After just over 4 weeks of being on the Carb Nite® Solution Diet I dropped it from my body transformation plan.

In this post I’ll explain why I did that, and what my new plan is.

Before I go any further, I have to say that I am very glad that I tried this diet for 4 weeks, as I learned a lot about my body and especially how it behaves around carb nights.  I am now so much more aware of how my body deals with carb cravings and how it feels when carbs are restored into the diet after days of ultra-low carb eating.

Having said that, let’s dive into some of the reasons I’m dropping this “diet” and what I’m planning to do next.

My Personal Carb Nite® Solution Results

As some of you may have read in my previous posts, I started the Carb Nite® Solution diet on day 5 of my body transformation challenge.  As of that morning I weighed in at 212.2lbs.  My body fat % on that day is unknown as I did not go for my DXA scan until 11 days later, and I don’t trust my bathroom scale readings for body fat anymore so I won’t bother reporting what my scale said that morning.

So, my starting weight on this diet was 212.2lbs and four weeks (28 days) later my weight was 205.0lbs, for a total weight loss of 7.2lbs.

Here is a week by week chart of my weight loss:

	Weight (lbs)	Difference (lbs)
Starting Weight	212.20	0.00
After 1 Week	207.20	-5.00
After 2 Weeks	205.80	-1.40
After 3 Weeks	205.40	-0.40
After 4 Weeks	205.00	-0.40

As you can see from the chart, my biggest weight loss happened in the first week on the diet, when I dropped 5lbs in the first week.  In my second week on the diet my weight loss dropped down to 1.4lbs, and then dropped to 0.4lbs/week for the next two weeks on the diet.

So, if you look at the total loss of 7.2lbs in 4 weeks, the amount is reasonable with an average of 1.8lbs of fat loss per week, which comes out to about 0.25lbs/day average.

However, if you look at the last two weeks, my weight only dropped from 205.8 to 205.0 which comes out to only 0.4lbs/week or 0.05lbs/day average.

Of course just measuring weight is not enough to judge a diet by, because we can’t tell how much of my weight loss is actually coming from fat loss/gain versus how much is coming from lean muscle loss/gain.

The reality may be that perhaps I lost 9lbs (not 7.2lbs) of fat during the 4 weeks on this diet, but perhaps I put on 1.8lbs of muscle which bumped my weight up.  Since my next DXA scan is not for another three weeks or so I can’t tell how my body composition has changed exactly during this time.  Perhaps in the last two weeks my weight hadn’t dropped as much because I was putting on muscle almost as quickly as I was losing fat.

Since I can’t report an accurate starting and ending body fat %, I realize this data is not totally complete, but I wanted to share it with you guys and you can make your own judgments.

My personal opinion is that the results I saw on this diet were not much different than what I’ve been able to accomplish on my own diet in the past.  As some of you may remember from earlier this year, I lost about 15lbs in the last 35days of my weight loss challenge with Tyler Cruz just following my own diet.  Once again, I re-iterate that in neither case do I have accurate body fat % data so I am purely reporting based on weight loss as that is all I have to report.  You guys can interpret the results your own way.

In either case, the reason I dropped the Carb Nite® Solution diet was not mainly due to the slow weight loss results in the last two weeks.  It had a lot more to do with something else.

Fighting My Own Intuition

When I read the Carb Nite® Solution, I was impressed with the in-depth scientific knowledge the author had about dieting.  Having read over 20,000 studies on the subject of weight loss, there is no doubt that Kiefer is an expert in his field.  Everything he talks about in the book makes perfect logical sense, which is why I was willing to give the diet a try even though prior to reading the book I didn’t agree with some of the concepts in it.

However, as I shared with Debby on multiple occasions, I no longer live my life purely based on “scientific proofs”.  I probably never have, but especially in the last five years I have learned to live my life following my intuition more than what scientists say is true based on their interpretations of experiments and studies.

To purely scientifically minded people, it may sound like pure stupidity to listen to a gut feeling over scientific “proof” but that is just how I live my life and so far it has served me well.  I believe in the power of intuition and intention, I believe in the Law of Attraction, I believe in energy healing as well as psychic abilities.  I have these beliefs in my life not because I read about the subjects in books or studies, but rather because I have done insane amounts of personal testing and experimentation in those areas.

