I lost 15 pounds in 15 days.  Does that sound crazy?  I’ve been on a lot of diets in my lifetime and I don’t think I’ve lost that much weight the first 2 weeks of any diet before now.  Not in two decades.  It’s really not normal, and most people would say that’s too much weight to lose in too short of a time.  I’m not sure if you followed exactly what I did if your results would be the same (or not), I just know that I certainly didn’t starve myself, I didn’t do any exercise, I didn’t take any supplements or pills, and I didn’t have any weight loss procedures or surgeries.  I just stuck to a two-week meal plan.

My goal is not to sell you a ‘fad diet’ or get you started on something you can’t keep up.  My goal is to show you what I’ve learned and give you some tools to lose weight by making better choices.  Making better choices means that you plan out your meals and shopping, and you know more about what you’re eating.  I’m not going to give you an exact two week meal plan to follow, because I don’t believe everyone will have success eating exactly what I did.  I think you’ll have better success if you start by planning what will work best for you. You know that you’ve gained weight, and you know how it happened. I’m just illustrating the fact that if it took thousands of bad choices to get you where you are today, then it will take thousands of good choices to get you back to where you want to be.

By now you are wondering “what is this magic diet”?  It’s nothing magic.  My 15 pounds in 15 days meal plan was what I would call “making better choices without exception” for a two week period. There’s a zillion ways to do this and hundreds of diets you could try. If you are overweight and have been eating poorly, there’s a pretty good chance you could lose as much as I did in two weeks. I don’t eat sugar, but I was eating fast food, snacks all the time, chips, pretzels, pizza, McDonald’s – you name it. I didn’t feel “full” unless my stomach had something in it ALL the time.

I don’t think most diets are completely suitable to switch to as a “lifestyle choice”. In other words after you’ve lost some or all the weight, you’ll just ditch the diet and go back to your old ways. Experts say that as many as 85 – 95% of people that lose weight in a diet just gain it back. I’m going to suggest you try something different for the first two weeks to lose a chunk of weight and get you started. If you’ve tried any diet before you know in the beginning you always lose more as you start to detox and remove the bad things from your body, lose some water weight, shrink your stomach, and empty your bowels. You are quite literally losing the last few weeks of bad things you’ve eaten.

I’m going to talk to you about Quick and Dirty Keto.  Maybe you know about keto, maybe you don’t.  Keto is a high fat low carb diet that has actually been around since it was accidentally discovered in the late 1800’s.  It was also a treatment for epilepsy in the 1920’s.  We know it as something that started to become popular in 2015-6 on several podcasts and it kind of had a cult-like following for quite awhile.  Now there are thousands of keto cookbooks, and as many blogs, websites, apps, and videos out there about it.  There are also many versions of keto from clean or dirty, to lazy or programs for bodybuilders.

OMG – Keto, Really?  Only to get Started.

Depending on what you’ve heard you probably already have some kind of preconceived notion of what keto is or isn’t.  Especially if you’ve tried or or know someone who has.  Keto is not a diet of unlimited meat and cheese.  Yes, we have also heard tales of people on keto eating 2 pounds of bacon in one day and that’s just not really a diet at all – is it?  Keto is a high fat low carb diet where you don’t count calories – you count carbohydrates.  There are 110 carbs in a McDonald’s Big Mac combo meal, 190 if you have a regular large drink instead of diet (I always have diet Coke).  On this meal plan I target only eating 20 carbs per day for weight loss, which means I eat less carbs in an entire week (140 carbs in 7 days) than I would in one single Big Mac meal.

Keto can be pretty complicated.  People doing “clean” keto can get really into the weeds counting their macros and keeping track of all sorts of things on the daily.  There are also things you can’t eat or drink on strict keto (diet pop/soda!).  I say I do Quick and Dirty Keto because I’m not giving up my Diet Pepsi.  I also won’t keep strict check on all my processed foods just as long as I stay under 20 carbs per day.

These are the reasons that for an initial 2 week meal plan starting a diet, Quick and Dirty Keto worked for me:

• I had more energy
• I slept better
• The food tasted better
• I wasn’t as hungry
• Snacked less between meals
• Food was easy to make

Is Keto What the Good Choice Bad Choice Diet™ Is?

