Singer Adele is said to have lost 45 kilos with a revolutionary new diet. Of course, all diet creators say it's new and it really works, but if we can believe Adele, it does work really well. Lose 3.5 kilos in a week without hunger, who wouldn't want that?
The Sirtfood Diet promises optimal fat burning and promises that you lose weight quickly and healthily without losing muscle. That almost sounds too good to be true, but the authors, Aiden Goggins and Glen Matten, aren't the best. One is a doctor with a degree in nutritional medicine, the other is a pharmacist and nutritionist. They have a huge fan base, including many elite athletes. Because what is striking in the book is that they have not only conducted research with people who are very overweight, but also with athletes who wanted more muscle building and more energy.
The Sirtfood Diet promises that in the first week you will lose 3.5 kilos and build about 900 grams of muscle mass. After that first week, there are two more weeks to learn the basics of eating Sirtfood and after that it goes 'automatically'.
The diet is based on 'sirtuins'. They are enzymes that are involved in all kinds of physiological processes in your body. Among other things, in regulating your insulin synthesis, muscle maintenance and fat burning. Are you still following it?
In Jip-en-Janneke language, the Sirtfood diet make sure you eat certain nutrients that are full of these substances. And with a few simple adjustments, you can get those substances in on a regular basis.
It is known that when you fast for a longer period of time or regularly, these enzymes in your body - the sirtuins - become extra active. These enzymes stimulate your metabolism, clear things up a bit (to stay in Jip-en-Janneke language) and in this way would even have a life-prolonging effect.
A period of fasting activates the sirtuins in your body. That is why intermittent fasting – where, for example, you fast for 16 hours a day and eat in a time window of 8 hours a day – is so popular. Those who fast regularly have an increased activity of sirtuins in the body. The sirtfood diet is based on this, but without the fasting. By getting the enzymes through certain nutrients, you are actually fooling the body. It is fasting without fasting and with the same effect on your health.
The Sirtfood Diet consists of three phases.
The authors of the Sirtfood diet promise rapid weight loss in the first week. And to help you with that, they also indicate exactly what you should eat and drink for the first week. The green smoothies – as we learned – are not particularly tasty, but so green that the health splashes out. Every recipe has a vegan or vegetarian option, which is nice. The recipes for the main meals are excellent and filling. You can also drink coffee and tea all day long, because they are also full of sirtuins. With a calorie intake of just 1,000 calories in the first three days and 1,500 calories in the following days, it's no wonder you're losing weight. But is it also sustainable?
In addition to Adele, the creators of the diet can also count Olympic athletes as their fans and Lorraine Pascale, TV chef at the BBC. She calls the diet "A no-nonsense diet that makes you lose a lot of weight and that is incredibly good for health. Aidan and Glen show how everyone can benefit from the sirt food diet by eating delicious food. I'm a huge fan!' And Adele, who is getting slimmer, is of course also a great example of the fact that the diet can be followed.
The question, of course, is which foods have a high sirtuin content. These are mainly plant-based foods † Lots of leafy greens such as arugula, kale, and celery. Herbs such as basil, flat-leaf parsley, celery and lovage (maggi). Dates, berries and strawberries, walnuts, cashew nuts, dark chocolate (85%, not 90!), buckwheat, red wine, olive oil, red onions, turmeric, capers, red peppers, coffee and green tea. The diet also recommends fatty fish (herring, sardines, mackerel – in that order), as well as chicken, egg and turkey.
The diet may initially sound like another successful diet where you eat little and continue on character until you can't stand it anymore and call the pizza line. The reason the Santé editors are convinced of the success is mainly due to the promise that you will not lose muscle mass. As can be read in the book:
“Normally when people lose weight, they lose some fat, but they also lose muscle; that happens with just about every other diet out there to date. So, if someone loses 3.2 kg in one week on the scale by 'draining' normally, you can assume that at least 900 grams of that consists of muscle. So that's exactly what we expected when we measured the body composition of our participants. When those results started to trickle in, we were surprised to see a startling outcome. While a weight loss of 3.2 kg on the scale was common, there was something else that happened much more often. For 64 percent of the participants in our study, the weight loss on the scale initially seemed more disappointing than this, although their weight loss of just over 2.3 kg was still impressive. But when we measured their body composition, we were completely stunned. The muscle mass in these participants had not only remained the same, it had even increased. The average muscle gain for this group was almost 900 g, which was a so-called "weight loss after taking into account muscle growth" of 3.2 kg. We will see that this is an infinitely more beneficial way of losing weight than losing both fat and muscle.
This was a remarkable finding, especially considering that the combination of mild calorie restriction and no additional exercise would be disastrous for muscle maintenance under normal circumstances. There had to be another explanation for this astonishing result:sirtfoods' powerful metabolic effects. Sirtfoods can not only activate fat burning, they also stimulate the growth and maintenance and repair of muscles. Our sirtfood-rich diet therefore ensured that the participants lost fat, without losing muscle mass as an additional adverse effect.
You may be wondering why this is so important. First, it means you look much better. Losing fat but preserving muscle leads to a more attractive, muscular and athletic figure. And more importantly, you also keep looking good. Skeletal muscles are the most important factor for our body's daily energy expenditure. That means the more muscle you have, the more energy you burn, even at rest. In most diets, weight loss consists of fat loss and muscle loss and we see that the metabolism is clearly slower. This prepares the body for weight gain when more normal eating habits are resumed. But by maintaining your muscle mass with sirtfoods, you burn more fat, while your metabolism hardly slows down. This provides the perfect basis for successful long-term weight loss.”
