How to Maintain Weight on the Bulletproof Diet
You’ve been on the Bulletproof Diet for awhile now and lost all the weight you wanted to shed. Your next goal is to keep the weight off. Or, maybe you were already at your ideal weight to begin with and are ready to move on to the next phase. Welcome to maintenance mode of the Bulletproof Diet. Here, you go through a short period of trying out some of the foods you’ve been avoiding to see how you feel. Then, you can decide whether they’ll be a part of your life, an occasional treat, or something you’ll never touch again.
Maintenance mode relaxes the diet rules a little, but with a plan. It’s not so much a time to go back to indulging in everything. Maintenance mode is a time to experiment on yourself — to see what works and what doesn’t.
If you’ve been following the Bulletproof Diet for a while and you’re ready to find out how different foods affect your system, this post is for you. Here’s what to keep in mind while you’re testing your individual reactions to foods.
Stick to the main Bulletproof Diet tenets
Even in maintenance mode, you want to adhere to the main Bulletproof Diet as much as possible to stay strong when life comes at you. You want to be resilient after every plane trip, stressful workday, gratuitous snacking sesh (it happens!), bout with the flu…staying Bulletproof most of the time will help you bounce back from it all.
Besides, if you’re measuring your response to food, you’ll get confounded results if you deviate too much from the principal diet. For instance, if you’re regularly eating foods that cause a low-level reaction, and then try something else to see if that causes a reaction, you can’t zero in on the true cause.
Have breakfast, if you feel like it
Chances are, you love your new superpowers and want to stick with Bulletproof Coffee in the morning. Occasionally, though, your friends will get together for brunch. Or waking up to an omelet exploding with veggies just plain sounds good.
In maintenance mode, you can have a Bulletproof breakfast when you want to. It’s actually a good idea to sit down to breakfast every once in a while, to confuse your metabolism into keeping your fat-burning systems humming.
Of course, you don’t revert back to sugar cereal and muffins. Your breakfast should have protein, fat, and vegetables to keep you going all day — like our Breakfast Buddha Bowl recipe.
Test your lectins
You probably noticed that not every vegetable appears in the green zone on the Bulletproof Diet Roadmap. That’s because on the Bulletproof Diet you avoid the foods that most commonly cause inflammation.
Aren’t all vegetables faultless, perfect food? Sure, vegetables are high in polyphenols, vitamins, and minerals. But plants don’t like it when you eat them or their babies. Since they can’t get away from hungry herbivores, they instead teach them that they’re bad food. Plant defenses like oxalates and lectins make people, animals, and bugs sick, so they don’t come back for more.
Related: How Lectins Suck Your Energy And Make You Weak
There’s a lot of variability here. How you react depends on how much of the plant’s chemical defenses are stored in the plant, and how sensitive you are. After a few weeks on the main Bulletproof Diet, you’re clean enough to notice the effects when something doesn’t jibe with your system.
More Diet Tips From Bulletproof
Add in low-fructose, high-nutrient fruits
Fruits have a lot of antioxidants and polyphenols in them, but their fructose content messes with your blood sugar and hunger hormones.[1][2] In maintenance mode, keep fruits to a minimum (one fruit or starch a day), and stick with low-sugar fruits, like raspberries and avocados.
Eat carbs, the smart way
The Bulletproof Diet isn’t the same as a full keto diet. It’s a cyclical low-carb diet with a carbohydrate re-feeding period. Again, this doesn’t mean nightly bowls of spaghetti and garlic bread. The Bulletproof Diet Roadmap tells you which carbs keep your metabolism in fat-burning mode and which won’t do you any favors.
This is where biohacking comes in. You have to play with the types and amounts of food to see what works for your particular makeup. For instance, you might have a small serving of sweet potato and see what happens. Your next carb re-feed day, try a slightly larger portion of white rice. Everyone is different, and thresholds vary.
Pay attention to the smallest discomforts and changes, like:
- Foggy thinking
- Achy joints
- Trips to the bathroom
- Flatulence or belching
- Rashes or acne
- Bloating
Women may need to re-feed carbohydrates more often than men do, and if you’re over 40, you might do better having carbs more frequently or substantially less frequently. The only way to know for sure is to test yourself.
Drink alcohol in moderation
Alcohol shakes up your whole system. It’s addictive, it metabolizes into sugar, it slows down the liver, and the yeasts throw off your gut flora.
If you’re Bulletproof, you’re more resilient to those things than you used to be. Depending on how long you’ve been at it, you may have a stronger gut, stronger insulin sensitivity, and stronger impulse control. So, your body can handle a little rattle from time to time.
Unless you abstain completely, there’s a good chance you’ll run into a situation where you want a cocktail or two. Choose green-zone alcohol like vodka or gin, and don’t go overboard. If wine is your drink of choice, make sure it’s Dry Farm Wines, a natural, organic, biodynamic, low-alcohol wine that’s tested for mold.
Naturally, there’s a lot of room for error here. If you have a little too much fun (no shame, it’s easy to do), there are things you can do to prevent the dreaded hangover.
Read: How to Hack Your Hangover
Biohacking boils down to testing yourself and paying attention. Some people test foods. Others dabble in nootropics and injecting stem cells into various body parts. The key is to learn what high-performance feels like, and to pay attention when you’re not feeling as good as you know you can feel.
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