This question is a red-flag for most personal trainers, nutritionists, and general health types who claim that the proper amount of protein to eat per day is some sort of crazy equation involving body mass, body weight, basal metabolism and the ratio to starch and….hey wait, come back, I wasn’t done talking yet…
Seriously though, you will hear many people talk about a reset, detox, cleanse, or whatever. This is simply the process that some of us go through to jumpstart ourselves in our health again. The reason it is misleading is that it is nearly impossible to go without protein, and if you try, you may end up in the hospital. So, you can forego eggs, meats, beans, etc for a week and be perfectly safe. The reason, wait for it, is that there is protein in everything, in trace amounts. And in some vegetables, that trace amount can be quite the significant amount. For example, there is only 1g in 1 cup of raw spinach. However, when you make a salad with 1 cup of raw spinach, 1 medium tomato sliced, 1/4 cup broccoli, 1/4 cup of cauliflower with some balsamic vinegar, you end up with a salad that has about 6g of protein in it. That ends up being a ratio of 3g of protein per cup of vegetables that you eat. This may not sound like a lot, but it is enough. That is the important thing. You are not trying to pack on pounds of muscle during a reset, detox or cleanse. In fact, if you work out, you are doing it wrong.
The simple fact is that during a “cleanse” week for us, we are averaging about 18-25g of protein per day, or about 35% of the average that is required for a sedentary lifestyle. Look at that sentence again. When you cleanse, you are trying to reset yourself. You are super charging your body with nutrients and phytochemicals and micronutrients to jumpstart your metabolism. You are going to put about 1200 calories of vegetables and fruits (about 10 cups or so, give or take) into your body and get yourself ready to jumpstart back into fitness and health acquisition. That is why we do it. That is why we go without protein for a week.
“But how can I work out?” Easy, you don’t. During “Cleanse” week you are not working out. You are resetting. And, you are sleeping. A lot more than usual. Sleep is a much more active process than people realize. While you sleep, your body is going through a set of tasks that include: cleaning, detoxifying, mineral redistribution, rest, filtration and more. The result, is that you will end up urinating first thing in the morning and you start your day again. During a cleanse, you are giving your body all the things it needs to do all of this and more. As a result, you will need more sleep as your body is working overtime since you gave it so many resources to use. See, your body is kind of dumb in the way it works. If you give it something, it will use all of it and not stop until its gone. When you fill it with sugar, it will use all of it, including turning it into fat for later use. But all the sugar is gone, so its happy. When you fill it with vegetables and fruits, you are giving it vitamins to use, minerals to use, nutrients to use, phytochemicals to use, antioxidants to use, and so forth. These are the things that your body uses to detoxify, so that is what it will do. That is what eating clean is all about.
Why only 7 days?
Because you don’t need more than 7 days. The body is very efficient at eliminating things and repairing itself. But mainly, it is hard on your body to make it work this hard for longer than 7 days. The laws of diminishing returns also tell us that the impact goes down drastically after 7 days. People will lose weight and feel awesome a few days into the cleanse, and there is no reason positive benefit to extending it. However, keep in mind, you can cleanse about every 3 months for renewed vigor and impact in your health. Resetting is always a good idea. There more reasons to only cleanse for 7 days. There is something called Ketosis that occurs when you eliminate certain things from your diet, wholesale. For example, if you were to eat only protein with limited fats and absolutely no carbohydrates, you enter what is called a ketogenic state. I will not go into that for the sake of this post, but it is a state that can be beneficial to you if you shoot for it.
Most people don’t know what they are doing and enter into a sub-ketogenic state and this is not the same and is not really benefitting them. In fact, a sub-ketogenic state is what happens when you eat a lot of protein and just enough carbohydrates to ruin ketosis. This is great for quick weight loss when you are in your 20’s, but it is not good for overall health in the long run. Take this unscientific case study as an example: A 53 year-old woman is trying to lose 25 pounds in about 6 weeks. This is doable, safely, actually. But she chooses to eat 6 ounces of chicken and 1/2 cup of brown rice 5 times per day and work out four times per week. Does this look familiar? So, she does this and about 3-4 weeks in has lost 16-18 pounds and plateaus, and additionally she begins to be tired, maybe a little depressed and starts having to drag herself to the gym. She begins to lose motivation. So to make herself feel better she goes out with some friends and has a couple of drinks and a nice italian dinner, after all, she has earned it, right? The result, was a loss of motivation to keep going, a shift in diet back to old habits, a rapid weight change back to the original weight in a couple of weeks and an actually slower metabolism. Where did she go wrong? “Well, she should have stayed on track and not gone out blah blah blah…” WRONG! Actually she started off track by limiting her diet so much that her body had to use up so many nutritional stores that she was actually nutritionally starving herself. A protein and carb based diet like that is not enough for people over 30. She needed to greatly increase her vegetable intake to reset her body. With a healthy diet and clean eating, there is no plateau until your body has righted itself. There are stories of people who have lost hundreds of pounds just by shifting their diet a little to eating clean.
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The Healthy Us 