Muscle for Life with Mike Matthews - The Military Diet: What 25 Studies Say About Losing 10 Pounds in 7 Days

Episode Date: November 25, 2019

Aside from the basic military diet meal plan and eating schedule (which we’ll go over in a moment), there’s no official military diet and the recommendations and rules vary based on who you ask. Furthermore, there’s no fitness guru claiming credit for the military diet. There’s no diet book promoting its eating principles. There’s no official website on the diet and the main argument thrown around in its favor is the rumor that Khloe Kardashian used it to lose weight . . . at some point . . . maybe. Despite this dubious track record, it’s still wildly popular, as evidenced by the 150,000 people who search for it every month online. Some of the appeal is understandable, too. Like many weight loss diets it has an attractive schtick: You only have to follow the military diet meal plan 3 days per week. You can still enjoy some normal foods while following the diet. You don’t have to follow the diet forever to lose weight. You can lose “up to 10 pounds per week.” You don’t have to exercise. What are the downsides, then? For starters, the meal plan you’re supposed to follow looks like the diet of a famished racoon rooting through a restaurant dumpster. There’s no rhyme or reason to any of the food choices, and it’s almost as if someone threw them together purely to troll people who don’t know any better. For example, dinner on the third day of the diet is 1 cup of tuna, ½ a banana, and 1 cup of vanilla ice cream. The meals are also designed to provide no more than 1,000 calories per day for the first 3 days of the diet, and the other 4 days of the week you’re allowed no more than 1,500 calories. If you aren’t familiar with what 1,500 calories looks like, that’s very little food—about half as much as most people eat. That being what it is, there’s a groundswell of dieters eager to learn more about the military diet and plenty of vloggers, influencers, and other bush-league diet gurus happy to spread the gospel. You probably know enough about dieting, though, to be skeptical. In fact, I’ll wager a hotdog and half cup of vanilla ice cream that you have a lot of questions about the military diet, such as . . . Why is it called the military diet? What are you supposed to eat on the military diet? Will the military diet actually help me lose 10 pounds of fat in a week? And more. You’ll learn the answers to all of t

A quick bit of exciting news before we start. My sports nutrition company, Legion Athletics, is going to be holding its biggest sale of the year in a couple days, starting on Wednesday, the 27th. This is our annual Black Friday and Cyber Monday sale. And what that means is that for a few days, you're going to be able to save up to 30% on everything in our store over at legionathletics.com. That's L-E-G-I-O-N athletics.com, including our protein powders, our protein bars, our pre-workout and post-workout supplements, fat burners, multivitamins, joint support, and all the rest. And as you will see come Wednesday, everything in the store is going to be marked down 5% to 15%. And then when you enter the code FRIDAY19, numerals 1-9,

at checkout, you're going to save another 15%. So if you like what I'm doing here on the podcast and elsewhere, and if you would like to help me do more of it, if you'd like to help me help more people get into the best shape of their lives as well, then please do support Legion Athletics this Wednesday when our big Black Friday sale kicks off. Hello, friend. How would you like to lose 10 pounds in the next seven days without having to exercise at all? How would you like to follow the little-known diet that celebrities and soldiers use to lose weight fast? Well, that's the pitch of the military diet, which is getting a lot of attention these days, and which is strangely named because we actually don't know where the idea even came from. No

military that we know of uses this diet for anything whatsoever. No government recommends it. It looks like it's just yet another marketing gimmick, which of course is no surprise. But regardless, this diet is out there and a lot of people are searching for it, are doing it, and are reporting success with it. And so should you try it? Well, the first thing you should know is there's nothing inherently special about this diet. It's just a low calorie, you could even say very low calorie diet that entails eating about 1,000 calories three days a week, and then no more than 1,500 calories four days a week. And you're supposed to alternate between the low calorie days and the higher calorie days. The idea here is that you just use this to reach your goal

and then you go back to normal eating. This is not supposed to be some long-term diet or sustainable diet. It's very unsustainable. And that's kind of the point because drastic measures can produce drastic results. Another thing that many people find appealing about the military diet is you don't have to exercise because you are not eating very much food. So you're creating a rather large calorie deficit regardless of whether you exercise or not. And that's why there are people out there who can lose five, six, seven, eight, not even 10 pounds in their first week. Now that's not going to be all fat. Remember that a lot of that is going to be water and glycogen, which is a form of carbohydrate that's stored in your liver and in your muscles. And that is vacated when you

