Why you could totally eat crap on Christmas day

December 21, 2012 · 25 comments

a pile of junk food including donuts and cookies with a red and yellow background

art by Jen TheMeister

If you read the blog very much, you know that I am totally opposed to the Tim Ferris style re-feed day where you eat whatever kind of crap you want once a week. The toxins, gluten, and bad fats in that will sabotage you for at least four or five more days, so you never really feel bulletproof.

Your cognitive function will suffer, even if you do manage to lose weight. My last post was about how to avoid temptation over the holidays. This post is a little bit more radical.

But what if you did it once a year? It turns out that there is a good reason to do that if you are already bulletproof, or even if you’re only part way on the way to having huge amounts of energy and focus at your beck and call. And there is good reason to do it on Christmas Day. I recommend that when you wake up, start with Bulletproof coffee so you can have an amazing morning opening presents with family and doing family activities. But then, if you are going to go off the rails at all, it’s time.

Eat the waffles. With the fruitcake. Douse it in canned whipped cream food product. Smear some margarine on something. Eat the cake bought at some large grocery store or Costco. Make sure you get enough mycotoxins by drinking beer, red wine, and maybe some eggnog made from a mix of industrial chemicals. Make sure that at least one item has MSG and another item has NutraSweet or aspartame. I’m actually not kidding about any of this, believe it or not.

Be sure to pay close attention as you’re eating. Does it really taste as good as you thought it would? Probably not, unless it has MSG in it.  How do you feel while you’re eating it?

The reason you may want to consider doing this comes the morning of December 26, when you wake up, and you feel like you’ve been hit by a truck. A truck full of zombies. The word zombie won’t even begin to describe how you feel, especially compared to how you felt the day before you ate all that crap. This is a slap in the face to your biochemistry and your nervous system, and it will serve you for months as a reminder about why you eat the Bulletproof diet on a regular, daily basis.

Because you don’t want to feel like this anymore.

It is so easy to get used to feeling good and having lots of resilience, that sometimes we forget how bad those once tempting foods actually make us feel. After a few “give in to temptation” days like this, you will teach your reptilian brain that those items you used to salivate over are not actually food.

And that will be the end of cravings for bad food. You will have a headache, you will feel bloated, you’ll probably clear the room with the gas you produce from your formerly healthy digestive system. All of this is just fine because you’ll learn a lesson and the lower level parts of your nervous system will also learn the lesson. No one craves getting beaten with a baseball bat, and that is how poor diet will make you feel.

Christmas is the best time to do this because you usually have downtime between Christmas and New Year’s when you don’t have to be that productive, and many people will feel like crap for several days after abusing their biochemistry this way.

And best of all, Christmas is right before New Year’s, which is when you make your New Year’s resolution. It’s so much easier to stick to a resolution to eat Bulletproof when you know what it’s like when you don’t!

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  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Christopher-Walker/691724777 Christopher Walker

    Definitely a great point Dave. I’m also against the weekly justified-binge but the one day per year to remind yourself how good it feels to eat well all year is a good idea. Plus it’s fun to enjoy some of the foods that you otherwise never even see for the rest of the year like the fruit cakes and family recipes. Good post thanks!@facebook-691724777:disqus

    • Paul N

      Keep in mind that the primary purpose of the “cheat day” was actually a “carb re-feed” on an otherwise low carb, ketogenic diet. The carb day helps to restore leptin sensitivity, and also provides starches for things like intestinal mucosa.

      So, there is actually a real purpose, and it can be achieved by eating “safe starches” (i.e. low/no toxin starches), like potatoes, sweet potatoes, white rice, tapioca and so on (no gluten or soy or corn, of course)

      So, eat a “real food” carb day, and you’ll do better. Eat a garbage carb day, and well, you’ll feel like garbage.

  • Greg Sandsonni

    Wait, what? There are mycotoxins in beer and wine? Merry Christmas to you to jerky

  • Andrea

    Oh gross noooo. I want to feel good on my vacation.

  • LaMotta

    Well I can’t do this, sadly … I’m so gluten intolerant that if I “go off the rails” my gut swells up significantly, and if extreme enough, it pushes on and it twists my spine out of place, dislocating my sacrum up through L4 or L5. Occasionally the effect is so bad I cannot walk until getting a chiropractor to “fix” things.

    So, I’ll pass ;)

  • http://www.6packsuccess.com/ Victor Dorfman

    I agree that the Cheat Day is pretty whack for folks eating well ALREADY. I advocate in my book though, because people coming off a SAD diet are going to binge one way or another.

    And planning it packs all the nastiness into one day, which helps breed awareness of how badly your body actually hates these cheat foods.

    But the more paleo/epi-paleo/bulletproof/primal whatever you want to call it you become, the more disgusting cheat days feel.

    No affiliation but if you’re going to cheat with sweets, Hail Merry makes relatively low sugar treats with coconut oil, almond butter and other primal stuff without gluten or soy or any of that crap. The one in the pic is my fav: ;-)

    • Abright

      I <3 Hail Merrys. When people ask me what to do about their inner cake monster, after long list of psychology tips, I say "If you really must feed cake monster, go with Hail Merrys."

