The Average Joe Diet–How to Gain 10+ Pounds per Month

I make a lot of bold claims for a health and fitness site.

No, you shouldn’t worry about calories, fat, carbs, or any other nutrient in your food. Instead of forcing yourself to “eat less,” you should instead strive to “eat better,” focusing on whole, minimally-processed foods and avoiding ultra-refined ones.

By focusing on the quality of the food you stuff your face with rather than the quantity, your body can do all the nitty-gritty accounting work of energy balance and improve your body composition with a limited investment of your willpower.

This belief is based on my observation that humans and their pets are the only animals on the planet who seem to be prone to obesity. Despite all speculation that humans have somehow evolved to seek out an energy surplus regardless of circumstances, I am still waiting for someone to give me one good scientific reason why this would be true.

Due to food’s direct impact on hormone levels and sensitivities as well as reward centers in the brain, I now believe that the heavily-refined foods filled with corn, wheat, and soy products that we (and our pets) eat play the primary role in our ever-increasing waistlines.

Enough Theory, How Does It Work In the Real World?

But talk is cheap.

Who says I’m not just some computer jockey who knows nothing about health? Who knows I’m not just some guy taking a break from playing World of Warcraft to try and stir up some shit in the fitness world in order to garner attention (and sell you an ebook in the process)?

Earlier this year, I decided to make my physical health and fitness more transparent. I started tracking such things as BMI, body fat percentage, oral temperature, waist-to-hip ratio, and waist-to-shoulder ratio to publish occasionally on this site. But I didn’t do this merely for the sake of doing it.

Oh no, dear reader. I’ve been hard at work in the lab the past few months, running a few experiments on myself to test my beliefs, and now it’s time to let you all in on all the juicy results. I published a few of my experiments so far, on eating offal and pigging out on junk food and real food.

So I say that food quality trumps food quantity and diet is more important than exercise? Sounds like I should ditch all exercising for a month and start eating like an average guy in his 20’s.

Seriously, what’s the worst that could happen?

The Rules of the Experiment

Prior to this study, I had been practicing what I preach and eating primarily meat, vegetables, fruit, and eggs. But it was time to switch things up.

I have long been a proponent that the “biggest win” most guys can do in improving their health and fitness is learning how to cook a few basic meals from scratch. Once you have them learned, it takes very little willpower to ensure that you always have healthy food on hand, ready to be eaten whenever you are hungry.

But most guys don’t cook. Most guys will never cook (unless they’re grilling). And statistically, I understand that even 90% of my readers will never even give it a shot. But I’m still gunning for you 10 percenters!

For four weeks, I wanted to emulate the “Average Joe Diet” for someone my age, which requires a bit of tweaking to my normal diet. After thinking long and hard, I came up with these three basic rules for how I would accomplish this:

1. I Will Eat Nothing That I Cook Myself
2. I Will Eat a Breakfast of Cereal and Skim Milk Every Morning
3. I Will Drink Soda Every Day

I think that about covers it, don’t you?

Everything else will be done the same, in particular my “golden rule” when it comes to food: eat when hungry, stop when full. No arbitrary rules such as cleaning my plate or counting calories here, buddy. Just eating the way it used to be before we got all neurotic about our food.

For this experiment, I will get before and after values of my:

• Weight
• BMI
• Body Fat Percentage (with Calipers)
• Waist-to-Hip Ratio (WHR)
• Waist-to-Shoulder Ratio (WSR)

In addition, I will take before and after photos.

Just Another “Junk Food Diet?”

Alright, I know what some of you are thinking. “Looks like Darrin’s going on a junk food diet just like everyone else.”

Morgan Spurlock started the trend with his 2005 blockbuster film “Super Size Me.” You’ve seen it. You know what happens. Spurlock eats nothing but Mickey-D’s for a month and ends up gaining 24.5 lbs.

Noticing that his numbers didn’t add up, Tom Naughton thought something fishy was going on and that Spurlock hadn’t been following the “rules” he laid out in the film. So Naughton made his own film, Fat Head, which documented his own month-long junk food binge… and resulted in him losing 12 lbs.

If you haven’t seen this film yet, check it out on Hulu. It’s pretty awesome.

Most recently, Professor Mark Haub went on a “Twinkie Diet” where he ate primarily convenience store snacks, closely regulated his calorie intake, and wound up losing 27 lbs.