If my logical mind tells me one thing, but my intuition is telling me the opposite, I will place my bets on my intuition any day.  It has literally saved my life on multiple occasions already.

The main reason I decided to drop the Carb Nite® Solution diet, was actually the same reason I decided to start it – because my intuition strongly insisted I do so on both counts.

There is some reason my intuition wanted me to get on this diet, and that is why I was attracted to it and jumped on it immediately after reading the book.

However, in the last week or so I began to get this nagging intuitive signal to stop the diet.  In the first few days I dismissed it as just my Ego mind talking, and at first I thought it might just be my mind trying to trip me up because it wanted some donuts or cheesecake or something, and was too impatient to wait for my next carb night.  So I kind of ignored it, and just made sure that I got a donut and some cheesecake for my next carb night – which was this last Wednesday.

What was interesting though is that even after I had my carbs on Wednesday night, including a donut and some cheesecake, I still had this nagging intuitive gut feeling that it’s time to get off this diet.  So by then I knew it wasn’t just my cravings or Ego mind talking.  In fact on Wednesday night, around midnight, I gave myself permission to have any kind of junk food I could ever want.  Even if that meant driving out to the McDonald’s drive through.  I considered it for a few minutes but my body didn’t want any of that.  I had a glass of water with lemon in it and went to bed.

On Thursday, I woke up and tried to go about my regular day after carb night.  I didn’t really eat much, as I didn’t feel hungry at all.  In the early afternoon I had an egg omelet as I knew I had to eat something, but it really didn’t taste good to me at all.  For dinner I made steak and salad, and even though the salad tasted good I really did not enjoy the steak at all.  The whole time I was eating it, my body was saying “Don’t eat this.”

On Friday morning, I once again did not feel like eating so I just had a protein shake but by the time mid-afternoon rolled around I knew I had to eat something.

That’s when it happened.

I went upstairs, opened up the fridge and saw all the different foods I had there which were Carb Nite® Solution friendly and I had everything in there to make a few dozen different types of meals.

I stood there for about 2 minutes, stared at the food in the fridge, and then closed the fridge door with the intuitive thought “I am no longer on this diet.”

There is no real logical reason why.  It’s just what my intuition told me was best for me at this time.

So I listened.

I emailed Debby, letting her know, which I know must have shocked her a bit as at first she probably thought I was giving up on my entire plan.  We exchanged several emails back and forth and had a chat later on in the evening, and I assured her I was just as dedicated to transforming my body as ever, and that I was just dropping this specific diet plan, that’s all.

It was a good experience for me to go on this diet, as it really raised my awareness of my body’s relationships with carbs and of course I did also lose 7.2lbs while on the diet, but now it’s time to move on.

A Few Words About Diets, Lifestyle Changes and Exercise Plans

I had a few interesting conversations about diets with a few people over the last few weeks.  The conversations revolved around the question of whether or not diets work.

I know it has become a common statement for people to say “Don’t go on a diet, because diets don’t work.  What you need to do is change your lifestyle.”

Almost every diet book published today starts off with some form of version of the above statement, right before they teach you their diet!

A diet to me is simply the current eating plan you are on, and to me every single person in the world is always on a diet.

Yes, that’s right, if you’re alive, you’re on some kind of diet.

What a lot of people delude themselves into thinking is that if they aren’t on a diet with a particular label, that they are not on a diet.

Like for example, if you believe you have never been on a diet or if you don’t believe in diets, and you simply just eat the typical North American foods most of us eat, you are on a diet.  You just may not know it.

If you just eat like everyone else in North America, then the diet you are on is called the Standard North American Diet, more commonly known as the Standard American Diet or SAD for short.  The acronym fits it perfectly, because it is a pretty “sad” diet as far as diets go.  I know, because I’ve been on it many times.

Regardless of what you’re eating, you are always on some kind of diet, and whatever that diet is, it is always working.  There is no such thing as a diet that doesn’t work.

All diets work.

All diets produce results.

It’s just that not all of them produce the results we want.

Some diets help us gain fat, while others help us lose fat.  Some diets make us healthy, while others make us sick.

