Glycogen Priming Method – The Best Glycogen Priming Diet for A Lean Body.
The Glycogen Priming Method (GPM) was born in early 2018 when a couple of busy and successful entrepreneurs came to me needing to make a change. One was a real estate agent selling over 60 homes per year, and the other owned a successful electrician business pulling in almost seven figures per year.
They were busy, and they wanted results.
When I asked them what their lives would look like in six months if I could wave a magic wand and grant any wish, their answers surprised me.
Weight loss didn’t even make an appearance until we were well into the list.
The #1 request though?
More energy.
These guys are hard charging producers and business men, but didn’t feel like they had the energy to do what they needed for their businesses and still have energy to be excited to be with their families at night.
Other essentials:
- Limit extreme feelings of hunger or deprivation
- No caffeine needed after lunch
- No meal prep required
- Be simple, no crazy ingredients or meals that required hours to cook
- Be Anti-Inflammatory.
- Allow room to eat with family at night – not prepping 2+ dinners
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They both also listed building muscle and losing belly fat as priorities, but much lower than most of the other requirements.
So I got busy putting together a performance eating plan – but not for athletes, for the busiest among us that often cut out healthy habits in pursuit of more success at work.
We talked through the steps that it would take them to be successful on this program. What was required, how much time was needed to make the food, what supplements were best on a program like this, and what kind of training would amplify the results without taking more of their valuable time, as well as the main things that would block their efforts at more energy and less fat
After six weeks I was literally shocked at the results.
Not only did they report that their energy levels had skyrocketed, they had both dropped close to 18lbs.
While these results can be seen on some diets, especially with caloric deprivation and marathon workouts, that’s not what this was – they were only working out for 15 minutes roughly 4 times per week.
This was a performance eating plan for energy, mental clarity, and focus all day.
The fat loss? Well, that was just icing on the cake.
I hadn’t planned for that, but upon reflection, it makes perfect sense. If you eat with the end goal of better mental performance in mind, it totally changes the paradigm most of us have around eating and worse, dieting. *shudder*.
It takes something that normally requires enormous amounts of willpower and motivation, and makes it second nature. It becomes easier to make good choices, especially once you start feeling a marked difference in mental energy and then start feeling lighter, and noticing the differences in the mirror.
This snowball effect continued after the 6 weeks, with both men feeling better, more energetic and leaner than they had in years.
And the part I like best about this? 95% of people regain all their weight back after a “diet”. But teach a man a sustainable framework for ideal nutrition, and the weight stays off.
The Glycogen Priming Method (GPM) is for Everyone.
Most of us have seen the 8,000 calorie “performance” eating plan that Michael Phelps was taking in during his training for the 2016 Rio Olympics. Since i’m going to assume that you don’t have a personal chef and you probably don’t have the time or energy to swim 10+ miles per day, this is out of the question for us.
In fact, when most people think about performance nutrition, they think of squeezing little Goo packets into your mouth and washing it down with some lukewarm lemon-lime Gatorade during a long run or training session.
But there are different types of performance.
Many of us are not and will never be competitive athletes. But that doesn’t mean we’re not competitive or looking for an edge in our businesses and lifestyles.
Eating food is something we all do, (and one of the biggest things I have in common with LeBron James) and the type of food, meal timing, and quality are things that impact how we feel, think, and sleep on a daily basis – we can use the food we eat to give us an edge at work, and enable us to be excited for our families in the evening.
Or we can continue to eat processed dog shit and cross our fingers and hope that we have more energy when we wake up.
But the choice is ours. We all eat daily. And no one can force us to eat spinach instead of donuts. So if you had a framework for maximizing your energy and muscle, and minimizing your fatigue, belly fat, and brain fog……would you capture it? Or let it slip?
The TWO Common Breakfast Mistakes that Glycogen Priming Method Instantly Fixes
Is breakfast the most important meal of the day? Some people say yes! Keto and Intermittent fasting advocates say “NO! It’s totally unnecessary!” so who’s right?
The Glycogen Priming Method is a big fan of breakfast. The RIGHT breakfast.
So many people set themselves up for failure every day by eating the Standard American Diet (SAD) breakfast. This results in unbalanced blood sugar levels, hunger spikes in the mid-morning and the afternoons, and getting tired around 2pm after lunch.
But it’s not your fault for eating like this. Most of us have been hearing about “the healthy part of a balanced breakfast” since before we could talk, so how could we know that this is literally preventing us from having the energy or focus we want when it’s been drilled into our heads since pre-K.
