Do You Need Diet Recovery?

I haven’t been talking all too much about my diet in my blog lately because, as many of you know, I have been eating intuitively. I’ve made it a personal and private journey.

Though I’m following a diet that promotes eating whatever sounds good, I’m still not doing that quite yet. I have still been eating really clean- only natural, unprocessed foods minus a few exceptions going out to eat. Though this is great, I’m ready to take the next step.

Like so many people, I’m ready to overcome my fear of eating foods that come with a nutrition label. It doesn’t mean I’ll go crazy (even if I do, good for me) but I want to be free in my nutritional choices. I don’t want to fear body fat. I can imagine that feels pretty….freeing.

So yeah. Simply said, I want ice cream too.

Like six years ago when I probably ate 3,000 calories a day, not even knowing what a calorie even was yet, and I was still energized and full of life?

I miss that feeling…don’t get my wrong, I am full of life. But there are better reasons to train and eat right than to look like a fitness model. Eat right and train to LIVE.

Exercise doesn’t have to come in the form of dumbbells…it can be rock climbing, hiking or swimmings. More nutrition means more movement!

Who else out there wants to be able to eat a meal and not worry about what it’s going to do to your figure, what the macros are, what farm or factory  it came from, if it was made with love or anger by the cook (yes, I’m kind of serious, this is a factor for many people) and then determine what to eat the rest of the day based on that meal’s macros. Time to get rid of those thoughts!

Additionally, many athletes and specifically bodybuilding competitors, are physically fit but may need a break from the strenuous training. Years of it. While it can be fun to watch your figure change drastically during competition prep, the turmoil afterwards can be painful.

Very recently, my place of work The Institute for the Psychology of Eating, held an online conference. One of the speakers at the conference was Matt Stone, a metabolic genius and the creator of 180 Degree Health.

He praises a lot of foods for their unique ability to increase body temperature, though some of these foods would not even be whispered by the typical kale-juicing junkie.

I listened to his interview in the conference and was intrigued by his beliefs. I then arranged to do a review over his books. The books I am going to discuss today are Diet Recovery 1 & 2.

First, let me start with saying that 1 & 2 are basically the same, though they are written extremely different. Diet Recovery 2 is a 3rd edition of 1, but a lot of parts where taken out and basically all of the literature changed.

I’m going to go over them as if they were one book and describe Matt Stone’s philosophy on how to recovery from a diet safely.

Matt’s main message of the books are in regards to metabolism. When dieters go on…well, dieting….for years, their metabolism decreases for many reasons. The body has to burn food at a slower rate in order to preserve energy.

It’s not just for dieters or people looking to lose weight. Matt also says that this is for the typical health junkie. For people that drink a gallon of water a day, flushing out all of their sodium (ahem) and those that fear this food or that food. It’s for people that eat so many watery foods, that when they finally eat something salty and filling, they suffer from gas and bloating for four days.

It’s for people that suffer from metabolic damage.

Matt clearly outlines signs of metabolic damage through something he calls the Metabolic Report Card. You fail it, you have some work to do. You pass it, good for you!

Some signs of a damaged metabolism include:

-A body temperature lower than the perfect temp- 98.8

-Low energy & fatigue

-Peeing often (more than once every four hours) and/or waking up in the middle of the night to pee

-Cold hands and feet

-Constipation

-Low sex drive

-Slow growing hair or hair falling out

-Abnormal menstrual cycles and flow for female

And quite a few more. The main point he drives is to increase your body temperature to 98.8. This temperature means your body is a fat-burning machine, capable of eating heart and hefty meals and still feel energized and ready for the day. Your body should be warm after eating, and you should feel full.

The purpose of this book is to outline these points and give a basic understanding of how to increase your metabolism through recovery.

I don’t want to give everything away but his recovery process is an interesting process for sure.

You know the typical eat less, train more protocol? Well Matt says differently. In fact, he says do the complete opposite.

He suggests that, depending on how severely damaged your metabolism is, stop training and start refeeding for a whole month. That means DON’T move and EAT everything and anything.

Resting is required so that your body can physically, well, rest after all of the years of not resting. You’d be surprised how much rest you really might need in order to start seeing any physical improvements and health changes.

In Diet Recovery 1, Mat says to strictly stop training for the whole month or more.

In Diet Recovery 2, he says to train appropriately and that it isn’t necessary to stop if you don’t really want to.

