Maffetone was very late figuring this out, of course, at least compared with Pythagoras. The pioneering mathematician also had a side interest in sports science, and after he settled in Croton in the sixth century B.C., the city suddenly began churning out champions. At one Games, Croton swept the top seven places in the two-hundred-yard stadion race while winning both the boxing and wrestling crowns. Pythagoras’s son-in-law, Milo of Croton, became ferocious enough in hand-to-hand combat to lead the annihilation of the kingdom of Sybaris and skillful enough in wrestling to rack up more victories than any other Olympian, a total of thirty-one victories over a twenty-four-year career.
And what contributed to their success?
“Pythagoras experimented with a special meat diet,” it’s reported, which was so effective that historians have battled for centuries over who deserves credit. Pausanias says it was Dromeus (“the Runner”) who “proved true to his name” and dominated the distance events at four Games after he “conceived the idea of a flesh diet.” A rival school says Pythagoras got there first; his student Milo “was famous for his meat consumption half a century before Dromeus is supposed to have discovered its efficacy in building up champion athletes.” Ancient Greek trainers became so sophisticated in the nuances of slow-burn fueling that they could split hairs over “the relative merits of deep-sea versus in-shore fish based on what type of seaweed they would likely have eaten.” On pork, there was no dissent; they all agreed you wanted to steer clear of pigs who’d foraged for crabs along the riverbanks and stick to the ones who fed on acorns and cornel berries.
But here’s where the story gets strange: Milo retired, Pythagoras got into a political jam and moved away, and just like that, Croton was finished. No more sprinting laurels. No more titanic fighters. Whatever Croton was doing right, it wasn’t doing it anymore. There’s no record of Croton ever winning another title at the Games. The city didn’t suddenly run out of strong young men or acorn-fattened ham, but whatever the magic was, it was gone.
“Food is only half the equation,” Maffetone explains. “You can have the finest fuel in the world, but it’s useless without the proper engine. It’s two systems. It’s input—what you eat—and output—how it’s converted. But here’s the funny part: it’s really, really, simple.”
“For anyone, or just seasoned athletes?”
“Anyone.”
“How long does it take to learn?”
“Two weeks. Two weeks and you can master it. Two weeks and you’ll be running on fat like your Resistance fighters.”
I pushed my notebook toward him across the table.
Maffetone began scrawling notes. To give him time, I got up to help clear the table. Maybe I’d take a walk with Coralee until—
“Here you are.” He couldn’t have written more than a dozen sentences. I sat back down and started to read. Really? It’s that easy?
Phil picked up the guitar and played me some of his songs. When it started getting late, Coralee packed me some of her special fat-as-fuel snacks for the road. Then I was heading home to see what the Maffetone Method could really do.
STEP 1: THE 2-WEEK TEST
Maffetone underlined “Test” in my notebook to make sure I got the point: this is emphatically Not a Diet. Diets, he believes, are a joke. They’re based on a stupid, shame-based notion that losing weight is a matter of willpower and sacrifice, that you’re heavy only because you’re too lazy to starve yourself down to size. “It’s baffling anyone still believes that, but they do,” Maffetone told me. “Even when it’s so clearly, visibly, unnatural.” Humans are hunter-gatherers; we’re born to search for food all day, every day, and scarf it down once we find it. Going hungry is the opposite of everything we’ve evolved to do.
So eat all you want, Maffetone urges. Just reboot your belly so it craves the food we’ve always hunted and gathered, not the fake stuff we’ve come to rely on. Once you’ve detoxed from the starch cycle and brought your body back to its natural metabolism, he says, you’ll be free of hunger pangs and afternoon sugar crashes and midnight munchies. It only takes fourteen days, as long as you follow one rule of thumb: nothing high-glycemic. Nothing that jacks your blood sugar, in other words, and causes insulin to start storing fat.
By the end of two weeks I should be a fresh slate, glycemically speaking, and no longer cycling from sugar surge to sugar surge. Then, once the test is over, I can gradually add processed carbs back to my meals and see what happens. If I eat a slice of bread and feel fine, okay. But if it makes me feel bloated, sluggish, or sleepy, I’ll know it’s too much starch for my body to metabolize efficiently. That’s what the 2-Week Test is all about; it’s designed to reactivate your natural diagnostic panel, so that instead of relying on some diet book to tell you what to eat, you’ll get instant, accurate feedback from your own body. “You’ll actually know what it feels like to have normal insulin levels and optimal blood sugar,” Maffetone explains.
So when I get home, I go shopping. I fill the cart with steak, fish, broccoli, avocados, canned squid, tuna, tomato juice, romaine lettuce, sour cream, and cashews—tubs of cashews, because they’ll be my go-to temptation snuffer. Also on the “yes” list: eggs, cheese, whole cream, dry white wine, Scotch, and salsa.
But no fruit, breads, rice, potatoes, pasta, or honey. No beans, which means no tofu or soy of any stripe. No chips, no beer, no milk or yogurt. No deli ham or roast beef, either, since they’re often cured in sugar. Turkey was fine if you cooked it yourself, but even then you have to be careful. I thought I’d hit the perfect multi-meal solution when I came across a stack of small Butterballs in the frozen food section, and only as an afterthought did I check the label and discover they were sugar-injected.
“Garbanzos are pretty moderate glycemically,” I emailed Maffetone after I’d done a little research on my own. “So I’d like to lobby for hummus.”
“Rule #1 of Step #1,” he replied. “No lobbying.”
The trick, I soon discovered, is solving one meal at a time. Breakfast was easy: by some whim I discovered that those $1.98 cans of squid from the Mexican food aisle are great in an omelette, so I’d fry up one of those, douse it with salsa, and be a happy man the rest of the morning. I kept cashews and spicy meat-sticks on hand throughout the day as snacks, and learned to add a splash of whole cream to my coffee instead of half-and-half. Lunch and dinner were only borderline crises when I got distracted and let myself get ravenous before planning what to eat.
By the end of Day 2, I felt like I had things under control—and then I stepped outside.
STEP 2: THE 180 FORMULA
I was barely a half-mile into an easy run and whoa! Why was my head spinning? I walked it off and began trotting again, but after another half-mile, I was bone-weary and panting. I wasn’t tired, exactly; whenever I stopped running, I felt strong and rested and ready to go. But as soon as I began to push a little, my energy drained and that damn beeping started all over again.
For Step 2, Maffetone had me wearing a runner’s heart rate monitor, a basic model with a chest strap and wristwatch console. The alarm was set to go off just before I hit my fat-burning threshold, which I’d calculated according to Maffetone’s quick-and-easy equation. To figure out your fat-burning zone, you subtract your age from 180 and then fine-tune by this scale: