The Sirtfood Diet is the Newest and Latest Strategy for Heath, Nutrition, and Weight Loss.
The Sirtfood Diet is the new way to shift weight quickly without radical dieting by activating the same ‘skinny gene’ pathways usually just induced by exercise and fasting. Certain foods contain chemicals called polyphenols that put mild stress on our cells, turning on genes that mimic the effects of fasting and exercise. Foods are rich in polyphenols-including kale, dark chocolate, and red wine-trigger the sirtuin pathways that impact metabolism, aging, and mood. A diet rich in these sirtfoods kick-starts weight loss without sacrificing muscle while maintaining optimal health.
Add healthy sirtfoods to your diet for effective and sustained weight loss, incredible energy, and glowing health. Switch on your body’s fat-burning powers, supercharge weight loss, and help stave off disease with this easy-to-follow diet developed by the experts in nutritional medicine who proved the impact of sirtfoods. Dark chocolate, coffee, kale – these are all foods that activate sirtuins and switch on the so-called ‘skinny gene’ pathways in the body. The Sirtfood Diet gives you a simple, healthy way of eating for weight loss, delicious easy-to-make recipes, and a maintenance plan for prolonged success. The Sirtfood Diet is a diet of inclusion, not exclusion, and sirtfoods are widely available and affordable. This is a diet that encourages you to pick up your knife and fork and enjoy eating delicious healthy food while seeing the health and weight-loss benefits.
HOW IT WORKS
The diet has two easy-to-follow phases:
PHASE 1 This lasts for seven days. During the first three days, you should have three sirtfood green juices and one full meal rich in sirtfoods – a total of 1,000 calories. On days four to seven, you should increase your calorie intake to 1,500 by having two green juices and two meals daily.
PHASE 2 This 14-day maintenance phase is intended to help you lose weight steadily. You can eat three balanced sirtfood-rich meals every day, plus one green juice.
The two phases can be repeated whenever you like for a fat-loss boost.
What happens after the second phase? And is this kind of diet really sustainable?
The idea of “sirtifying” meals is for those who have completed phase one and two but still want to continue on the Sirtfood path. It involves taking your favorite dish and giving it a Sirtfood twist. Recipes include everyday favorites such as chicken curry, chilli-con-carne, pizza and pancakes.
The Sirtfood Diet is not designed to be a one-off ‘diet’ but rather a way of life. You are encouraged, once you’ve completed the first 3 weeks, to continue eating a diet rich in Sirtfoods and to continue drinking your daily green juice. There are now many Sirtfood Diet recipe books available, with recipes for lots more Sirtfood-rich main meals, as well as recipes for alternatives to green juice and more hints and tips for following the Sirtfood Diet. There are even some recipes for Sirtfood desserts! Phases 1 and 2 can be repeated as and when necessary for a health boost, or if things have gone a bit off track.
GETTING STARTED
Daily juices are essential to the Sirtfood Diet. So make sure you have a juicer. You’ll also need three key ingredients.
Matcha is a powdered green tea and an important ingredient in green juices. It’s readily available online, if your local health food shop doesn’t stock it. Similarly, lovage – a herb in the green juice recipe – can sometimes seem hard to find. But it’s easy to buy seeds online to grow it in a pot on a windowsill.
Finally, buckwheat. It’s a fantastic alternative to more common grains, but most supermarkets mix buckwheat and wheat in their products. You’re more likely to find 100 percent buckwheat products in your local health food store.
MEAL IDEAS
For breakfast, try soy yogurt with mixed berries, chopped walnuts, and dark chocolate, or for something savory, an omelet packed with bacon, red chicory, and parsley.
The sirtfood salad is great for lunch – but if you’re craving some carbs, a wholemeal pitta stuffed with turkey, cheese or hummus is healthy and filling.
Dinnertime doesn’t have to be dull, either: stir-fried prawns with kale and buckwheat noodles is a tasty evening meal. And, believe it or not, pizza is still on the menu if it’s made the sirtfood way.
THE HEALTH BENEFITS
There is growing evidence that sirtuin activators may have a wide range of health benefits as well as building muscle and suppressing appetite. These include improving memory, helping the body better control blood sugar levels and cleaning up the damage from free radical molecules that can accumulate in cells and lead to cancer and other diseases.
‘Substantial observational evidence exists for the beneficial effects of the intake of food and drinks rich in sirtuin activators in decreasing risks of chronic disease,’ said Professor Frank Hu, an expert in nutrition and epidemiology at Harvard University in a recent article in the journal Advances In Nutrition. A sirtfood diet is particularly suitable as an anti-aging regime.
Although sirtuin activators are found all through the plant kingdom, only certain fruits and vegetables have large enough amounts to count as sirtfoods. Examples include green tea, cocoa powder, the Indian spice turmeric, kale, onions and parsley.
Many of the fruit and vegetables on display in supermarkets, such as tomatoes, avocados, bananas, lettuce, kiwis, carrots and cucumber, are actually rather low in sirtuin activators. This doesn’t mean that they aren’t worth eating, though, as they provide lots of other benefits.
The beauty of eating a diet packed with sirtfoods is that it’s far more flexible than other diets. You could simply eat healthily adding some sirtfoods on top. Or you could have them in a concentrated way. Adding sirtfoods to say, the 5:2 diet could allow more calories on the low-calorie days.
A remarkable finding of one sirtfood diet trial is that participants lost substantial weight without losing muscle. In fact, it was common for participants to actually gain muscle, leading to a more defined and toned look. That’s the beauty of sirtfoods; they activate fat burning but also promote muscle growth, maintenance, and repair. This is in complete contrast to other diets where weight loss typically comes from both fat and muscle, with the loss of muscle slowing down metabolism and making weight regain more likely.
RECENT POSTS
Check the Articles page or the ‘Recent Posts’ section at the bottom of each page to read the collection of articles that have been published in the last year. There is also a whole host of nutritious recipes on the ‘ The Best Sirtfood Recipes‘ page.