![]() ![]() “Everyone needs some amount of stress in their lives,” says Goggins. So how does it work? Well, firstly, it’s vital to understand the “stress” part of the equation. But it’s a bit more complicated than just starving yourself for short-term changes. Yes, the diet mimics some aspects of fasting, and in the first seven days of the full diet Sirtfoods appear to turbo-charge the effects of calorie restriction. It’s a valid concern: in most calorie-restriction diets, early weight loss tends to come from calorie depletion and reduced water-bloating, and – as recent research on contestants in TV’s The Biggest Loser shows – simply rationing yourself every day can slow your metabolism to a near-permanent crawl, as well as messing with your body’s levels of “hunger hormone” ghrelin, making you permanently hungry.īut, Goggins and Matten counter, this isn’t what Sirt does. Most point to the fact that, at least in the initial stages, the plan focuses on calorie restriction and that, according to previous experience, weight loss over 1kg a week is unhealthy or unsustainable. Of course, this is the aspect of the Sirt Diet that has critics howling. We believe it’s better to consume a wide range of these nutrients in the form of natural wholefoods, where they co-exist alongside the hundreds of other natural bioactive plant chemicals which act synergistically to boost our health.” In other words: eat better, rather than just popping a pill. “In supplement form it’s poorly absorbed by the body, but in its natural food matrix of red wine, its bioavailability (how much the body can use) is at least sixfold higher. Goggins and Matten point to the example of resveratrol. It’s the obvious question: if sirtuins are so game-changing, why aren’t pharmaceutical and supplement companies scrambling to distill them into pill form? Short answer: because the mechanism by which they operate still isn’t fully understood, meaning that supps won’t necessarily be as well absorbed by the body as the natural forms. With a standard diet that cut calories by the same amount in a week, you’d expect to lose a maximum of 1kg. And the results in just one week, even considering the calorie restriction, were astounding: the test subjects lost an average of 3kg of fat but put on around 0.8kg of muscle. All had been doing a moderate amount of exercise none increased it and some even began doing less. To test the diet on a wider scale, Goggins and Matten recruited 37 members of KX Gym in London, 15 of whom were overweight. I lost body fat, I was sleeping better, I had no gut issues, I was feeling energised… I was teaching and training half a dozen classes a week with fantastic recovery, even from the most gruelling Brazilian jiu jitsu session.” But, crucially, I also felt the best I have in a couple of years. After the initial week, following the diet was plain sailing, and after three weeks I was 5kg lighter. “The juice is key: it’s like rocket fuel. “I didn’t feel hard done by at all,” says Rannoch Donald, a trainer and coach who tried the diet. On the face of it, this sounds awful: even most fasting diets allow more calories. After that all-out first week, the recommendation is to eat a balanced diet rich in Sirtfoods, along with more green juices. ![]() On days four to seven, calorie intake is increased to 1,500 and consists of two juices and two meals. It’s simple enough: during the first three days, daily calorie intake is limited to 1,000 and consists of three green juices, plus a Sirtfood-rich meal. To test this idea, Goggins and Matten created the Sirt Diet, the seven-day eating plan that’s caused all the fuss. ![]() Certain foods – Sirtfoods, as they’ve been dubbed by diet creators Aidan Goggins and Glen Matten – are especially high in these sirtuin activators and so, the theory goes, if you eat a diet mostly composed of these foods you’ll lose fat and improve your health. Mild forms of stress – including exercise and calorie restriction – trigger the body’s production of sirtuins, but it’s recently been discovered that chemical compounds known as sirtuin activators, found naturally in fruit and vegetables, can do the same thing. In summary, sirtuins make us fitter, leaner and healthier (there’s also evidence that they might help combat serious diseases such as Alzheimer’s and diabetes – more on that later). Sirtuins – from which Sirt gets its name – are a group of Silent Information Regulator (SIR) proteins that ramp up our metabolism, increase muscle efficiency, switch on fat-burning processes, reduce inflammation and repair damage in cells. What’s the truth? What’s the evidence? And what’s the science behind it all?įirst, the science. ![]()
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