If you take 100,000 people on the SAD diet and put them in a room, an insurance company will be able to predict with amazing accuracy how many of them will suffer a heart attack, and how many will die, based on just a few pieces of information such as age, height and weight of each person.  The results are predictable.  They can’t tell you who will die, but they can tell you how many will die, because the results are so predictable.

So to anyone asking “Do diets really work?“, I say “Of course diets work.  Every diet produces some kind of result.  The trick is to be on the diet that produces the kinds of results you want.”

As for those who say “You don’t need a diet, you need a lifestyle change”, I say “What does that even mean?”

I mean really, what do the words “Lifestyle change” really mean?  It’s so ambiguous, it begins to mean nothing.  If you’re making changes to your daily eating habits, you are changing your diet – period.  You are switching from one type of diet to another.  It’s as simple as that.

Throwing in a statement like “lifestyle change” just complicates things and makes it sound harder and more ambiguous in my opinion.

I prefer to speak in more specific terms so if I’m referring to making changes to my “food plan”, I refer to that as my “diet”.  If I’m referring to making changes to how/when/if I exercise, I refer to that as my “exercise plan”.

Incidentally, just as everyone is always on some kind of diet, everyone is also always on some kind of exercise plan.  Even if your exercise plan is to never exercise, that is still a plan.  It’s a plan to not exercise.

My New Plan, The Paulymath Diet and Exercise Plan

Shortly after making the decision to drop the Carb Nite® Solution diet, I spent some time in meditation over what I will do next.

I am determined to transform my body, so I know that if I get rid of one plan I have to immediately replace it with another plan, otherwise I’ll just fall back to the “default” plan I’ve been following for most of my life.

Meaning, if I drop the Carb Nite® Solution diet and I don’t replace it with another diet, I’ll just end up falling back into following the SAD diet.  That’s just what happens.

When we don’t have a plan (diet) we always just follow the default case, and the default case in North America is the SAD diet.  That is why more than 60% of us are obese.

While in meditation, I asked my Higher Self “What diet should I now follow?  Should I got back to the pH Miracle Diet I have followed before, or should I ask Debby to design a diet for me, or will I attract some kind of new diet/plan I haven’t heard of yet?”

The answer I got was that I should now follow my own diet.

At first this kind of scared be a bit as I thought about whether or not I trust my own qualifications to create and put together a diet for me to follow and then I realized that I’m more than qualified to do this.

I’ve spent the last 10 years studying, testing and experimenting with almost every popular diet that has come out in the last 30 years.  I’ve got every diet book on my book shelf from Atkins to The Zone.

I also have a diploma in Advanced Nutrition, and Vegetarian Nutrition from Alive Academy and am a Certified Sports Nutrition Consultant (CSNC).

Nutrition isn’t something I just started learning about last month.  It’s something I’ve passionately studied, researched, experimented with and invested a decade of my life and a lot of money into.

Couple that with my intuitive connection to my body, and I now realize that there isn’t a person on this planet more qualified to put together a diet plan for me than myself.

Of course I’m still very much interested in learning from others, studying all the newest research, and will probably continue to read the newest diet books that come out to learn about their theories, but instead of following any one specific authors diet, I will now learn from them and integrate that which makes sense into my own diet – which I have labeled as the Paulymath Diet for now.

I have already begun putting the first version of the Paulymath Diet in place as I work on getting totally clear on what it will be exactly, and will cover this more in future blog posts.

I have also toyed with the idea of creating a membership portal where I could share exactly what the Paulymath Diet is and provide resources such as videos, plans, tracking sheets, ebooks/reports, workbooks etc. to its members, as well as establishing a community of people to share their insights and experiences.

Of course I realize that I haven’t even established what the Paulymath Diet even is yet, but assuming it produces positive results for me, would anyone be interested in something like that?

One thing I know for sure is that the Paulymath Diet is going to be a lot more than just about what to eat, what macronutrient percentages to follow, or whether or not to count calories.  There are plenty of resources online to hear many different (and often opposing) theories on all of those things.  What I really think is missing out there though is a diet that integrates the psychology, personal development, and even the more spiritual/intuitive aspects of eating healthy.

That is one area of dieting where I think I can contribute a lot of insights from personal experience.

I asked my dog Zoe what she thought of the idea.  She seemed to like it.

Either that or she was just thinking “Did you say food?“