Transcription
For 30 days, I ate 2 lbs of lentils every single day. 2 lb of cooked lentils. And I'll be honest, I'm incredibly sick of lentils. I never want to have another lentil again, at least not for a while. I love lentils, so I I will come back to them. But this was a rough test.
I did this because I had a theory. I was chasing an idea. 2 lbs of food sounds like a lot. It sounds like the opposite of a diet, something where you would not be, you know, losing weight or or or even burning fat. But can I eat a mountain of food every day, feel incredibly full, sustain an even weight, gain muscle, and and feel good while doing it for about a little over a dollar a day. I mean, incredibly cheap. Now, this wasn't the only thing I ate, but it was a bulk of my calories for the last month.
Okay, so here are my predictions before I start the month. I'm currently in the middle. I am about 45 days into a 90-day resistant starch test. And I think along with the resistant starch from the lentils, uh, I'm going to lose weight. I'm also going to predict that the volume I'm going to stop snacking. I think that's a big one. Now, this one's going to be tough. I I I do I think my cholesterol is going to drop, but I do think that's going to be more of a mechanism from the resistant starch. And I predict and I know and I know this happens to me all the time. I think I'm just going to get sick of lentils. I think it's going to take a week or two. And I think I'm just going to be over it.
Okay, rules are simple. 2 lbs cooked lentils every day. 2 lbs cooked is around 1,000 to,100 calories, roughly 80 82 g of protein, which is kind of insane, and around 60 g of fiber. The plan is pretty much to make two different recipes. A braised lentil, which I'm going to show you today, and then just my basic lentil soup, which I've made a bunch of times on the channel. I can meal prep a couple of days at a time and just repeat.
I'm I'm on this is the end of week one right now. So, this is my third time doing this. It's simple. I prep and cook four cups of dried lentils in a saucepan. Always make sure you sort your lentils. Make sure there's nothing odd in them. Sometimes you do find little little like pebbles or things like that. And I also did go back and forth between green lentils and black lentils. Make sure you wash and rinse your lentils. So, I'm going to toss them into my saucier for about 15 minutes with 7 cups of water, which that's pretty low for lentils, but I'll show you why. Uh, we're not going to suck up all the water on this initial cook. I'll show you why after. I'm also not going to add any salt.
Now, the only thing that goes in this tomato braze dish is going to be pretty much a whole onion and some garlic. Okay, so now in the frying pan, I'm going to throw that on a medium heat. Let that heat up just a bit. Add a touch of olive oil. I don't want a ton of fats in this. So, just a touch of olive oil. I'm going to toss onions in with a bit of garlic and let that sweat out. So far, I'm not adding any salt to any of this. We're going to wait till the end. Once that sweat out, we're going to add in the whole can of tomatoes. Let that cook down. Going to mash up the tomatoes a little bit. And at this point, the lentils are done. I'm going to add about half of the lentils to the sauce and add in some chili flakes and a little oregano and simmer for about 15 minutes. Once everything's simmered together, we're going to salt and taste. The rest of the lentils can get stored for tomorrow. And this is today's portion.
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So, why would 2 lbs of lentils do anything at all? Three things stack up. One, this isn't even two pounds of lentils. This is actually a pound. This is half of the serving. I did want to show you cuz it is really unique cuz this is a gigantic bowl of food. A gigantic bowl of food. It's one pound of lentils, but it actually weighs it comes in at about 2 lb of a serving. It's going to be full. This bowl is 700 calories, 45 g of really great protein, 8 g of fat, and 100 g of carbs, and it's tasty.
So, yeah, what does 2 lbs of lentils a day do? Number one, satiety. I've talked about the satiety index. It's a study that ranked how full certain foods keep you feeling. Boiled potatoes rank the highest, but beans, lentils, legumes, they rank pretty pretty high. Lentils kind of hit the mark across the board. pure volume all at once filling physically filling your stomach. Your stomach literally measures volume. The receptors in your belly will tell you once it's stretched how full you're feeling and tell you to stop eating. 2 lb of candy bars is going to be a massive caloric load. This is 2 lb of food for 700 calories. And once I get 2 lb of lentils, I'm going to be about 1,400 calories across the whole day. And it's going to be a struggle to eat much more. But along with other things because of the fiber, you know, there's blood sugar levels. Lentils are slow digesting foods. So that means even though these have a lot of carbohydrates because of the protein, because of the fiber, it's going to digest slower. You're not going to get that giant spike, that giant spike of energy. You're going to have sustained energy all day long without the 3pm crash. And lentils have a thing which is kind of like the second meal effect. Eating a large portion of something like lentils will actually blunt your blood sugar at your next meal.
Now, for my leftovers, my cooled lentils, which is three portions of this, those are going to turn into a resistant starch. A big chunk of this lentil, you're not even going to digest. Your body is still going to use it. It's not like it's a waste. It's not like it's completely unusable. It's going to go down into your gut and ferment. Your gut bacteria are going to feed off of the resistant starch, which is going to do a whole lot of good across your body, but it also leads to my week one problem. We'll talk about that in a minute. But overall, the amount is insanely good for you over a long term. I wouldn't suggest eating two pounds of lentils every day. I would suggest adding a lot more lentils into your diet daily.