But I’m not taking their path. This is not a junk food diet. This is an “Average Joe Diet.”

Junk food diets tend to be extreme experiments. They are done more to prove a point than to offer a realistic portrait of how people actually eat. I wanted to put myself in the shoes of the average guy my age.

I only wound up eating fast food about three times per week while I was on this experiment. Even when I’m trying to be super healthy I end up hitting up a fast food joint once a week. And although I drank soda every day, I could rarely drink more than two (I really think they are way too sweet).

My breakfast of some minimally-sugary cereal (like Raisin Bran or Cheerio’s) would make most nutritionists happy. My lunches were generally a microwave meal of burritos or pot pie, and dinner usually consisted of pizza or pasta.

So, far from trying to ride on Spurlock’s coattails, I think you’d agree that I was doing my own thing here.

The Gruesome Observations

I started this experiment shortly after the trainwreck that was my attempt to eat as much junk food as possible in one day. As you can read in that post, trying it turned me into a mess. I had to deal with a headache, stomachache, and high anxiety levels.

During my first week on this new diet, I had to deal with these same issues, but with a lower intensity. I noticed that, in particular, every time I drank some soda I felt like crap for the next few hours. I was really worried that I was going to have to deal with this for the entirety of the experiment…

…but after a week it all practically stopped.

Seriously, I felt fine. I didn’t feel great, but I didn’t feel like absolute crap the way I did earlier. This was probably the most surprising finding from this experiment.

Stomach pains were pretty bad the first week or so as well. My belly bloated up almost immediately after starting to eat like this, which wasn’t helped by the fact that it quickly became too large for my pants! I’m guessing this was mostly water weight at first, since my midsection didn’t really start to get flabby until the end of that first week.

A Plot Twist, a Bag Heist

After four weeks, I did my final “weigh-in,” tallying up the numbers in my notebook that I drag around with me everywhere.

The end of this experiment also coincided with something I was greatly looking forward to: a trip to Argentina and Brazil! After putting my body through hell by loading up on refined carbs and other processed food for four weeks, I was really looking forward to “detoxing” on some famously cheap (and delicious) steak and red wine!

I brought along my notebook to work on an upcoming “Kitchen Hacking 101” email course I’ll be adding to this site soon (you heard it here first, folks!) and was taking a load off at a bus station when it happened.

My $#%$ing bag was stolen.

I’m not gonna lie. Losing my credit cards, phone, and camera sucked. Spending a warm, sunny day stuck at the police station sucked. But the worst part was knowing that my notebook was in that stolen bag.

Yup, after four weeks of self-inflicted abuse and intense data-crunching, all my results were now probably in some Buenos Aires trashcan along with the rest of my non-valuables.

I debated whether I should even write this post for a long time. Without solid numbers and before-and-after photos, you really shouldn’t believe anything I write about my observations and conclusions. I didn’t post here for almost two months because I was so burned out and deflated (sorry, folks).

But like a phoenix, I arose again.

Screw it, I’ll give you the best representation I have of the results and just accept that you will (and should) take it with a grain of salt. After all, I remembered the jist of the numbers, and I took another photo of myself after returning from my trip in preparation for my next experiment (even though I had already lost about 5 lbs when I was in South America).

So here’s my “kinda” before and after photos:

Yeah, my phone was jacked, too, so I had to use a pretty whack camera, but I think it’s still pretty clear how doughy I had gotten.

During those four weeks, I gained 14 lbs, and my body fat increased between two and three percentage points. Mass was gained almost completely in the midsection.

The Moral of the Story

Despite the lack of hard data and effective before-and-after photos, I’m sure you’ll agree that I got pretty out of shape over the course of these four weeks.

By focusing on changing what I ate rather than how much I ate, in addition to stopping most physical activity, I gained weight spontaneously. Could it be possible to reverse-engineer this and get the opposite results?

Although by necessity an over-simplification, cutting out exercise completely and relying on ultra-processed foods for most of my caloric needs is a pretty close approximation to what most guys are doing in their day-to-day. Had I followed this protocol for years, I’m sure I’d be in pretty rough shape.

Since I messed with two variables here (diet and exercise), we can’t be sure what specifically was the cause of my gut growth, but with my next experiment, I will start eating healthy while still avoiding working out. Should be a blast.

Don’t touch that dial, folks!

Photo: raymccrae

Tagged as: average joe diet, junk food diets, quality vs quantity