Daily Cylical Ketogenic Diet - With Meal Plan
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What Is the Daily Cylical Ketogenic Diet (DCKD)?
The Daily Cyclical Ketogenic Diet (DCKD) is a modification to the Standard Ketogenic Diet (SDK) that combines all the advantages of SDK, Intermittent Fasting, and Smoothies and removes all the disadvantages.
In business terms, we call this “synergy”.
“Synergy” happens when things are combined to create a greater value than the sum of the individual parts.
For example, let’s say you have 2 people starting a nutrition website … a Doctor and Website Developer. Neither could accomplish this individually, but together they can. Together, they create more value than they do separate. That is synergy.
It’s like saying 1 + 1 = 3. Individually, the answer is obviously 2, but when combined, they create additional value beyond what either could achieve individually.
This is how DCKD works. Individually, each of these diets have advantages and disadvantages. But when you combine them, we are able to combine the biggest advantages while removing the biggest disadvantages.
This article will walk you through a little bit about the Standard Ketogenic Diet, Intermittent Fasting, and Superfood Smoothies. And then in the last section, we will provide you with 3 meal plan options to follow.
How DCKD Modifies the Standard Ketogenic Diet
The Standard Ketogenic Diet will help you lose weight. It primarily does this through hunger control. When you are on keto, the #1 thing that most people notice is that they don’t feel hungry. When that happens, you’re going to consume fewer calories and lose weight.
Keto may also help with brain/cognition health, type 2 diabetes, and other things. However, the #1 issue with the Standard Ketogenic Diet (SKD) is a complete lack of focus on micronutrients (e.g. vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants).
Micronutrients are so important to your health for reasons that go well beyond fat loss. It’s extremely hard to get the proper amount of micronutrients in when doing SDK, because the most nutrient dense foods are fruits, vegetables, and superfoods … which are high in carbs and only allowed in very small amounts by the SKD.
DCKD modifies SDK by incorporating 1 meal per day that is dense in micronutrients (e.g. a superfood smoothie). By doing this, you can eliminate so many of the biggest disadvantages of the SDK, while also retaining most of the biggest advantages of the SDK.
By adding in 1 micronutrient dense meal per day, you consume high antioxidant foods that have countless benefits to your health. And that is the primary advantage to superfood smoothies and why the DCKD allows this.
In DCKD, you are in ketosis for ~20 hours per day and out of ketosis for ~4 hours per day.
Here’s a visual of how the DCKD differs from the SKD:
Intermittent Fasting
Intermittent fasting is essentially skipping 1 meal per day / consuming all of your calories for the day within a 6-8 hour window.
Many people skip breakfast, eat lunch at noon, and eat dinner at 6pm. That routine means you will eat all your calories within a 6-hour window and will be fasting for the other 18 hours.
It’s really not difficult to follow at all, but it can take ~2 weeks for your body to adjust to it. You just need to adjust your window to whatever will work best with your schedule.
For example, actor Terry Crews eats all of his calories within an 8-hour window: from 2pm – 10pm. This means Terry is fasting for 16 hours per day.
Benefits of Intermittent Fasting:
- Great for Fat Loss (works via calorie restriction)
- Good for Anti-Aging
- Good for the Brain
To lean more about Intermittent Fasting, we wrote a separate article on it: View Article
For this article, it’s important to understand that there are a lot of benefits to Intermittent Fasting, but one of the cons is that there isn’t much structure or instruction beyond skipping meals. When you combine Keto with Intermittent Fasting, you end up with a meal plan that helps curb your appetite, which helps make intermittent fasting easier to do.
Superfood Smoothies
The Ketogenic Diet will help you lose weight by keeping you full longer and making you less hungry. Intermittent Fasting will help you lose weight by calorie restriction.
I want to also include a strategy that will target optimal health, beyond just fat loss. To do so, I need to have you consume a lot of micronutrients – which will help you in more ways than weight loss. Since micronutrients are primarily found in fruits and vegetables that will take you out of ketosis, we want to make the most of it by having you consume the most nutrient dense foods there are: superfoods.
