Day 9 and I began Week 2 yesterday, Monday. As expected my weight went up a couple of pounds after Binge Day (marked with an asterisk). Still, I’m down 4 lbs total after my first week, that’s great!
This whole week I’m trying out an experiment, so that I can get back to my almost-daily stretching in the mornings.
WEEK 2 EXPERIMENT TWEAK: Can I eat within 90 mins of waking (instead of 30-60) and still lose weight on the 4 hr body plan?
I know that once my body loses some pounds and then plateaus, I will likely have to go back to being completely strict. But in the meantime I’m trying out different tweaks. So far they’ve all worked just fine. This one is not an occasional tweak, however, so we will see how it goes for a whole week.
What is the 4 hour body diet? Highly flexible on slow carb diet recipes.
You know for yourself how much fun it is to go on (or look over) a diet plan and have every single meal and recipe planned out for you. It’s so satisfying perusing all the delicious-looking recipes and pictures of amazing mouth-watering foods.
The problem with many of these? I can think of several:
- Many of these meal plans involve lots of unusual ingredients (and non-repeatable foods) which results in a higher food bill.
- Many of them have every single meal and snack planned out. This doesn’t take into account real life, or the real people in your life, or if you don’t feel like cooking from a recipe first thing in the morning when you’re still waking up, or if you can’t cook supper one night.
- Many of them don’t work if you don’t follow the meal plan exactly.
For my 4 hour body review, I have to say that the tim ferriss slow carb diet plan is pure simplicity. He gives you five basic rules to follow in his 4 hour body book (plus tips for refinement). For almost every meal, you have a healthy protein, veggies, and beans. How you cook these and which recipes you use is up to you. I’ve been discovering that I can do tweaks here and there with my recipes and get more variety than I at first expected. Like when I made the Pan-Seared Chicken with Harissa, Dates, and Citrus yesterday. I’m continuing to try different tweaks as real life situations come up every week.
Lunch: fast low carb recipe
I’m still enjoying my HelloFresh leftovers my daughter made for us on Mother’s Day. I simply substitute refried beans for the garlic mashed potatoes. Today I sauteed fresh spinach for my veggie side. I had my Greek yogurt with almond and vanilla extract and cacao nibs for dessert.
Supper: healthy low carb recipe
TWEAK: Can I occasionally have pasta made from bean flour for my beans at a meal?
(Real Tweak: when my hubby really wants to make Gluten-Free Tuna Casserole with lots of cheese and whole cream, can I still lose weight and eat this, too?)
My hubby made this when I was out of town and wanted to make it for me to try. He used two kinds of corkscrew pastas made simply of bean flour. One of them was made with chickpea flour, the other was another kind of bean, approved for the 4 hour body slow carb plan (Tim Ferriss generally recommends avoiding chickpeas). The pastas were made from bean flour (and water I assume) and that’s it – no additives or other flours.
ANSWER: Yes! According to my numbers next morning, eating the gluten-free tuna casserole with bean pasta and lots of cream and cheese didn’t affect my numbers. I had one medium serving, about 1.5 cups.
I grew up eating vegetarian meals every other night, it’s much healthier and more balanced (and REALLY good for the Earth), and eating so much meat all the time on the Paleo diet was too much for me. So it would be a good idea for me to generally avoid meat on Binge Days, we’ll see if that happens. But having a lighter meal like this is wonderful – tuna was the protein, there were green peas and spinach in the casserole, and he topped it using toasted minced cauliflower instead of bread crumbs! Brilliant! And it was delicious! (I haven’t liked chickpea pasta in the past.)
I liked having bean pasta instead of beans. I would however only do this on occasion on the 4 hour body slow carb plan.
I enjoyed red wine along with water with my meal. Didn’t need a dessert.
WEEKLY SUMMARY of 4 hour body review:
| Goal | 180 | 25 | 25% | 45% | 40% | 50 | |||
| DATE: | Day | WEIGHT: | BMI: | BODY FAT: | BODY H2O: | SKEL. MUSC: | MET AGE: | Ttl lbs lost: | |
| 5/7/2023 | Su | i | 200.7 | 29 | 36.6 | 43.5 | 36.9 | 60 | |
| 5/8/2023 | M | 1 | 199.6 | 29 | 36.6 | 43.5 | 36.9 | 60 | 1.1 |
| 5/9/2023 | T | 2 | 196.4 | 29 | 36.6 | 43.5 | 36.9 | 60 | 4.3 |
| 5/10/2023 | W | 3 | 196.6 | 29 | 36.4 | 43.6 | 37 | 60 | 4.1 |
| 5/11/2023 | R | 4 | 195.8 | 29 | 36.4 | 43.6 | 37 | 60 | 4.9 |
| 5/12/2023 | F | 5 | 195.6 | 29 | 36.4 | 43.6 | 37 | 60 | 5.1 |
| 5/13/2023 | Sa | 6 | 194.8 | 28.9 | 36.2 | 43.8 | 37.2 | 60 | 5.9 |
| 5/14/23* | Su | 7 | 194 | 28.7 | 36 | 43.9 | 37.3 | 60 | 6.7 |
| 5/15/2023 | M | 8 | 196.8 | 29.1 | 36.7 | 43.4 | 36.9 | 60 | 3.9 |
| 5/16/2023 | T | 9 | 196.6 | 29.1 | 36.6 | 43.5 | 36.9 | 60 | 4.1 |
