What you eat has the largest impact on your performance.

Most diets are optimized for weight loss at the expense of intellectual capacity. This tradeoff is not worth it for high-impact professionals. A few months of impaired thinking while loosing some weight could have significant negative impact on your career.

Maintaining a balance of both mind and body health doesn’t require a new approach to nutrition, it requires an old one.

How I Got Fat Without Noticing

I was eating a reasonably healthy diet but was consuming about 100-500 surplus calories per day. I wasn’t morbidly obese but I was gradually putting on a pound or two every month.

Sound familiar?

It should because this is how most people get fat. You don’t just wake up magically rotund one morning. Instead, your body sneakily adds the weight over the course of years. Just because the problem took years doesn’t mean the solution has to.

Quickly And Permanently Fixing The Root Of The Problem

The root of the problem was obvious — I was eating a bit too much every day. The food I was eating didn’t fill me up enough.

My needs for a new way of eating were as follows:

• Must be easy to adhere to, especially while traveling/eating out
• Must allow for weekly Crumbl Cookie (non-negotiable)
• Must produce optimal balance of mind and body performance
• Must be delicious to eat (to deter unplanned cheating)
• Must be flexible — people following extreme diets like vegan or carnivore are generally insufferable

Out of these requirements I built a modification of the primal diet that decreased my sleep need, improved my health metrics, shed weight, and improved my mental acuity.

The Menu: How I Eat

The way of eating is simple — eat real food six days a week, one day a week eat whatever you feel like.

Real Food 6 Days A Week

Real food includes meat, seafood, eggs, vegetables, fruit, some fats, and nuts/seeds. It sometimes includes dairy and legumes. It rarely includes grains. Eat until you’re full at each meal. Don’t snack. Don’t drink calories. Have as much coffee, water, tea, and diet soda as you want — I’m partial to Coke Zero.

Cravings One Day A Week

The reason this way of eating works is because of this single day each week.

At worst you will eat a bunch of junk food that will blow way past your calorie requirements. Since you’ve built a buffer the other 6 days, this won’t result in weight gain. Even the worst is the best in the long run though.

Once you establish healthy eating the other 6 days of the week, you will begin to feel like shit when you eat junk food. This will naturally condition you over time to eat less junk food on your cheat day. I love doughnuts, but the sugar crash makes me feel so depressed and gross afterwards that I have grown naturally averse to them.

Sometimes the best antidote is the poison itself.

A Typical Day Of Eating

To demonstrate how flexible this approach is, here’s an example of a day’s worth of eating where I’m being flexible.

Breakfast

• 1/2 cup mixed berries
• 3 tbsp hemp seeds
• 2 tbsp unsweetened coconut milk
• 1 tbsp honey
• Black coffee

Lunch

• Cava bowl with chicken, salad, hummus, feta, olives, and cucumbers.

Dinner

• 2 cups of stir fry veggies
• 8 ounces of ground beef
• Baked potato

Dessert

• 2 bananas
• 2 hard boiled eggs
• 2 small meat sticks (45 cal each) Despite the fact that I feel like I’m eating a lot of food, I have been loosing weight eating like this.

Results

Over the past 30 days, I have lost 6 pounds without feeling like I am starving and my mind feels more agile.

Although your body may require a different balance of fats and carbs, this approach will work for everyone. Over time your junk food cravings will naturally diminish. You will feel more dialed in to what your body truly needs.