Simply put, no – it’s not.  My diet is more of a way of thinking.  My wife Tracy and I don’t believe that anyone will stay on any diet for a lifetime – Keto, Paleo, Atkins, South Beach, Zone, Grapefruit, Cookie, Cabbage, or even the Detox diet.  Nobody.  The Good Choice Bad Choice Diet is about changing your lifestyle and your habits, FOR LIFE.  Just for whatever reason, I had better success getting started with Quick and Dirty Keto. Our comments those first few weeks were that we liked the taste of the (full fat) foods more on this diet that others we had tried over the years, AND we didn’t seem to be hungry between meals.

Having said that there are a few things I should mention we did. We had Bulletproof Coffee (BPC) every morning for breakfast and nothing else. You can look it up online but it’s basically:

• 16 oz coffee
• 1 tbsp ghee (clarified butter)
• 1/4 cup whipping cream
• 1/4 cup half and half
• 1 tbsp MCT oil (refined coconut oil)
• Monkfruit blend, Stevia, or other sugar free sweetener to taste

That’s it – you just blend it in the blender for 30 seconds like it’s a latte and you’re good to go!  This was the only thing we had for breakfast, and it was a fat bomb that kept us full and full of energy until lunch.

After our morning coffee, we usually had lunch between 11AM and noon and dinner between 4-5PM each day.  That because we were employing an intermittent fasting technique called “8 on and 16 off”.  This is something you’ll want to do for the first few weeks as well because it will set the stage for your future results and lifestyle changes.  It will shrink your stomach, reduce your appetite, and start to put you on a schedule.  No more eating at night.  In fact, no more eating for no reason at all.  You will have either coffee or a light breakfast, a lunch, and a dinner.  If you do this right with only consuming food 8 hours a day and not any at all for 16 hours you will force yourself to look forward to those meals.

There’s your explanation of what I did the first 15 days.  We actually continued doing quick and dirty keto for about another month and I’m approaching 25 pounds weight loss now.  You should not think that you will ever lose that much weight as you did the initial two weeks again.  Normal weight loss for most people is 2-3 lbs per week once you get a few weeks or a month under your belt.  Also keep in mind normally men lose weight faster than women, and you lose weight fast when you’re younger vs. older (in most cases).  My wife and I are both diabetic (type II – not insulin taking) so we have migrated off of Keto to more of a low-carb diet now (kind of like a Mediterranean diet but with lower carbs).

We are learning to live each day by making better choices.  In fact that’s the trademark of the Good Choice Bad Choice Diet™, it’s simply Make Better Choices™.  Like I said earlier, you made the bad choices to become overweight, you need to come to terms that there is no quick fix, and you’ll likely have to make just as many good choices to take that weight off.  I know that if I ate hundreds, or even thousands of cheeseburgers and fries to gain 50 lbs, don’t think think it might take hundreds, or even thousands of healthy choice meals to lose 50 lbs? 

I don’t want you to think for a second we have some type of secrets here, or that we will never eat anything bad again.  For years we’ve seen skinny people eat the worst food in public or at the holiday dinner.  They stuff themselves with plates and plates of food and desserts and our comments have always been “how is that fair?  It must be great to be skinny and eat like that!”  It’s because that’s when you see them make the bad choices, you don’t see the good choices they make to balance it out.  It might be spin class or jogging, or even fasting the entire next day.  They don’t eat like that every day (or they would be overweight too).  But when they choose to make bad food choices they know what they have to do to not gain weight.  Or when they gain the slightest 5-10 lbs, they take action to lose it.

How Do I Get Started?

I’m glad you asked.  This all started because I wanted to write a cookbook (which I am in the process of doing).  People started asking me for recipes, which I didn’t have yet because the cookbook isn’t done.  I’m not sure how long it will take to write it, because I am constantly discovering new things and what works for us (which is why I keep adding recipes to this web site).

What I can do is point you to some things that helped us get started.  I’m sure that this website will get bigger as time goes on, but for now this is what we’ve got.  Click on any of the links below to explore and find out more.

How To Make a 2 Week Meal Plan

How To Try Quick and Dirty Keto

Low Carb Foods Cheat Sheet

Planning a Low Carb Diet that Works for You