So, this is the end of my first week. Thursday, I have tomorrow. It was really rough. The food was good. I don't mind it, but the gas was crazy. Now, I'm already experiencing a ton of gas from my resistance starch test. This just kind of doubled it up. I was I'm almost to the end of the resistance starch test. The thing that I realized through the resistant starch test and now even more with this just because of the portion sizes adding a lot of water before and after really helped the gas. I think that kind of helped move things along. But overall really with week one that's been the only downside. You know, feeling incredibly full and feeling good about it. That's that's been a super positive. I really love that.
Friday, week two. This is where I expected snacking to die and it has where I would normally be heading out to the pantry to grab um some sort of snack in the middle of the day has pretty much stopped. I'll be editing or working on a video and I look up at the time and it's 4 or 5:00 and I didn't even realize it. So, that was that was pretty cool. I haven't really felt an afternoon slump in a long time. But, I will say the even energy has been really really cool. Also, wait. Nothing's happening. I know we're only two weeks, but it's been pretty consistent. 167.8 and I'm at 168.8. So, I mean, I actually I I've gained a pound, but that I really just think that's like water weight, honestly. Uh I don't think I've gained any fat.
I actually almost forgot to record week three. It's Friday. This has been a boring week. I'm still farting like crazy. It's kind of settled down a little bit, but it's also been really boring. I am so sick. So sick of lentils. I am trying something. I'm getting ready to go on a run. Normally I don't like to do like a fiber before a run, you know? It's like I try to do like a um a carb like a rice or even like toast or something like that. Like this is a little fibery and having gas or being bloated is not a great thing to do on a run. But I'm just curious about how the energy if it if it sustains me at all. I mean, if I don't report back, it's probably didn't do anything.
>> Uh damn, that was tough. I will say I've noticed that my recoveries have been better. the Ber I'm training for Berlin right now, the Berlin marathon in September and it's been really tough because of the summer and my recovery scores are going up just over 3 weeks. It's been better to eat the lentils for lunch and just kind of plow them down than to try to kind of have them for dinner like the night before a long run. So, I have noticed that.
Now, quick scoreboard back to the predictions the very beginning of the video. Snacking being killed off check. Feeling incredibly full. It was an easy check. I I knew that was going to happen. And insane gas was correct, but honestly, I underestimated it. I thought it was going to be bad. It was really bad. But it also did die down. Now, the part that I didn't predict, and I'm still not 100% if this was cause or if I'm just correlating way too much stuff at this point, but this month, my sleep has been more restorative. Now, there is some data that says eating more fiber will help you sleep at have a better night's sleep. I'm not waking up as much as I used to, but again, that could all tie into things that I've been really working on with sleep. A I've been doing a lot of sleep stuff. So, my sleep score has already been ticking up. The difference that has happened lately is even though I'm having a very high sleep score, my recovery score along with that sleep score has also gone up.
Number two, craving crunchy foods. a month of soft stews and I just I never want to have a soup again. The one thing that I expected uh that didn't happen at all was I thought the scale would move a little bit more. I wasn't expecting a whole lot because I was trying to eat at a maintenance. I was feeling very full. I wasn't snacking very often. So, I figured I would be dropping a couple of pounds, but I did not. I do believe I've done a few body scans throughout this test. According to the body scan and my current scale, I am losing fat and gaining muscle. That could be completely separate from this test. So, I could be losing fat because of the caloric deficit and gaining muscle because of of working out.
The little things that were great meal prep turned into a rhythm. This was so easy and it was so cheap. The other thing too that really made a big difference, and I think this was because of the satiety, was I stopped thinking about food. I recently listened to a podcast that talked about how different people react to food. You could you could set four people at a table and put a plate of doughuts down and three out of the four people will not think about they might have a doughnut. They might take a bite of the doughnut, but that fourth person is going to be using 50 to 60% of their their brain power to be thinking about how not to eat the donuts. And that's something that I've always struggled with. There's a lot of food noise and that's where everybody's different and why willpower is a completely different thing for a lot of people. That's where GLP1s kind of come in because they can actually shut down that food noise. Now, a gigantic bowl of fiber and protein, slow digesting foods that are very satiating can do the same thing and I noticed that was kind of cool. The food noise kind of went away this month.
If I can give any advice, if this is something you typically don't do, just just ease in. 60 gram of fiber a day is a lot for most people. I know I'm going to get somebody arguing with me in the comments. That's not a lot of fiber. It is for most people. Eating half of this amount every day for 30 days is sufficient for a a giant portion of the population. I don't think there's really you're there's kind of diminishing returns to go into the two pounds a day. I just wanted to see what would happen with the extreme. And I do believe it's an extreme. So, I don't say to do that. If it's something that you do want to try and just see what happens to you and what happens to your food noise if that's something you experience, pull that lever one time for a couple weeks and see what happens. Again, would I tell you to eat two pounds of lentils every single day? No, definitely not. It's not something I would recommend. I did this as a stunt so you don't have to.
Honestly, gang, if you got something out of this, please click the subscribe button. I like running these 30-day tests to find out what happens. The resistance starch test is going to be coming soon. I think that's going to be one of my my biggest takeaways because so many things have happened during this 90-day test. It's exciting to get a lot more of the data, like my blood work from it. So, that's going to be an exciting video coming out here in a couple of weeks. Drop a comment down below. Let me know what I should test next. I have some ideas, but I'm really curious to see what you think. I make these videos because after my weight loss, I found an incredibly happy life, and I want to motivate you to be able to do the same thing. So, follow along for more. I will see you on the next one.
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