AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT (PART 1)

WILL SKIPPING BREAKFAST AND PUTTING BUTTER IN YOUR COFFEE
HELP YOU LOSE WEIGHT AND INCREASE YOUR MENTAL FOCUS?

What if I told you that it was healthy to skip a traditional breakfast every day and eat more butter?  In fact, what if I told you to put that extra butter in your coffee every morning?  Would you think I was crazy?  How about adding some coconut oil to it too?  Butter and oil in your coffee?!?  Now, that sounds both unhealthy and disgusting.

When I hear about a crazy diet or workout program that is the newest “fad”, I like to research it, study it, and most importantly, try it out on myself to see if it really works.  And there are a million of them – everyone is looking for the “magic bullet” to weight loss, the once-a-day pill we can all take to maintain our perfect weight and eat everything we want…while sitting in front of the TV.

I decided to try one of these nutrition fads – and it isn’t really that new — some people have been trying this little trick for decades.  Let me tell you about this little something I’ve been trying out that is completely different from what I’ve done in the past.

I’ve been doing this for 3 months now, maybe longer.  I waited a while before telling anyone I’d been trying this out, and frankly, I didn’t believe it would work.  But I like to experiment.

WHAT DROVE ME TO TRY SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT?

Recently I auditioned for the Nautilus Max Trainer Challenge at our gym.  I’ll be honest with you, I gained some weight for 2 months before the Challenge because I really wanted to have the same experience (watching my diet and doing the workouts) that my clients have been having for the last 24 years, as a way to remind myself that the advice I give really does work.  Well, did it?

The answer is yes…and no.  I started the program in January weighing in at 173 lbs. (more than I have ever weighed) and my body fat was 15%.  OK, I know what you are thinking – “BIG DEAL, those numbers sound pretty good”.  But for a 47-year-old fitness professional who owns a health club, it wasn’t so good.  In fact, I thought it was pretty unacceptable, and I wanted to change it.

But I wanted to see if I could do 2 things:

First, I wanted to lose 10 lbs. (in 10 weeks or less) and secondly, and most importantly to me, I wanted to lose ONLY body fat.  I didn’t want to lose any muscle at all.  Could I do it?

Overall, I did the typical things one should do to achieve this goal…the things I always recommend to all my clients.

• I did Metabolic Strength Circuits 2-3 times a week and
• HIIT (high intensity interval training) 3-4 times a week and
• Monitored my caloric intake with the goal of burning more than I took in – creating a calorie deficit

And it worked, but only for about 3 weeks.  I dropped some weight (mostly body fat) and felt pretty good.  I was hungry a lot but I expected that.  But suddenly, I hit a wall.  At Week 4, no change in weight.  Week 5… I lost 1 lb.  Week 6… nothing.  Stuck again.

So now I am 6 weeks into the Challenge and I’m not hitting my goals.  With 4 weeks to go, I knew I had to change something.  Did I have to try something completely different?

Just as I was scratching my head, wondering what I needed to do to achieve my goals, I remembered that a friend of mine had been raving about this “Bullet Proof Coffee” thing he’d been trying, and how it was supposed to help you lose weight and feel awesome.  So I thought, since the typical approach is not working as fast as I’d like, why not try something totally different?

WHAT I DID 

I decided to give this Bulletproof Coffee a try.  I mean, I drink coffee every morning, so how easy would it be to tweak what I was doing if it was going to work and give me the strength of 10 men…right?

Technically, Bulletproof Coffee is a branded coffee drink consisting of “upgraded” black coffee blended with grass-fed butter and “Brain Octane oil” (a type of medium-chain triglyceride (“MCT”) oil).  The recipe was created by David Asprey after traveling to Tibet and tasting yak-buttered tea drinks (yum!).  He returned to the United States and experimented with buttered drink recipes and published the preparation for his buttered coffee drink on his blog in 2009.  He claims that the drink boosts cognitive performance and weight loss:  drinks made with butter and other forms of fat have been in use for centuries by people from the Himalayas, Ethiopia, Nepal, Vietnam, and Singapore.  Here’s a helpful link.

So, at Week 6 of the Nautilus Challenge, having hit a roadblock with my progress, I decided to try something completely different:  Bulletproof Coffee.  Stay tuned next week to hear about the results of my experimentation and more about being Bulletproof!

Phil Dozois, Owner, Breakthru Fitness