The Sirtfood diet jumped onto the scene with a bang in 2020. The term became popular when British singer and superstar, Adele, revealed the reason for her drastic, sudden weight loss.
Dieters soon caught on to the trend, mainly because the diet allows wine and chocolate! Unheard of -and almost too good to be true, right?
Apparently, it really works and may even have some great health benefits. A year on, people are still swearing by the benefits of doing the sirtfood diet.
Many medical experts and researchers have called the diet restrictive and unsustainable. The diet claims to stimulate the “skinny gene”. The proteins under the SIRT1 gene counteract the effects of inflammation, and weight gain, as well as ageing, says Men’sMen’s Health.
Bold claims, indeed.
Apparently, there are certain foods that actually activate sirtuin. The protein is believed to help regulate the metabolism too.
Where did it come from?
Even though Adele and other celebrities popularised it, it was created by two British nutritionists Glen Matten and Aidan Goggins. The Sirtfood Diet guarantees that dieters lose up to 7 pounds in 7 days! Most experts say that this is pretty dangerous because the recommended amount of weight loss is around 1 to 2 pounds a week.
What can you eat?
The book by Matten and Goggins offers a whole list of foods that promote and activate the ”skinny gene”.
The Sirtfood Diet food list includes:
- soy
- parsley
- extra virgin olive oil
- 85% cocoa dark chocolate
- kale
- red wine
- turmeric
- walnuts
- arugula (rocket)
- strawberries
- onions
- matcha green tea
- buckwheat
- chilli
- lovage
- Medjool dates
- red chicory
- blueberries
- capers
- coffee
The diet combines sirtfoods and calorie restriction, which may trigger the body to produce higher levels of sirtuins.
Calorie restriction means reducing the typical average daily caloric intake of most of the population, which is around 2500 calories, hopefully without malnutrition or the deprivation of essential nutrients. Most new-age dieters follow intermittent fasting as a lifestyle that cuts meals down to an eating window, which usually cuts the number of calories fasters can consume for the day.
Advocates of the sirtfood diet believe eating loads of sirtuin-rich foods like green tea, kale, blueberries, salmon, and citrus fruits can give your body a steady metabolic boost. These foods have loads of polyphenols in them, antioxidants that better your skin and heart, says Brooke Alpert, R.D. and author of The Diet Detox.
Caroline Apovian, MD, director of the Nutrition and Weight Management Center at the Boston Medical Center, told Women’s Health, “The eating plan itself is designed to ‘turn on the sirtuin genes (particularly SIRT-1), which boost metabolism, increase fat burning, fight inflammation, and curb appetite”.
What does the plan include?
The sirtfood diet is consists of two phases that dieters must strictly follow.
The diet menu is set over a total of three weeks, divided into two phases.
Phase one: Dieters limit their intake to three Sirtfood green juices:
- Kale,
- arugula,
- parsley,
- celery,
- green apple,
- lemon juice,
- and green tea)
And one Sirtfood-rich meal per day.
This comes to around 1,000 calories.
For four days after, you drink two Sirtfood green juices and eat two Sirtfood-rich meals. This will bring your calorie intake to about 1,500 calories consumed per day.
Phase two: This is the maintenance stage. This stage is for the next 14 days of the diet. It is less restrictive than week one and contains more juices too; three Sirtfood-meals and one Sirtfood green juice per day.
After those three weeks, there’s no set plan to follow. Usually, at this point, most diets will have a refeeding plan. To continue on the Sirtfood path, all you have to do is tweak each of your meals to include as many Sirtfoods as possible, the magazine continues. The creators advise around 30 minutes of exercise, at least five days a week.
Though the diet may require you to consume foods you maybe don’t regularly, the meals aren’t any less tasty. Potential meals in the Sirtfood Diet include:
- Celery and blue cheese soup,
- Chicken and kale with spicy salsa,
- Butternut or pumpkin with buckwheat.
All three of these recipes are in The Sirtfood Diet: The Ultimate Sirtfood Diet Book For Beginners.
There are also loads of free recipes on the net. A quick google can bring up hundreds of sirtfood cooking ideas.
The Sirtfood Diet’s website provides a few meal options:
- Baked salmon salad with creamy mint dressing
- Baked potatoes with spicy chickpea stew, and more!
The downside
Besides the sirtfood diet’s claims of quick weight loss, losing more than one pound a week is ill-advised. Rapid, unprovoked weight loss is actually a symptom of several lifestyle conditions and illnesses. When it is, the problem with rapid weight loss lies in the types of lifestyle changes people need to make in order to lose weight quickly.
Crash diets and unhealthy starvation diets promote unhealthy feelings around food and body image. Also, when you lose lots of weight on these fad diets, you usually gain it back pretty fast.
Most research shows that gradual, controlled weight loss is easier to maintain over the long term. It helps you develop healthy eating behaviours and has fewer health risks than fast weight loss. Healthline advises that This approach will help you build healthy eating behaviours to keep the weight off and is safer than rapid weight loss, especially if you don’t have the support of a health professional.