My thoughts? I say somewhere in between. Maybe don’t necessarily stop working out completely, but just take a light jog or rock climb. I would say it would be smart to stay active, but to go ahead and avoid the gym. Don’t go running or sprinting, but enjoy the outdoors doing something else less stressful on the body.

In fact, after reading both of these chapters, I resonated so much with what he was saying that I decided to take one week off. I think know I could have gone even more (I haven’t taken more than 5 days off in several years) but I felt refreshed and I wanted to work more on this next part- refeeding.

This part may be a little more controversial for some. 

Matt basically recommends for a whole month eat anything you want. Eat warming foods (food that will help raise your metabolism) like ice cream, pizza, whatever and back off of the millions of cooling foods you eat that make you pee every 30 minutes (lettuce, juices, kombuchas) etc. He doesn’t say cut them out…just be aware of how much you’re peeing and how warm you feel after eating. These are the signs to look out for to see if you are properly recovering.

Diet Recovery further recommends to eat a little bit beyond fullness. Eat till stuffed, simply said. I believe the science on this one, but I personally haven’t done this and don’t know if I could. I enjoy reading about it and discovering why he says these things, but I also don’t want to eat too much to where I can’t get up and move.

Oh yes that reminds me.

Eating sugar, junk food, salt and everything else we fear. Why does he recommend them you ask? 

(Image courtesy of Sura Nualpradid/FreeDigitalPhotos.net)

1. Get over the mental hoops with sugar and junk food. Diet Recovery is just as much about healing your mind than it is your body.

2. Help your body become accustomed to these foreign foods again.

3. Increase energy. After being calorie deprived and overtrained for years at a time, you’ll be surprised how good you feel after a few weeks of refeeding.

Of course, eating the junk food in whatever quantities you want is just the initial diet recovery protocol. He’s not saying make it a lifestyle change, it’s just for the period of recovering that he recommends you do this. After your metabolism is healed, you can then make your own decision whether or not you want to continue to eat ice cream every night or if you’ll allow yourself to eat more freely.

Hopefully you do. Again don’t go overboard, but you really should eat exactly what you want when you want it.

We are free to do as we please as human beings….I think it’s something we tend to forget at times.

Overall Matt IS a strong supporter or sugar and salt. He loves it. It’s great for teeth, digestion, sex drive, energy, metabolism and long term health.

But, on the other hand, there is one food he is not a big fan of.

Poly Unsaturated Fats

(Image courtesy of Gualberto107/FreeDigitalPhotos.net)

KUDOS to Matt Stone for this one. Honestly, I have reached a point where I don’t really want to hear about good foods or bad foods anymore, but when he goes into detail about poly unsaturated fats, I’ve made it a point to avoid them from now on.

I feel like I’m giving too much away with this review but I’m way too excited about actually learning something to not share a bit about this.

PUFAs (poly unsaturated fats) are the most commonly used fats today. They are the ones health industries recommend using for cooking due to their numerous “health” benefits.

It’s all a lie. A LIE!

I think Diet Recovery 1 did a better job explaining PUFAs for a newbie, though 2 still went through the basics.

This is an excerpt taken from DR1:

“First of all, polyunsaturated fats directly interfere with the function of the thyroid gland, as well as how the thyroid hormones can be taken up and utilized by the mitochondria in the cells. This interference can give a person, thin or fat, a slow metabolism with an endless array of consequences to go along with it.

Secondly, omega 6 is a precursor to the formation of inflammatory molecules in the body known to elevate several counter-inflammatory substances such as the “stress hormone” cortisol and Suppressor of Cytokine Signaling (SOCS-3). These factors rise in the presence of inflammatory molecules like Interleukin-6 for example, which is well-understood to rise in proportion to the omega 6 content of the diet – particularly in relation to the omega 3 consumption in the diet coinciding with that.”

So basically it destroys the body’s ability to metabolize properly….and after doing more reading in my free time, many studies have shown that feeding farm animals PUFA will raise their body fat levels to juicy them up for us. Nuff said.

Some pufas include seed oils such as corn, soy, canola, cottonseed, sunflower, and all nuts (except macadamias are okay).

Yeah, grapeseed oil, one of the “healthiest” oils, has a WHOPPING 70.6% PUFA content.

Just a hundred years ago, people were eating buttery pancakes, ice cream, and all the other “bad sugars” but their metabolic rate and overall health was just fine.

They had sugar and salt, and plenty of it. But you know what they didn’t have?