Even the idea of grabbing something healthy like a banana on the way out the door is totally backward in terms of performance eating….unless your work demanded that you run a 10k first thing in the morning. Mine doesn’t, and I’m assuming yours doesn’t either.
Solution: Have a healthy breakfast prioritizing proteins and fats that will stabilize blood sugars, hormones, and give you the energy you need to go strong all day
No More Slow Down! The Glycogen Priming Lunch for Max Energy.
Lunch is the make or break meal if you want to be productive afterward. Most of us aren’t having 3-course meals and a few martinis for lunch, but if you’re speed-eating a Chipotle burrito in your car between appointments, you might as well have those martinis.
Before we as humans settled down from our nomadic lifestyle to a life of planting and harvesting grains, Starbucks, and Wifi on airplanes, we were hunters and gatherers.
This change to a settled, agrarian civilization has changed much about how we operate, but our survival mechanisms remained relatively unchanged since we’ve only been living this way for the last few hundred years.
What that means is that for most of our history, we had to go out and hunt our food if we were hungry. And I don’t mean navigating a rough lunch rush at Arby’s.
So as an evolutionary mechanism that helped us not starve, when we started to get a little hungry, that’s when we’d get a bit more energy, focus, and mental clarity in order to hunt better.
The Glycogen Priming Method doesn’t call for donning a loin cloth and chasing down your neighbor’s livestock but simply using our natural inclinations to hunt in order to get more energy for the afternoon and do better work when your counterparts are nodding off after their pasta carbonara.
This means eating a lighter lunch than we’re accustomed too in order to maintain energy and not overwhelm our system with the need to digest and relax after a big meal.
Solution; Have a healthy lunch prioritizing proteins and vegetables. The best option here is a Big Ass Salad. Oil and vinegar as dressing. Avoid the creamy dressings that normally come with the Standard American Diet.
The good news about this is that you can easily prep a salad meal or something a bit less put together (nothing sexy about eating pulled pork and carrots), eat at any restaurant, or EVEN drive through a restaurant and get what you need at any Fast Food place.
Sleep Deeper with the RIGHT Glycogen Priming Dinner
The actual Glycogen Priming actually takes place at dinner, because up until now we’ve been fairly limited in our carbohydrate intake. This is important for a few different reasons:
- Maximize energy for the day
- Allow the opportunity to prime glycogen stores for the following day
- Allow flexibility with night time meal
- Burn body fat during the active portion of the day
- Get more restful deep sleep
So if you’ve done it right the rest of the day now is your chance to have a bigger meal with friends or family without guilt and actually set yourself up for an energetic tomorrow by priming your glycogen stores
This is amplified if you’ve also trained during the day because many of the nutrients will be partitioned toward repairing the broken down muscle cells and refilling what you burned throughout the day.
Many goo-roos will tell you not to eat carb (or at all) after 6pm or 7pm. This has no basis in science at all, and is simply a way of getting many people to quit grazing after dinner when most of us aren’t hungry, but looking for something to do.
Solution: At dinner, have a protein a carbohydrate, and a vegetable. It doesn’t have to be fancy, in fact, if you’re a little ashamed to post your dinner on Instagram because it’s sooooo boring…..congrats, you’re doing it right.
The Glycogen Priming Method also allows dessert from time to time. The best days for this are the ones where you’re a bit more limited throughout the day in what you eat, or on days when you smash a hard workout.
Summary
Don’t worry about the fad diets, the ketos, Atkins, and others. In fact, try to avoid thinking about “diets” at all. Instead, prioritize a way of eating that amplifies your abilities. Eat to become more, not to become less, and you’ll be able to build the body you want while having the energy to do what you want.
Remember, you don’t have to be an athlete to for performance, and the high achievers of the world need to fuel their hustle too. Don’t’ fall victim to the diet trap ever again.
- Avoid “high energy” breakfasts. Prioritize proteins and fats
(DOWNLOAD THE BREAKFAST GUIDE HERE) - Avoid heavy lunches. Prioritize proteins and veggies instead
(DOWNLOAD THE FIT FAST FOOD GUIDE HERE) - Slow down and have a larger dinner. Prioritize a healthy carb, protein, and veggie
- If you want a “done for you” guide to Glycogen Priming – Grab The Million Dollar Meal PlanHERE.
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