  • Jack117
  • Terrence Chan

    Well, the poison is in the dose. I don’t need to gorge on a bunch of grains/bread, sugar, omega 6s, etc. to know I will feel like crap if I do it. But I also know my body well enough to know that if I have one small slice of cake, it won’t bother me that much.

    I eat well because it improves my quality of life, not to be a meticulous fanatic. This post has a bit of a religious fervor to it, like you should sin so you realize how much your god loves you for forgiving your sin.

    • Nathan

      Except this is based on science, so the religious thing is a false equivalence. The point is that if you eat clean and then introduce a bunch of shit to your system it effects how you feel, and that likely will effect your cravings for those foods.

  • Jack117

    Mr. Asprey,

    Do you need to do anything special to preserve the 5lb bags of bulletproof coffee? If I open it and then close the top by rolling it and putting pegs on it, will that keep the coffee good or will it cause problems?
    Thanks,

    • Nathan

      That should be ok but I’d keep whatever you’re not going to immediately use in the freezer,

      • Jack117

        What would happen if you didn’t keep it in the freezer? I’ve had the bag for the past 4 weeks and have just been closing it with pegs and keeping it in a cupboard.

        • Nathan

          Nothing necessarily keeping it in the freezer just keeps it fresher and decreases the likelihood of toxins developing.

        • Jack117

          Thanks.

  • Xina Lynn

    I volunteer with tons of people on medical needs diets (preferably the Paleo AIP) due to autoimmune disease, including Celiac’s, which I have myself. I eat so clean that I feel fantastic and would almost consider myself cured. I would NEVER cheat and put my body through that crap, no matter how bad a random craving might get. I’d rather keep fighting those cravings than spend a month with a gluten migraine or sugar neuropathy. But I do run into people that give into their cravings all the time, and I often wonder how many times they’re going to do that before they learn their lesson. I don’t think that lesson is worth the fallout and wouldn’t wish that on or recommend it for anyone, especially someone with health problems, but I agree that if you’re going to cheat, do it when you have time off from work!

  • Sam

    The logic is a little faulty… people suffer terrible hangovers from the over-consumption of alcohol all the time, and yet they still manage to hit the bottle just as hard the next weekend. I don’t think humans are as logical as you think… we seem to enjoy the suffering!

  • http://www.facebook.com/jake.severin Jake Daniel Severin

    I’ve read about MMA nutrition coaches allow a cheat day in the form of letting the fighter eat something like spaghetti once a week, which I think is more for comfort than anything else!

  • Curt B

    Despite the junk food, eating a pastured bacon wrapped holiday wreath would satisfy arbitrary junk cravings ! My best guess is that you’ll wake up feeling a little more energized then a lumpy stew of cake batter.

    • Dave Asprey

      Lol!

  • http://www.facebook.com/greglnelson Greg Nelson

    I didn’t read this post until now and ate what everyone else was having at Christmas (minus gluten), mostly to be polite. I sure felt it, especially eating sweet treats and crashing soon afterwards. Mo’ suga’, mo’ problems. I’m more committed than ever to eating Bulletproof and working to get my family to try and stick with it.

  • Michael A

    I follow a modified paleo diet that’s similar to the Bulletproof diet. I can tell you that growing up and into my mid twenties I fell ill about once a month. After starting paleo I did not get sick once until I cheated on Christmas! After six months of paleo and not getting sick once, I contracted strept on December 26th after spending Christmas eating poorly and surrounded by sick children. I am always around sick children, however, so I assume it was the combination of sickness and bad diet. It wasn’t worth it! Needless to say I’ll be sticking to paleo next Christmas.

  • TrueDA

    This is completely in line with what I currently do, interestingly, I react the same way, I wake up feeling bloated, crappy and wishing I hadn’t made the decision to eat that way the prior day. In the end, I enjoyed it during the day, but it certainly did not derail me from my newfound lifestyle of >65% animal fat carb/bean/grain and especially gluten-free freedom. True to form Dave.

  • JR

    I actually understand the rationale. I used to love Pizza. I mean love it. And then one day I noticed that after I had a few slices I’d get bloated, brain fog, my entire system would slow down. This was especially deadly at work on Pizza day. I would just shut down. I have the same issue with processed foods. Use to love frozen dinners and fast food until one day I threw up for three hours after eating our favorite Mexican fast food (you know the one). I could probably name quite a number of things these days that affect me that way. But when you haven’t had something in a long time you start kidding yourself about the effect it has on you. So… last week, I had some pizza, a bear claw (the cheap ones) and a coke and a variety of little snacks we had around the house because my daughter was home from school.
    The next morning I woke up sick as a dog, I mean sick. Nauseous, diarrhea, and brain dead. I can’t even look at pizza now. If it wasn’t for a 100mg Provigil, I probably wouldn’t have remembered my name. Every once in a while, maybe once a year, sometimes longer I’ll remember smoking and I start craving it and so I’ll have one and then I feel like total crap for a few hours after, stomach turning, headache. That feeling sticks with me for a long time after. You can literally train yourself to do a cheat day once a week, your body will just adapt, but surprise yourself every once in a while with something bad and you remember real fast why you left it. Not for everyone of course. Depends on how you handle your habits and addictions. Of course, I wouldn’t recommend it with heroin or booze (that would be insane), but we’re talking about cupcakes and crap food here. Hard, but not impossible. And some of us just need to be reminded once in a while why we gave it up in the first place.

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