Dave: I’m Dave Asprey, and you’re listening to the Bulletproof Radio Short Report, a highly condensed show to bring you the most important ways to upgrade yourself.
Today we’re going to talk about the 14 steps to eating the Bulletproof Diet. The reason for this is that it’s kind of overwhelming to wade through all of the information that’s in the Bulletproof Diet, even though it’s a one-page infographic you can download for free on Bulletproofdietbook.com. Even if you haven’t done that, I’m just going to walk you through it, so maybe you don’t even need to do that.
You can take as many steps at a time as you like to. Something is better than nothing. Perfection is not required. You can spend a lot of time kind of building out your own program, or you can just go straight to the Bulletproof Diet infographic, which is a simple form. It tells you what to eat when, and those two variable matter greatly. It matters on a daily basis. It eve matters on a weekly basis. I will walk you through all that. Information overload, though, happens to the best of us.
One of the problems sometimes people run into on the Bulletproof Diet as well is that they really don’t implement it fully. They say, “Oh, I’m kind of Bulletproof, but I’m eating cherry turnovers on the weekends.” What you’re doing there is you’re adding some carbs back, which I recommend you do once or twice a week, but you’re choosing carbs that cause inflammation and cravings for several days. You probably won’t get the results you want. That’s not an optimal approach. Maybe you got rid of grains, but you didn’t go to the trouble of finding grass-fed meats, so you’re getting all the grain toxins and fats in the meat you’re eating, so it didn’t work. That’s because there are some things that are kind of mandatory, and high-quality meat is one of them.
This step-wise approach that we’re talking about today is going to just get you going. You don’t have to do everything, but the more you do the better it works. This is probably the opposite of the standard American diet. The steps are cumulative, so the further you go the more Bulletproof you can be.
Here’s Step One: Eliminate sugar. This means things like fruit juices or drinks that contain high-fructose corn syrup. For the most part honey, except if you’re using the sleep pack that used up to a tablespoon of raw honey before bed. If you’re one of the people who responds well for that, and it doesn’t raise your triglycerides or causes other problems, hey, raw honey can be a lifesaver;. That also means you eliminate agave at least most of the time. If you’re going to have these things that contain sugar, you would want to have them only occasionally and only after dinner rather than in the morning. You’re not going to be drinking orange juice for breakfast any more.
Step Two: Replace the sugar calories with healthy fats from the Bulletproof Diet road map. Things like grass-fed butter; ghee; coconut oil;, Brain Octane oil, which is 18 times stronger than coconut oil; or upgraded MCT oil, which is very highly purified and is 6 times stronger than regular coconut oil. If you try some other oils and you end up getting digestive distress, there are differences in purity that really matter, particularly around coconut oil. Coconut oil itself, the quality matters greatly. A lot of coconut oil has problems with mold contamination when the coconut is drying, sometimes in the sun, sometimes in the tropics.
Step Three: Eliminate gluten in any shape or form. That means bread, cereal, pasta. While you’re at it, don’t go to gluten-free junk food, which is almost as bad. If they’ve replaced gluten with a mix of other high-carbohydrate stuff, you may find that you get digestive distress, brain fog and food cravings just like you did from this gluten-containing diet that you used to eat.
Step Four, by the way, is remove all grains except white or maybe brown rice if you really prefer it. You remove grain-derived oils. Remove all vegetable oils like corn oils, soy and canola. While you’re at it, get rid of unstable polyunsaturated oils like pressed-walnut oil, flax seed oil, and in particular peanut oil. This isn’t to say you should never eat a walnut. It is to say if you’re eating pressed-nut oils, quite often they are unstable and have way too much polyunsaturated fat that makes you inflamed. The whole point of The Bulletproof Diet is to reduce all of the various causes of inflammation so you can feel better and perform better.
Step Five: Eliminate all synthetic additives, colorings and flavorings. Most importantly this includes NutraSweet or aspartame, MSG, dyes and artificial flavorings. The reason for this is that most of these cause food cravings or have other negative health affects.
Step Six: Eat significant amounts of pastured, grass-fed meat from big ruminant animals. Things like cows, sheep, or bison if you want to be fancy about it. At the same time, you want to have fish. If you’re not allergic to them and you’ve confirmed that, eggs, particularly egg yolks, and shellfish.
Step Seven: Eliminate legumes like peanuts, beans and lentils. If you really must have beans, you’re going to be eating a lot of carbohydrates. You need to soak them and sprout or ferment them safely, then cook them. Eating, say, a ground-up bean flour is really not going to be your friend. You’re going to get digestive discomfort and stress from that if you’re like most people.
Step Eight: Remove all processed, homogenized and pasteurized dairy except for grass-fed butter. High-fat items like butter, you can pasteurize it because you’re not damaging the proteins. They mostly aren’t present in the butter. If you’re going to eat dairy, you should eat full-fat raw whole dairy from grass-fed cows as long as you tolerate it. Some people don’t.
Step Nine: Switch to grass-fed meat and wild-caught seafood. Eat pastured eggs and some pork, chickens, turkeys and ducks, but not too many of them. Those types of animals tend to have more omega-6 oils, and we’re working to minimize those.
Step Ten: Switch to organic. This matters in particular for your vegetables and for the occasional times when you eat organic fruit. This is more important for some clients than others. When you check out the Bulletproof Diet infographic, I have incorporated that. Things like avocados tend to be relatively safe even if they’re not organic, so they tend to be a bit higher on the infographic. Plus, the avocados taste good.