This is going to make your diet plan not just about fat loss, but about better health. It will also help you succeed in your fat loss plan. When your body has the nutrition is needs, it runs much better and more efficient … which is extremely helpful when you are trying to lose weight. This is going to make your plan a much healthier plan than any other.
Many superfoods are sold in capsule form. However, it’s really hard to get an effective dose of superfoods by taking capsules. 1 capsule is just ½ gram of powder where 1 tablespoon is ~10 grams.
In other words – I can ask you take 40 capsules of superfoods or ask you to just add 2 tablespoons of superfoods to your smoothie. Which is easier?
Aside from making it really easy to consume superfoods, there are additional reasons why I promote superfood smoothies:
Most people do not consume enough fruits, vegetables, and superfoods. Smoothies make it very easy to do so.
Smoothies are easy to follow long term:
- Easy / fast to make
- Tastes good
- Not expensive
Not controversial. Supports eating real, whole foods. Everyone agrees with eating more fruits and vegetables.
I can create recipes that use specific foods to target your health problems. This is the easiest way to get you to eat a variety of these foods on a daily basis.
Variety is important. Different foods have different benefits. Superfood smoothies make it very easy to consume a wide variety of beneficial foods all at once.
Picking a Superfood Smoothie Recipe:
There are 2 good ways to choose a recipe:
- Based on taste. Make the recipes you enjoy the most. If you enjoy them, then you are likely to follow it long-term.
- Based on health goals. Make the recipes that contain the ingredients which may benefit your health goals the most.
If you are new to making superfood smoothies, I would recommend starting by making a recipe based on taste. Because the most important thing is for you enjoy the smoothie. If you don’t enjoy it, then you won’t follow it long term.
If you’re an experienced smoothie maker or you have a health issue that you want to target, then I’d recommend making smoothies based on health goals.
Read this article for more information and guidance on picking smoothie recipes based on either taste or health goal: Link to Article
Daily Cyclical Ketogenic Diet Meal Categories
Let’s now get back to the Daily Cyclical Ketogenic Diet. As mentioned in the overview, we are going to combine the best of the Standard Ketogenic Diet, Superfood Smoothies, and Intermittent Fasting.
The DCKD meal plan will consist of consuming 3 different types of meals:
1. Ketone Booster
2. Healthy Keto Meal
3. High Micronutrient
Ketone Booster Meal:
This meal category is meant to boost your ketone levels and provide you with energy.
Ketone Boosters are high in Medium Chain Fatty Acids (MCT’s), which your body is more easily able to convert into Ketones than other types of fat or stored fat.
The most common Ketone boosters are:
- Keto Coffee (aka “Bulletproof” coffee) View Recipe Here
- Matcha Keto Latte
- “Fat Bombs”
“Fat Bombs” is a creative nickname people came up with for a whole series of various ketone boosting recipes. We don’t provide recipes for fat bombs, but can you can Google “Fat Bomb Recipes” to find a bunch of recipes.
We propose adding superfoods to this recipe to make them “Superfood Keto Coffee” and “Superfood Matcha Tea Latte”.
Superfoods like Cacao, Cinnamon, and Maca are the most common superfoods added to Keto Coffee.
There are 2 primary reasons we recommend adding superfoods:
- Superfoods are dense in micronutrients. One of the biggest issues with the Standard Ketogenic Diet is a lack of micronutrients. Adding superfoods to your Ketone Booster will help overcome this gap.
- Superfoods are high in antioxidants, which remove free radicals from your body. The reason this is so important for the Keto Diet has to do with LDL (“Bad”) Cholesterol. Keto Coffee and Keto Matcha Latte are very high in saturated fats – which can raise cholesterol levels. When LDL Cholesterol interacts with a free radical, the free radical will oxidize the LDL Cholesterol and turn it into Oxidized LDL (“Very Bad”) Cholesterol. This is bad because Oxidized LDL Cholesterol is what can clog your arteries. By adding high antioxidant superfoods to these drinks, you are helping reduce your free radicals, thus lowering the ability of LDL Cholesterol from turning into Oxidized LDL Cholesterol.
