DON’T Try The Bulletproof Diet

As with any fitness trend, the Bulletproof Diet is making headlines and for seemingly good reason. Creator, Dave Asprey, supposedly developed this diet over the course of 15 years and $300,000 invested. The core ideal of this diet is that by increasing your body’s performance to its peak, you can achieve better weight loss, more concentration, and overall happiness. While this is generally true, his boasts of helping you achieve this include drinking a concoction in lieu of breakfast daily. However, I urge you: don’t try The Bulletproof Diet. Allow me to tell you exactly what is in the concoction you’ll be consuming daily.

Coffee and butter.

That’s right, the Bulletproof Diet consists of drinking Asprey’s invention, Bulletproof Coffee, which consists of 2 cups of coffee, two tablespoons of “grass fed, unsalted butter”, and a tablespoon of MCT (medium-chain triglyceride) oil. If you’re having trouble understanding what the immediate problem is, then please read our post on butter alternatives to understand our beef with butter. However, for the sake of this article, let’s dive right in.

To begin, Coffee, at its best, is a negative calorie creator. That means, drinking coffee actually burns calories since it boosts your metabolic rate and fat loss initially. Over time, your body becomes used to it and the losses become gains. This is partially due to your body realizing caffeine as a necessity and, for anyone who has suffered from caffeine dependency, it ends up being a bear to get from under. Now imagine drinking two cups of coffee in the morning, of course this would do what I mentioned above in a bigger way, but it also DOUBLES the amount of caffeine most of us consume before work.

Next, we add in the butter, which according to Asprey, will curb your appetite as it’s rich in omega 3 fats and the usual benefits of butter. We all know better. Beyond this, the MCT oil is actually legitimate as there have been some case studies performed suggesting a link between fat burning and daily consumption of this or coconut oil. What is confusing though is that after your breakfast coffee, he urges dieters to add extra fat to the rest of their meals and no longer avoid red meat or high fat yielding foods.

That is where I have to return to the title of this article and once again reiterate: don’t try the bulletproof diet, it does not work. Our bodies are specially made to balance enzymes, fats, and other liquids on a daily basis. However, when we introduce a foreign object into it, our bodies react violently and quickly. So, imagine you’ve been dieting for a long time and you begin the BF diet and the first day you introduce DOUBLE the caffeine, a huge amount of unsaturated fat, and 400+ calories in a single drink. Your body will immediately react with, you guessed it, weight gain.

For that day, you’ll feel great because you’ve grabbed a lot of things your body wants. However, coffee is also a diuretic and increases the amount of water needed to drink daily to counteract the amount of liquids lost. But, more importantly, you haven’t gained any nutrition or protein yet. Remember that important part of eating right that keeps your muscles running? Instead of having a few eggs and coffee or possibly oatmeal mixed with protein powder, you only had two cups of coffee. Not having sufficient protein during breakfast regardless of how full you feel, will eventually backfire. When you obtain a good amount of protein that early, it sets the pace for the day and you feel more full than you will consuming just fat and butter that will be expelled within hours of consuming “Bulletproof” Coffee.

In an active lifestyle (4-5 workouts a week or equal exertion), eating higher fats or meats will be fine. Your body is burning fat faster than you can consume it typically and drinking this coffee probably wouldn’t curb your hunger to begin with. This would become an addition to your daily protein shake and not in lieu of it. However, for those the diet is targeting with less active lifestyles (0 – 2 workouts a week or equal exertion), this diet will have the opposite effect AND get you hooked to caffeine within a month of doing the diet. You will sing its praises for the first week and then curse its existence a few weeks later since when you miss a day of drinking it, your attitude, health, and general disposition will be completely messed up.

Again, don’t try the Bulletproof diet. While it’s great on paper, any time you see “an easy no worries” diet out there, it usually doesn’t work for people who are actually looking for this kind of thing. The best way to really begin to lose weight is to start increasing the amount of water you consume daily, then look into finding more ways to find activity that fits around your schedule. Shortcuts don’t exist in the fitness world and when they pop up, chances are they’ll end up hurting you far more than they help you.

I hope this was informative for anyone curious about this diet and until next time, think healthy, be healthy!