PUFAs.

The evidence for the evilness of PUFAs is astounding. I never thought I would see the day that I would be passionate about a health claim but by golly, this is one I can stand by.

So stop the nuts. They are PUFA-fied.

Okay, okay, you want more info you go read the book.

Here’s a little heads up about the book, too.

It’s written VERY differently form any other health book you will ever read. Matt is very nonchalant, sometimes playfully shocking and very non-traditional.

Yet, I love it. It’s really refreshing to not have to read a paragraph five times over to understand what it’s trying to tell you, or sell you. I can’t tell you how many times I really wanted to grasp something some docter oz wannabe was writing, but just couldn’t interpret each case studies’ numbers, facts and claims. They just jumble together.

Matt is very clean and clear and he writes in a way you probably won’t forget.

This excerpt is from the beginning of Diet Recovery 2:

“I want you to know, if you are new to me, that the amount of thought, study, and experience I have is incredibly broad, deep, and vast. You wouldn’t really know that just by reading this book, because I want this to be relatively light reading with very straightforward thoughts on the matter at hand. But I have studied the subject of human health relentlessly, engulfing several hundred books, thousands of studies, blogs, and websites, communicated directly with thousands of people about health matters (my site has over 40,000 comments and counting and I have consulted with several hundred individuals from dozens of countries), and have essentially given myself one of the most complete and in-depth educations on the subject ever accomplished – and I continue to learn and grow at an accelerated rate with each passing year (creeping up on a full decade of full health immersion).

What you may be surprised to NOT see in this book is hundreds of studies referenced. This is actually a weak and cheap tactic used by many in the health field to falsely give their theories credibility.”

I couldn’t agree more with that last bit. And the first bit simply made me happy….he’s not cocky whatsoever but he is confident in his recovery plan, no matter how challenging it may sound at first.

The only  part that got me a little nervous about his program Rehabilitative Rest & Aggressive Re-Feeding (RRARF) was the fact that many people have indeed gained quite a lot of weight during the program.

Of course they do though. After years of starving yourself and overtraining and then immediately jumping into a relaxing bubble bath with five slices of pizza for a month might just do that to you. It doesn’t mean you’re unhealthy though. You may just need to gain a bit in order to lose it later.

You have to be smart about your approach. He clearly states, this is not a weight loss program. This is a program that is meant to regain your health and get your metabolism back up.

Diet Recovery is meant to do exactly that: save you from your desires to be perfect, look perfect and eat perfect. Sometimes perfection can lead to damage (physically and mentally) and then some sacrifices will need to be made (gaining a little weight) in order to get back the life you deserve.

Eat salt. Eat sweets. Eat calories. Love your body. That’s basically what he wants you to accomplish through your own healing journey.

He even has a chapter on perfection and it’s dead-end-ness. It’s one of those things that I can read over and over again and it “click” every time but I really need to implement it into my life to quite searching for perfection once and for all. I love that he is a quitter though. A quitter of perfection.  There’s really no point. But health? There are many reasons to regain your health.

The books are around 90 pages, so obviously you should give this really quick read a go. I’ve only covered a few of the basics, but out of all the books I have read and reviewed, this one is my favourite.

Some truth about me: I have cold hands and feet. My temperature is 96.6. I have fatigue and low energy. I’m bloated often. I have a really strong desire to be perfect. And I am ready for change.

I actually reached out to Matt myself for a little additional insight and help. He gave me some really great recommendations and challenged me to up my calorie/carb intake with lots of good foods like fruit, honey, maple syrup, rice, etc. and see what it does for me while still training. I’m actually GAME. I’ve been so picky with my body, only doing what the ‘bodybuilding experts” suggest but I’ve never actually been on a quest to see what works for me. This book inspired me to start eating differently to see how my body responds.

I will be the one experimenting. I will be the one eating what I want to eat. I am not following a meal plan for once…. just following my body.

So honestly, if any of these things are resounding with you, I highly recommend getting one of these copies online. In fact….Matt is giving away his books for free ALL of this month, one at a time. It’s his birthday month so he decided to give back! It’s the perfect time to get your own copy of Diet Recovery (I suggest 2) and start RECOVERING. You can find out ways to get his books for free by signing up on his newsletter here, or if you want to get it now you can find them on Amazon!

Check out his website here.

Check out his facebook page here.

Do you need diet recovery? Find out here! #dietrecovery #edrecovery

Any questions? Comments? Let us know!