Keto Coffee and Keto Matcha Latte are very high in saturated fats – which can raise LDL (“Bad”) cholesterol levels.
Free Radicals can turn LDL Cholesterol into Oxidized LDL (“Very Bad”) Cholesterol.
This is very bad because Oxidized LDL Cholesterol is what can clog your arteries.
Anxioxidants help remove free radicals from your body, thus lowering the ability for LDL Cholesterol to turn into Oxidized LDL Cholesterol.
This is why we recommended adding high antioxidant superfoods to these drinks; and to the Ketogenic Diet in general.
Healthy Keto Meal:
This meal category is meant to keep you in ketosis. You want to follow the standard SKD macronutrient breakout for this meal (70-80% fat calories, 15-20% protein calories, and <10% carb calories) for this meal.
Remember: for the keto diet, we are looking for very low carb, high fat, and low protein. This is because fats are converted into Ketones while protein is not.
Here are a list of foods we recommend:
- Best Seafood with Low Mercury: anchovy, butterfish, catfish, clam, crab, crawfish, croaker (Atlantic), flounder, haddock (Atlantic), hake, herring, jacksmelt, mackeral (north Atlantic), mullet, oyster, plaice, pollock, salmon (canned or wild), sardine, scallop, shrimp, sole (Pacific), calamari, trout (freshwater), whitefish, whiting.
- Best Dairy with Low Protein (try to find grass fed dairy): Butter, ghee, heavy whipping cream, cream cheese, sour cream, brie, cheddar and parmesan cheese
- Best Nuts and Seeds: Almonds, black cumin seeds, black sesame seeds, brazil nuts, chia seeds, flax seeds, macadamia nuts, pecans, pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds
- Best Fruits: Avocados, Olives
- Best Vegetables: Asparagus, broccoli, Brussel sprouts, cabbage, cauliflower, celery, cucumbers, eggplant, any greens, kale, garlic, mushrooms, onion, parsnips, peppers, rutabaga, tomatoes, zucchini
- Best Meats: Bacon (nitrate free), Grass fed beef, lamb, wild game meats
- Best Fats and Oils: Coconut oil, cocoa butter, grass fed butter or ghee, lard or tallow from organically raised animals, duck fat, extra virgin olive oil (don’t heat)
- Best Sweeteners: Stevia
There are millions of keto-approved recipes that you can find online as well. Just be smart when choosing the recipe and keep the above list in mind.
High Micronutrient Meal:
This meal is meant to pack in healthy antioxidants and micronutrients. It’s this meal that we recommend a superfood smoothie.
This is what separates the SKD from the DCKD. This meal would not be allowed by the SKD because it will naturally have a higher carb count than what would be approved by a standard ketogenic meal. This meal will take your out of ketosis for part of your day.
In our opinion, the benefits far outweigh the cons of taking your body out of ketosis for ~4 hours per day; and if you have read the book up to this point, you understand this too.
The length of time you will be out of ketosis for will vary based on how many net carbs you consume during this meal.
After eating this meal, your metabolism will first burn all the calories from the carbs. While your metabolism is burning the carbs, you are out of ketosis. Once you have burned those calories, you will be back in ketosis.
Make sense?
How long will you be out of ketosis for? That depends on 2 things:
- Your metabolism
- How many net carbs you consume in this meal.
Example …
- Let’s say your metabolism burns the average 2,000 calories per day. That means you burn 83 calories per hour on average.
- Now let’s say you drink a nutrient dense superfood smoothie that contains 230 total calories. Of those total calories, 128 are from net carbs.
Your metabolism will start burning those 128 calories from net carbs right away. And if you average burning 83 calories per hour, then it would take you roughly 91 minutes to burn those calories from net carbs. This means that you will be out of ketosis for 91 minutes.
The more calories from net carbs you consume, the longer you will be out of ketosis.
