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The
principles beyond this new revolutionary simple healthy diet.
The IntenseDF diet is a diet based on the following principles:
The night diet principle.
We can expect to spend one third of our lives sleeping - that means a
good eight hours every day! Even if we are doing nothing in those eight
hours, our bodies burn calories. Our hearts keep pumping blood, our
lungs take in and expel air, and our cells certainly do not sleep during
that time. And we should not forget that our brains are kept busy
reorganising all the information acquired during the day, an this operation
requires a lot of energy.
When we sleep, we do not eat! Therefore, this is a period where the
energy balance is negative, i.e. we burn calories but we do not get any.
The night diet principle implies that we should eat during the day and
diet during the night!
It sounds a little weird at first, but as soon as I begin to explain the
details everything will become very clear. |
How can we plan our food intake in order to diet during the night?
The answer is very simple. Every hour our bodies burn energy. For
example if our bodies needs 2,000Kcal a day, we could say that on
average our bodies burn 84Kcal per hour. In reality, during the day we
need more energy than during the night, but as a general rule we can say
that every hour our bodies need about 80-100Kcal.
When we eat a meal, we do not instantaneously absorb the energy
contained in that meal. Normally it takes between one and two hours to
absorb those calories.
Now let’s join these two concepts together. If we eat a meal of
160-200Kcal every two hours, we supply exactly the quantity of energy
that our body is going to use in the next two hours. That means those
calories are not going to be deposited in our adipose tissues but are
going to be burned straight away!
These small meals, eaten every two hours, allow us to feel energetic
because our cells can get all the nutrients they need in that moment. |
This is why it is so easy to follow this diet.
While sleeping during the night, we do not eat and we only burn
calories, in particular fat.
Remember that the most effective way to
burn fat is to burn it slowly, and during the night our metabolisms are
very slow because we don’t do any physical activity.
During the day we
have supplied our bodies with a quantity of energy which is just
sufficient to sustain our daily activity. However, we didn’t supply
energy for the night.
The consequence is that during the night we burn
our reserve of fat.
We are sleeping so we don’t feel hungry. Our
metabolism is very slow so the body finds it very comfortable to burn
fat.
Did you get the concept? It is quite simple.
The best period for dieting
is during the night when we are sleeping, and not during the day where
we can perceive that we are hungry. |
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The
hormone diet principle. A second important principle considered
in the IntenseDF diet is the so-called hormone diet principle. Our
bodies produce a large number of hormones - so numerous in fact that it
would take a long time to mention each of them. Luckily, we can
concentrate on just three of them, namely:
a) Cortisol;
b) Insulin;
c) Human growth hormones (HGH).
Cortisol is a
hormone produced mainly during the early hours of the day with a peak
around 6am. After 10am the concentration begins decreasing considerably
so that after noon it is normally quite low.
Cortisol forces our bodies to burn fat and to convert amino acids into
glucose.
This teaches us an important concept. We should not eat fat or proteins
in the morning. If we eat proteins, the amino acid will be converted
into glucose. If we eat fat, we will interfere with the process of
burning our own fat.
Ideally, we should only eat carbohydrates during the morning, and
possibly after 9:00-10:00am when the concentration of cortisol has been
reduced considerably.
When we first get up, we do not normally feel hungry, probably because
of the |
effect
of the cortisol which is releasing enough energy from our adipose
tissue, and from amino acids that are converted into glucose.
Many bodybuilders dislike cortisol because they are afraid that part of
their muscles will be consumed. In this respect, we need to remember
that our bodies use mainly damaged proteins when they need to get energy
from proteins. Normally it is believed that damaged proteins are
dismantled and then burned as amino acids 30-50 times faster than
proteins in good shape. Therefore, during these hours of high
concentration of cortisol our bodies are cleaning themselves, getting
rid of many proteins that have been damaged by free radicals and other
reactions like glycation and so on.
If we eat too early, we could interfere with this important process of
cleaning.
Conclusion: we should start eating after 9:00-10:00am and we should only
have carbohydrates in the morning until 12:00.
Remember that a breakfast is healthy when it includes low GI
carbohydrates, while it is unhealthy when it contains proteins and fat.
