If you read last month’s previous article on the Bulletproof diet you will know I had agreed to give it a go and report back to you. The Bulletproof diet has been devised by Dave Asprey; a Silicon Valley tech multimillionaire who claims his diet allows you to hack your body’s natural metabolic processes. Dave claims this allows you to lose up to a pound a day, improve you health, brain function and benefit from the diet’s anti-aging qualities.

The diet is essentially very similar to the Paleo diet, which has become extremely popular over the past few years and is advocated by many nutritionist, anti-aging experts and athletes. The diet is based on what it is thought our hunter gather forefathers ate before the agricultural revolution. This revolution, which is thought to have taken place around 10,000 years ago, introduced cultivated foods into our diets. It is thought cultivated food like grains, dairy and sugar have a detriment effect on our health. The Bulletproof diet differs from the Paleo diet in that it advocates coffee and butter. Lots of butter and only Dave Asprey’s Bulletproof coffee.

Dave Asprey argues that your body can tolerate butter because it doesn’t contain harmful casein and BCM-7. That may be the case for most people but not me. I tried the diet for about two weeks, trying my best to stick with the meal plans in Dave’s book. By the end of the two weeks I was feeling extremely phlegmy to the extent I just had to stop the diet. I also discovered I had put on 4Kgs. Now don’t get me wrong I love the taste of butter, which was in part the appeal of the diet, but this diet is clearly never going to work for me. That said it must work for some people. Dave Asprey is a very successful businessman who would have never developed such a successful brand if it simply doesn’t work at all. By the way, the Bulletproof coffee is excellent with or without the butter in it.

There are some really good ideas in the diet and some great recipes too that I will adapt without the butter. One example of something I’ll now focus on a lot more and something that Dave advocates is making sure you only eat meat from animals that have been fed a natural diet. That also means definitely no farmed fish. Let’s stick to the wild fish that have lived a happy life in the open seas and haven’t been fed a diet of soy and antibiotics. This does seem to be entirely sensible. Why would you only focus on your diet and not the diet of the animals you consume?

We can also all agree that we need to be eating lots of unprocessed foods, plenty of vegetables and trying our best to avoid sugar. Dave’s also got some really sensible advice on the types of fats we should be consuming, which since the zeitgeist of fats of now changing I’d recommend you update yourself on this. You can check out my piece on fats from last year: https://www.brigstockskinandlaser.com/good-fat/

Another great trick in the diet is to do daily 16 to 18 hour fasts. This means we limit our food intake to a 6 – 8 hour window. So, for example you might skip breakfast, maybe have one of Dave’s Coffee’s, have lunch at around 1:00pm and then make sure you eat dinner by 7:00pm. The benefits of fasting are well documented and this might be a great technique that does indeed allow you to “bio-hack” your body. If like me you can’t tolerate the butter you can try adding  coconut oil and coconut milk to your coffee and if you want to add Dave’s Bulletproof Brain Octain (C-8 medium chain triglycerides) that’s great.

Like all great ideas and advice you need to take from this diet what you can and leave what doesn’t work for you. I’m reminded of Brian’s quote in Monty Python’s life of Brian where he stands in front of the assembled masses and says:

Brian: Look, you’ve got it all wrong. You don’t need to follow me. You don’t need to follow anybody! You’ve got to think for yourselves! You’re all individuals!

The Crowd: Yes! We’re all individuals!

Brian: You’re all different!

The Crowd: Yes! We’re all different!

Man on his own in crowd: I’m not…