If you are more of a math person, below is an image of how you can calculate this:
Incorporate an Intermittent Fast:
When you are not eating, you are fasting. Every morning when you wake up, you are in a fasted state (hence where the word “breakfast” comes from … “break your fast”).
There are a lot of benefits to fasting and the longer you fast for, the greater the benefits you will receive (up to an extent, of course).
We recommend trying to squeeze all your calories for the day within a 6-8 hour window, so you are fasting for 16 – 18 hours per day.
For example, if you consumed all your calories between 10am – 6pm, then you consumed all your calories in an 8 hour window and are fasting the other 16 hours. The tight the window, the more benefits from fasting that you will receive.
In a fasted state, you will be burning stored fat for energy – thus a fasted state is also a state of ketosis.
In fact, fasting is the original Ketogenic Diet. The Ketogenic Diet was created to try to mimic the mental state of the body that occurs when you’re fasting (e.g. having your brain running off ketones instead of glucose).
Daily Cyclical Ketogenic Diet Meal Plan Options
Overview
We provide you with 3 meal plan options: a beginner option, an intermediate option, and an advanced option. Pick one and get started today.
You can pick any option you want. Any and all have massive benefits to weight loss, overall health, as well as anti-aging.
I would love for you to get to the intermediate or advanced options, as they incorporate short-term fasting (which has many health benefits, especially for weight loss and anti-aging).
However, do not feel you must do the advanced option in order to achieve results. ALL options will give you amazing results.
Option 1: Beginner's Option - Eat 3x Per Day
This option is a great option to start with if you are not used to short-term fasting or if you typically eat a high-carb foods (which is extremely common for most people).
In this option, we are hitting you with a few different strategies:
- Increasing your antioxidant and nutrient intake via superfoods (either via superfood keto coffee and/or superfood smoothies). This is going to help you in countless ways.
- Reducing your carb intake by replacing some of your carbs with healthy fats. This is going to reduce your hunger / appetite and also train your metabolism to more efficiently use fat as an energy source instead of just carbs. This will result in a better fat burning metabolism.
- Reducing your calories
This option may take 2-3 weeks to adjust to … especially if you are used to eating frequently. As you get used to this meal plan, start eating your breakfast later and your supper earlier. This will squeeze all the calories you eat into a shorter time period – which has weight loss and aging benefits. In addition, it will help prepare you for the Intermediate Option if you choose to advance to that option.
The meal plan for this option is displayed in the image below. You can also print this article by printing the print icon at the top of this article.
Option 2: Intermediate Option - Eat 2x Per Day
This option could also be called, “the short-term, intermittent fasting” option.
In this option, you will be eating only 2x per day during the week instead of 3x. By doing so, you end up doing a short-term fast of ~18 hours for each of these days.
As an example, let’s say you choose to eat your two meals at noon and 6pm. This means that all your calories for the day are being consumed within a 6-hour window. The other 18 hours, you are fasting. The shorter the window, the longer your body will be in a fasting state, and the more benefits you will receive.
In the advanced option (discussed later), we are going to pick a couple days where we expand the fasting time period from 18 hours to 24 – 36 hours.
You may struggle with skipping a meal for the first 2-3 weeks due to the fat adaption period (discussed previously in this book). This feeling will eventually go away. We are going to force your metabolism to re-learn how to burn your stored fat as an energy source.
Once your metabolism figures out how to use your own stored fat as an energy source, intermittent fasting becomes easy. This is the point where we call your body, “fat adapted”.
Example times when I eat on Monday – Friday:
Example 1: I used to eat my first meal for lunch around noon and then ate my second meal at 6 pm after work. (This is where the original 6-hour window came from)
Example 2: Then my work scheduled changed, so I changed my meal timing to this:
- I drink a cup of black coffee at 7:30am. I exercise for 30 minutes at 8 AM.
- Around 9am, I drink a superfood smoothie and ½ cup of raw nuts. Sometimes I save the raw nuts for later and eat them around noon.
- Between 9am – 4pm, I’m at work and usually drink water and green ice tea.
- I eat my last meal around 4pm. I find that eating this meal earlier helps me sleep better at night.