dramatically drop your carbs, which you're going to have to do on the military diet. So while losing a fair amount of weight, just poundage in the first week can be appealing, remember that's not fat. Of course, you are going to lose fat in that first week and you are going to lose more fat on the military diet than you would on a more reasonable diet that doesn't have you more or less starving yourself. But there are some consequences that we'll get to in a minute. First, however, I just want to give you an idea of what eating is like on the military diet. So here is day one. This would be a low calorie day. So for your breakfast, we have one half of a grapefruit. We have a slice of toast, two tablespoons of peanut butter, a cup of black

coffee or tea for a total of 327 calories. That's it for breakfast. Now we move on to lunch, which is one half of a cup of tuna, a slice of toast and another cup of coffee. That's it. Total calories, 211. And then we move on to dinner, which is just three ounces of any lean meat. And that would be raw. I'm assuming a cup of green beans, one small apple and one cup of vanilla ice cream. That's a, I wouldn't, I wouldn't recommend the vanilla ice cream. If you're only eating this many calories, I'd recommend to take that 274 calories. It's a lot, a lot, it's ice cream and use it on vegetables instead. But regardless, that's a dinner of 523 calories for a total intake of 1,061 calories for the day.

Now, the next couple of days on this plan are similar. They have some different food choices, like we have some cheddar cheese here. We have some hot dogs. Again, not what I'd recommend, but there's always that vanilla ice cream, but it's more or less the same thing. Not a lot of food. And so the idea then is you starve yourself a couple of days of the week, and then you can eat quote unquote, whatever you want on the other days, but no more than 1500 calories of whatever you want. So that's still pretty restrictive. If you go into Excel, fire up your favorite calorie counting website and check out what 1500 calories is like, especially of foods that would qualify as whatever you want. You're going to quickly learn that you can't eat that much of any of those foods. All right. So who should

follow the military diet? Anybody? I'd say most people shouldn't, but if you need to lose weight quickly and health be damned, because you're not going to mess yourself up in a week or two, or even three, possibly four of something like this. If you do it for too long, you will, then I understand why it's appealing and it wouldn't be entirely unadvisable, I suppose, because you are going to drop a fair amount of weight for sure on this diet. But remember that it's not going to be exclusively fat. A lot of that weight is going to be water and glycogen, be exclusively fat. A lot of that weight is going to be water and glycogen, like I mentioned earlier. And keep in mind that your body can only lose fat so quickly because there are physiological processes that need to occur to turn that body fat into usable energy and to burn it and eventually

exhale it. For most people, that limit is a couple pounds a week, two, maybe three. For leaner people, it's probably around one without sacrificing a lot of muscle at least. And in people who are quite overweight, maybe four pounds a week is probably a ceiling, possibly five. And so again, keep in mind that when you follow the military diet, possibly five. And so again, keep in mind that when you follow the military diet, while you might like what you're seeing on the scale, that is not going to be all fat. Only maybe 30% of it at most is going to be fat. The rest will be water, glycogen, and food weight too, I should mention. Because remember, when you are generally eating more food, that means that you generally have more food in your body that's being processed. And of course, that weighs something. You reduce your food intake, you are generally going to have

less food in your body, and that equals a lower average body weight. And as the military diet is not sustainable over the long term, not even over the long term of what it would take to maybe lose the weight that you want to lose. If you're like the average person that I hear from, you probably want to lose anywhere from 15 to 30 pounds. And this is not the way to do that. 15 pounds, 15 to 30 pounds of fat in particular, this is not the way to do that. You will absolutely suffer trying to lose that much fat on the military diet. And you are going to end up losing a fair amount of muscle as well. And especially if you're not exercising and not training your muscles, which is going to be quite difficult to do if you're following this diet because you're eating

so little food. Hey, before we continue, if you like what I'm doing here on the podcast and elsewhere, and if you want to help me help more people get into the best shape of their lives, please consider checking out my VIP one-on-one coaching service. circumstances and needs. So no matter how complicated or maybe even hopeless you might think your situation is, we will figure out how to get you the results you want. Every diet and training program we create is 100% custom. We provide daily workout logs and we do weekly accountability calls. Our clients get priority email service, as well as discounts on supplements, and the list goes on and on. To learn more, just head over to legionathletics.com slash coaching. And if you like what you see, schedule your free consultation call. Now there's normally a wait list to work with our coaches and new slots do fill up very quickly. So if this sounds even remotely interesting

to you, head over to legionathletics.com slash coaching now and schedule your free consultation call. And let's see if our program is a good fit for you. And so where does that leave us? Well, the military diet again can be useful if you just need to quickly lose some weight, maybe for an event that is coming up. Or if you want to jumpstart your cut and just get a nice boost of motivation, see that scale drop a bit, lose a couple handfuls of fat in the first couple of weeks, and then switch to something that is more sustainable and more sensible. Now, what does that look like? Something more sensible and more sustainable? Well, there are a few points. One is I recommend you use an