Step Eleven: Cook your food gently if you cook it at all. Use water in your cooking whenever possible, and use lower temperatures. Avoid things like microwaving, barbecuing and frying, because these create a lot of toxins from what they do to the protein and the fat. Those toxins can cause things like brain fog, food cravings or, well, cancer.
Step Twelve: Limit your fruit consumption to one or two servings per day, and choose the low-fructose fruits like berries and lemons over high-fructose things like watermelon and apples. The Bulletproof Diet infographic at Bulletproofdietbook.com guides you to choose things that are better for you with more antioxidants and less fructose.
Step Thirteen: Add spices and other flavorings from the Bulletproof Diet. Favor herb-based spices like thyme and rosemary over powdered spices. Use high-quality spices that are recently opened. Never allow your spice jars to be over a steaming pot, because once you get moisture into your spices, they are well known to contain spores of toxic molds that can grow while they’re in your cabinet. If you have spices from several years ago, toss them out and buy new powdered spices. Do yourself a favor.
Step Fourteen: Most of all, enjoy your food. Everything tastes better with butter on it. The Bulletproof Diet is a high-flavor, high-amazing kind of diet. You do not need to live on sticks and twigs, and that includes just sticks of butter. Use the butter to make something delicious.
Here’s the thing. You’re always on the Bulletproof Diet. You can either be in the red zone or you can be in the green zone, and somewhere in between is what every food choice you make from here on is going to do. You can be aware of it or not be aware of it. You can’t fall off the wagon, because everything you put into your body will always affect you whether you like it or not. The more you move away from the green zone on the Bulletproof Diet, the less you’ll benefit. The more you stick to it, well, the more Bulletproof you’re going to be. Small variations are fine and normal, and it doesn’t mean you failed.
By the way, after you’re feeling super Bulletproof, your pants fit just right, you might try going out and eating that cherry turnover wrapped around a pizza, or whatever it is that’s your personal kryptonite. When that happens, feel how you feel. Feel how tired it makes you. Look at how bloated you are the next morning. Realize that it lasted for a couple of days. Now you have a really strong motivation for not doing that again. Eating absolute crap one day a week is only going to make you tired and swollen for another four days.
If you experience allergies, acne or other negative effects after you have dairy, and these can come on the same day or even a couple of days later, try switching to ghee as your only dairy source, and eat more coconut oil and animal fat. Most people, though, handle butter pretty well. You could also consider using the new Bulletproof Food Detective application, formerly called Bulletproof Food Sense, on the iPhone or Android in order to tell whether the dairy you’re eating is actually making you weak. This is a free app you can download. Bulletproof Food Detective.
Next point, don’t really count calories in an attempt to lose weight. Eat until you’re full and then stop. You’re going to get full quickly because there’s a lot of butter. Counting calories that go in isn’t very useful because the calories that go out vary incredibly widely, and it’s not from exercise. About half of what’s the calories that you burn actually are not entirely exercise-based at all. Calories aren’t a very effective way to lose weight or to keep weight off.
The next point. Snacking makes you weak. When you’re eating right, you should have no desire for snacks. If you want snacks, you didn’t eat enough or you ate the wrong foods. Bulletproof Intermittent Fasting, where you have only Bulletproof Coffee for breakfast, really does work, but it works better for some people versus others. Women in particular do better when at least some of the time they add three tablespoons of upgraded collagen to their coffee. So they’re not technically fasting. They’re just having fat and protein, and avoiding all forms of carbohydrate in the morning.
Next point. Really limit your fruit consumption so you don’t raise your triglycerides and even contribute to fatty liver disease. Eating whole fruit is better than drinking fruit juice, but actually limiting your fructose is just a good idea for a whole bunch of reasons that we write about on the blog. Fructose won’t kill you, but limiting it is a good idea. 25 grams or less per day.
Next point. High healthy fat intake is optimal. Between 50 and 70 or even 80 percent fat; 5 to 30 percent carbohydrate, although if you’re eating 30 percent carbohydrate you better be working out a lot; and about 10 to 30 percent protein. Don’t make the mistake that a lot of paleo people do of overeating protein. That will also make you inflamed and tired, especially over time.
Eat as little polyunsaturated fat as you can. It’s a great idea to have fish oil, or better yet krill oil, if you don’t consume fatty cold-water fish like salmon at least once a week. I take a little bit of krill oil every day.
If you’re at a restaurant and you can’t find grass-fed meat, choose the leanest cuts of grain-fed meat you can get. This usually means the filet mignon. You do that because a lot of the toxins in grain-fed meat go into the fat of the animals. You don’t want to eat animal fat from industrial animals. If you are finding grass-fed meat, switch it around, or go to the rib-eye. Get the fattiest cuts possible, because that is the most precious part of a grass-fed animal. It’s the fat.
Another thing to think about is that it’s not an excuse to say I don’t have time. It’s not optional to nourish your mind and body. You’re going to spend time eating. Either you’re going to eat crap or you’re not going to eat crap. It’s up to you. Anyone out there can make soft-boiled eggs and Bulletproof Coffee versus eating a Danish. If you do this stuff mostly right, you’re going to set yourself up for a low-inflammation, high-performance, high-energy kind of life. If you don’t make the time to take care of yourself now, you’re going to have to make time to be sick later. It’s actually cheaper to eat well now than it is to go to the cardiologist later in life. Eat Bulletproof, be Bulletproof.
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