners, obviously, but avoid fruit and fructose. And again, it's not going to kill you. Guess what, if you're from European ancestry, your ancestors did not have like blueberries in the middle of winter, generally speaking, right? So you'll be fine for a few weeks. And then there's that cheat day.

And cheat day, anything goes. The amount of damage you can do on cheat day is pretty limited. And there are ways you can mitigate that. There's a whole chapter called damage control and before our body. But focusing just on that diet and having one day off where you know you can do anything means when you are controlling yourself for those six days of the week, you're not giving up your favorite foods forever.

You can even keep a list of all the things you want to eat on cheat day. And then you have free license to eat on cheat day. And that provides you with a release valve so that you can build in the cheating as opposed to having it occur as a failure point.

And there are a handful of other things there. If you have domino foods in the house, for instance, if you eat a lot of almonds or mixed nuts and you're just going to sit there compulsively eating them while you're sitting at your laptop, don't have what I call dominoed foods in the house, which are going to really create some portion control issues.

But broadly speaking, don't drink calories, don't eat things that are white, take from three categories and build your meals out and those are the meals that you follow. Do not eat fruit or fructose and then cheat one day a week. Saturday is a nice day for cheat day for most folks.

And just to answer some questions people are going to have, no, that doesn't mean 24 hours that you can spread out over two days. That will actually set you back. But the amount of fat that you can store in a handful of sittings over 24 hours, which legitimately is more like 12 to 18 hours, pretty limited.

So that's a slow carb diet. Great. Thank you for that. I also want to ask, is it okay to take the day after cheat day and fast or do one meal that day? When I followed the slow carb diet, I benefited from it tremendously. Lost fat, gained muscle, tons of energy, sleeping great, required less caffeine, all sorts of wonderful things.

Stable blood sugar. I felt so, so good. Really enjoyed the cheat days. I really, really enjoyed the cheat days. So much fun. At some point, there's some gastric distress that comes from not regulating intake, which led me to not want to eat the next day. So I tended to do the cheat days on Sunday in my case.

And then I would fast most of Monday, just water, black coffee, tea. And then I might have a small meal in the evening. And then by Tuesday, I was back on the slow carb diet. Does that seem like a detrimental deviation from the plan? I think that if that is what works for you, then that is what works for you.

So the slow carb diet template for me is a starting point. And generally, I'll say, I think this is from Picasso, right, it's like learn the rules as an amateur so you can break them as a professional. It's like I recommend most people kind of stick with the format for a handful of weeks and measure the results, right?

So there are guidelines for how to measure. The scale is a bit of a blunt instrument, so there are other ways. But if you're extremely overweight, you can just use the scale. And fasting, I think, is fine, or just ratcheting back your caloric consumption significantly. And what happens over time for most people also is for the first, say, four weeks on cheat day, you're going to go completely insane.

And I remember I was doing something much stricter called the cyclical ketogenic diet, which is a whole separate thing. It's much more limiting in terms of what you can eat. But I was training for ultimately the nationals in Chinese kickboxing. This was happening in '99. So I was training super hard.

I was following a cyclical ketogenic diet, which meant I could eat very few things. But I did have this one cheat day. And I would do a glycogen depletion workout beforehand, which is one of the things you can do to limit the damage on cheat day, do a glycogen depletion workout beforehand.

And then I would just go crazy. I mean, I would drive to Krispy Kreme, buy 12 donuts, and they would be gone by the time I got home. And it wasn't an hour away. It was like a 10-minute drive. Donuts would be gone, right? So I would go to Safeway, and I would buy a bag of those fun-sized Snickers.

And that would be just a tiny portion of my calories. Sweet stuff for you, huh? A lot of sweet stuff. I also did the savory stuff. I mean, I had my favorites. Nothing was safe. Pizza. Nothing was safe. Nothing was safe. My paws got into everything. And then over time, because the next day you're going to feel like you got hit by a diabetic dump truck, you start ratcheting back.

And you're like, OK, maybe I don't need to do that. Maybe cheat day will just be two meals. Or maybe cheat day will just be like the pastries in the morning with the coffee. And you start to regulate a bit, generally. You don't have to, but over time, you generally will.

And I think after you've followed it to the T, just follow the commandments for, say, four to eight weeks, then you can certainly deviate. And I'm not saying if you're not hungry, don't eat. However, in many cases, people have acclimated to not eating in the morning. And then they end up overeating later in the day.

If you have that habit, if you're consuming 50% of your calories or more at dinner, and you want to lose body fat, I would say get some cottage cheese or something that will give you 30 grams easily in the morning. Worst case scenario, use a protein of some type.

Just don't make it hypercaloric. You mean powdered protein? It could be powdered whey protein. Whole food is going to do a lot more. And no calorie counting, correct? No calorie counting. It tends to be self-limiting. When you're eating this much fiber and this much protein, it tends to be very self-limiting, what you'll want to consume and what you can consume.

Once again, I had great experiences with slow carb diet, and I'm going to go back on. Yeah, and nobody needs to buy anything to figure it out. If you just search on Tim.blog slow carb diet, you'll get everything that you need to get started. No purchase necessary.