This has been shown by many scientific studies.
Insulin:
while the amount of cortisol present in the blood undergoes |
diurnal variation, with the highest levels present
during the early hours of the morning and the lowest levels present around
midnight, insulin is produced soon after a meal rich in carbohydrates,
and to a lesser extent, proteins. Therefore by working on our meal
pattern and composition we can modulate the production of this hormone
inside our bodies.
A diet that forces our body to produce a
large quantity of insulin is an unhealthy diet!
We should always remember this. The lower
the quantity of insulin produced in our bodies, the better
Insulin is produced by our bodies when they detect a large
quantity of carbohydrates (like glucose) and some amino acids (from
proteins) in the blood. By releasing these hormones, our bodies forces
their cells to uptake glucose and amino acids from the blood up to 30
times faster than they do without insulin.
One trick to keep the production of
insulin low during the day is to avoid eating large quantities of
carbohydrates and proteins in one sitting.
Ideally, we should spread our carbohydrates during the day in numerous
small meals. If the quantity of carbohydrates in our blood is low, our
cells can deal with them without insulin. |
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When
the concentration of glucose is too high, insulin becomes indispensable
to speed up the glucose uptake from the blood.
From all these concepts, we can draw the following two conclusions:
a) Carbohydrates must be eaten in small rather than large amounts per
sitting during the day. In this way, the body will not be forced to
produce a large spike of unhealthy insulin.
b) Proteins and carbohydrates should not be eaten together, in order to
prevent the synergic effect that these two nutrients could exert on our
bodies by forcing them to produce insulin.
c) Fat should not be eaten with carbohydrates and proteins because as we
have seen carbohydrates and proteins stimulate the production of
insulin. A high quantity of insulin stimulates the body to store fat.
Therefore, the fat present in a high carbohydrate meal will be stored
immediately in our adipose tissue. Once the fat is there, it becomes
very difficult to remove!
Human growth hormone (HGH):
Human growth hormone is produced mainly during the night between
midnight and 2:00am. During this time this hormone is produced in a big
spike. HGH stimulates our bodies to rebuild themselves - particularly
muscles, skin, bones and so on. |
What
can we learn from this? Well, to repair itself the body needs mainly
proteins. That means when this big spike of HGH occurs, amino acids
(from proteins) should be available to be used to sustain the building
process stimulated by this hormone. Remember that the body can easily
store fat or carbohydrates but it cannot store proteins. Therefore if we
do not eat proteins a few hours before this natural spike of HGH, our
body could find itself without the raw material for rebuilding! This is
why it is so important to carefully supply proteins exactly when our
bodies need them most. Proteins supplied without this hormone will be
converted into fat and glucose.
Therefore if we eat proteins in the morning the amino acids of those
proteins will be converted into glucose (carbohydrate) or fat.
So proteins eaten in the morning could be
fattening. If we eat proteins in the evening those proteins will
be used to rebuild our internal structures. This process of rebuilding
and repairing requires energy (a lot of it) - which means that
proteins eaten in the evening should have a
slimming effect!
Now it is time to summarise the hormone diet principle:
1) Carbohydrates should be spread throughout the day with small meals to
prevent the stimulation of insulin. |
2)
Fat should be eaten from 12:00 to 20:00. It is important to avoid large
quantities of fat at night (after 20:00) because fat has been proven to
interfere with the production of HGH.
3) Protein should be eaten from 20:00 to midnight. In this way when we
have a large spike of HGH, while we are sleeping, our bodies are
saturated with amino acids that can be used for rebuilding and repairing
the internal structures of our bodies. In this way proteins will be used
to build muscle, tendons, skin and bones, and not fat!
We could depict this eating pattern with the following table:
|
Time |
Carbo |
Fat |
Protein |
Kcal |
|
10:00 |
x |
|
|
200 |
|
12:00 |
x |
x |
|
200 |
|
14:00 |
x |
x |
|
200 |
|
16:00 |
x |
x |
|
200 |
|
18:00 |
x |
x |
|
200 |
|
20:00 |
x |
|
x |
200 |
|
22:00 |
x |
|
x |
200 |
| |
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Tot |
1400 |
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