aggressive but not reckless calorie deficit. So something around 20%, eating 20, maybe 25% fewer calories than you're burning every day, as opposed to with the military diet. as opposed to with the military diet. If you are the average woman, you're maybe gaining, you're maybe burning anywhere from, I don't know, 1800 to 2000 calories a day, especially if you're, if you're exercising, if you're not, it might be a bit lower. And so when you're eating a thousand calories a day, you might be eating a half of what you're burning. That might be a 50 or even 40 or even 30% calorie deficit. And that's extreme. That's too much. So again, I recommend you keep it aggressive, but not extreme, 20-ish percent. And if 20% is too tough on you, then make it 15. If you feel totally fine on 20%,

you can push it up a little bit to 25% and speed up fat loss a little bit. And you shouldn't really find it any more difficult than 20%. You shouldn't notice anything in the way of muscle loss or any major impact to your training any more than 20%. Another key point is eating enough protein because that is going to help your body retain muscle. It's going to speed up fat loss. It's going to keep you fuller. And how much is enough? Somewhere around one gram of protein per pound of body weight per day when cutting is optimal. Now, if that puts your protein intake too high, so let's say if you're a guy at 20% body fat or above, So let's say if you're a guy at 20% body fat or above, or if you're a woman at 30% or above, I would recommend that you just switch to about 40% of your daily calories from protein.

I also recommend that you do plenty of resistance training. So if you're like most people, you have maybe three to six hours per week to exercise, use 80% of that time training your muscles. And if you want to get the most out of training your muscles, focus on heavy compound weight lifting. Focus on working with weights that are, let's say, at or above 70 to 75% of your one rep max and doing a lot of exercises that involve multiple joints and multiple muscle groups, squats, deadlifts, bench presses, overhead presses, barbell rows, and so forth. I also recommend that you do some cardio if you want to maximize fat loss, but not too much. So let's cap it at two hours a week of cardio so you can minimize muscle loss and interference with

your resistance training. And if you want to get the most fat loss out of that, do high intensity interval training so long as it doesn't beat you up too much. For HIIT, I very much prefer biking or rowing because they're low impact and research shows that in the case of biking in particular, it has likely the least amount of interference effect with your resistance training. Now, if you don't like HIIT or if you can't do it for one reason or another, that's totally fine. You can do low intensity steady state, but again, just don't do more than a couple hours a week. And last is you should consider adding a couple supplements to help you lose fat faster.

Most fat loss supplements, supposed fat loss supplements don't work, but there are a couple that have been shown to work quite well, and they are caffeine, sinephrine, and yohimbine. If you want to learn more about those in particular, just head over to legionathletics.com and search for each of them separately. And you'll find long form articles that I've written on each that explain how they speed up fat loss. And in the case of caffeine and sinephrine, how they work synergistically. My sports nutrition company, Legion Athletics is going to be holding its biggest sale of the year in a couple days, starting on Wednesday the 27th. This is our annual Black Friday and Cyber Monday sale. And what that means is that for a few days, you're going to be able to save up to 30% on everything in our store over at legionathletics.com. That's L-E-G-I-O-N-athletics.com, including our protein powders, our protein bars, our pre-workout and post-workout supplements,

fat burners, multivitamins, joint support, and all the rest. And as you will see come Wednesday, everything in the store is going to be marked down 5 to 15%. And then when you enter the code Friday, 19 numerals, one nine at checkout, you're going to save another 15%. So if you like what I'm doing here on the podcast and elsewhere, and if you would like to help me do more of it, if you'd like to help me help more people get into the best shape of their lives as well, then please do support Legion Athletics this Wednesday when our big Black Friday sale kicks off. All right, well, that's it for today's episode. I hope you found it interesting and helpful. And if you did and you don't mind doing me a favor, could you

please leave a quick review for the podcast on iTunes or wherever you are listening from? Because those reviews not only convince people that they should check out the show, they also increase the search visibility and help more people find their way to me and to the podcast and learn how to build their best body ever as well. And of course, if you want to be notified when the next episode goes live, then simply subscribe to the podcast and whatever app you're using to listen, and you will not miss out on any of the new stuff that I have coming. And last, if you didn't like something about the show, then definitely shoot me an email at mike at muscleforlife.com and share your thoughts. Let me know how you think I could do this better. I read every email myself and I'm always looking

for constructive feedback. All right. Thanks again for listening to this episode and I hope to hear from you soon.