We Tried It: The Sirtfood Diet
Under his instruction, the singer hits the gym (whether she wants to or not), and follows the Sirtfood Diet, which focuses on about 20 “wonderfoods” like arugula, celery, cocoa, coffee, red onion and more. I have no kids and a terrible singing voice, so testing out the diet for myself seemed like my only option to become more like Adele.
Plus, dieters are clinically proven to lose 7 lbs. I’d be A-Okay with that. So I gladly volunteered to try out week one. Step one, before the diet actually started, was to read through The Sirtfood Diet and make a grocery list. On the first three days of the program I would be slurping down three green juices — made up of kale, arugula, ginger, green apple, parsley, lemon and macha powder — and just one meal per day.
The recipes thankfully are filled with ingredients you can find at any grocery store, anywhere in the country — except for one thing: buckwheat. Buckwheat and the other sirtfoods are the focal points of the diet because they’re high in polyphenols — a plant-based nutrient that Goggins and Matten say are great for the digestive system. Polyphenols “activate a powerful recycling process in the body which clears out cellular waste and burns fat,” the duo write in the book.
“They do this by activating our sirtuin genes — also known as our ‘skinny’ genes. I’ve never been a regular green juice-drinker, but this was enjoyable enough. I kept sipping throughout the day, and started getting my usual hunger calls around 11 a.m. I have a pretty severe snack addiction, but I at least go for the healthy stuff, like pistachios and granola bars, and this was normally when I get my fix. But I pushed through.
Goggins and Matten say that you can eat your one meal at any time of the day, so I decided to go for 4 p.m. By 1 p.m., I was miserable and starving. The green juice did absolutely nothing to curb my hunger, which makes sense — nothing in it has real staying power.
I regularly write the What I Eat columns, and I kept thinking about the nutritionists who talk about the need for meals with protein to keep you satisfied, something I was severely lacking. My day piled up, so I somehow didn’t actually eat until 5 p.m. Luckily, the meal was DELICIOUS. I went for the aforementioned miso-glazed tofu, and I would make this any day of the week.
I even managed to save part of it to eat when I got home from work as a “dinner” (is it against the rules to split up the one meal? I was too hungry to care). More green juice. More hunger. Today’s meal was harissa-baked tofu with cauliflower “couscous.” I’m not vegetarian, but I’m not a big fan of shrimp, the other option that day. I probably should have gone with it anyway though — this meal was a big miss for me. I had green juice for breakfast.
My meal today was a kale and red onion dal with buckwheat, and WOW. I loved it. I wanted piles of it. The only remaining problem? I’m someone who exercises regularly, and hard. I go to CrossFit three times a week, sometimes more, and I run or swim on the other days.
I could finally eat two meals a day — hooray! But my tough workout unsurprisingly didn’t go well on such little food over the last three days. So with the increase in food on the plan, I decided to switch things up — I would go back to eating normally, and just try out the other recipes for the rest of the week. I’m stubborn and highly competitive, so it was frustrating to “fail” at the diet, but I also really, really love food, and skipping one to two meals a day was not worth it to me.
The other meals I tried — pan-fried salmon with caramelized endive, arugula and celery leaf salad (it also has avocado!); Tuscan bean stew; the sirt super salad; the sirtfood omelet — were all similarly fantastic. If you are immune to hunger and really enjoy green juices, go for it (and check with your doctor beforehand)! If you’re more like me, skip week one, and go straight to week two, when you get to enjoy three full and truly excellent meals a day. And you can still pretend to be Adele.
However, they go a step beyond regular carbs and focus on net carbs. A net carb is the total carbohydrate content of food minus its fiber and sugar alcohol content. So if you're looking at the carbs on a nutrition label you can't take them at face value, you have to subtract fiber and sugar alcohol to figure out what its net carb content is. The reasoning behind this is that if you're consuming less carbs which are then metabolized into sugar, your body focuses not on burning the sugar, but rather on burning fat.
This is exactly what you have to do to follow the diet. There are two plans you can follow on Atkins: Atkins 40 if you have less than 40 pounds to lose or Atkins 20 if you want to lose more. Atkins 40 allows you to eat 40 net carbs which are made up of three 10 carb meals (it's ok if it's not exactly 10), and two five carb snacks.
The meals should be made up of four to six ounces of protein (which has 0 net carbs) and "foundation vegetables" which include things like broccoli, bell peppers, and Brussels sprouts. The rest of your carbs can come from things like cheese, nut butters, fruits, and whole grains (albeit very limited amounts of whole grains). You can even have certain alcohols like bourbon or vodka-which have 0 net carbs. After doing my research I planned out my meals— somewhat.
After completing all my research I wanted to plan out exactly what I would be eating every day so it would be super easy to just heat meals up and chow down. Maybe it's because I'm not a math person, but having to plan out what I was going to eat every day down to the last net carb was not easy.
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