I will say this again, you have to find what works for you! The success is in your Daily Routine so make sure your Daily Routine is something you enjoy and works for you.
Option 3: Advanced Option - Longer Fasting Periods
The intermediate option contained intermediate fasting periods of 18 hours, 4 days per week (Monday – Thursday). In this advanced option, we are going to add 1-2 days per week of a longer fasting period of 24 – 36 hours.
Like the other options, you may struggle for the first couple weeks while you adjust, but it’s gets very easy once you are adjusted.
This option is my favorite because it incorporates several key points:
- A daily fast
- A longer fast, 1-2 days per week
- Superfood Smoothies
- Superfood Keto Coffee
Here’s an example of my eating schedule when I eat 2x per day:
Example 1: I used to eat my first meal for lunch around noon and then ate my second meal at 6 pm after work. (This is where the original 6-hour window came from)
Example 2: Then my work scheduled changed, so I changed my meal timing to this:
- I drink a cup of black coffee at 7:30am. I exercise for 30 minutes at 8 AM.
- Around 9am, I drink a superfood smoothie and ½ cup of raw nuts. Sometimes I save the raw nuts for later and eat them around noon.
- Between 9am – 4pm, I’m at work and usually drink water and green ice tea.
- I eat my last meal around 4pm. I find that eating this meal earlier helps me sleep better at night.
On the days of the longer fasting periods where I only eat once for the day, I will typically choose breakfast as my 1 meal where I drink a Superfood Keto Coffee and eat an omelet consisting of 2 eggs, ½ avocado, onion, and cheese. This meal does an excellent job of killing my hunger and makes it very easy for me to fast until the following day.
I will say this again, you have to find what works for you! The success is in your Daily Routine so make sure your Daily Routine is something you enjoy and works for you.
7 Comments
(5)
heather traner July 21, 2018 at 7:06 am
Hi! I love the thought of cyclical keto diet. But if you take yourself out of ketosis with a smoothie, then wouldn’t it take another two days to get back in? Not a couple of hours? And do we just have that smoothie alone or have it with something else? The whole point is to have micronutrient dense foods for a few hours or just one meal? And then your body will snap back into ketosis for dinner and fast? Is the two-plus time on getting into ketosis more common for people who aren’t fat-adapted and once you’re fat-adapted, you can go in and out much easier?
thanks!!
Matt Fitzgerald July 21, 2018 at 3:17 pm
Hi Heather – thanks for your questions.
1.) No – it will not take you out of ketosis for a couple days. “Ketosis” happens when your body no longer has carbs to use as an energy source. Lets say you consume 300 calories from carbs. Lets also say that your body burns the average 2,000 calories per day (or 83 calories per hour). When you eat 300 calories from carbs, your body will move out of ketosis to start burning those 300 calories. That will take approximately 3.5 hours. At that point – you have no carbs left to burn and your body will need to switch back over to burning fat for energy – hence you will be back in ketosis. How long you are out of ketosis for just depends on how many calories from carbs you consume on your micronutrient-dense meal.
2.) We typically have the smoothie alone as a meal, but you can do whatever you like best. The primary point to this is that 1 meal per day should be filled with micronutrients since they will be lacking in your ketogenic-approved meals.
3.) Going in and out of ketosis doesn’t have anything to do with being fat adapted. You go in ketosis anytime your body no longer has calories from carbs to burn … which is going to be the same for everyone. The primary benefit of being fat adapted is that you stop becoming hangry. When you are not fat adapted, your body will make you suffer when your belly is empty because it isn’t good at switching energy sources from food to stored fat. When you become fat adapted, your body will simply switch it’s energy source to your stored fat when your belly is empty.
moamed khodair July 7, 2018 at 7:43 am
thank you
moamed khodair July 5, 2018 at 6:30 am
in open day can i eat carb and sugar?
Matt Fitzgerald July 5, 2018 at 1:29 pm
Hi Moamed – yes, you can eat whatever you want.
Here are a couple tips:
1.) If you find you are not losing weight as fast as you’d like, be more careful on your calorie intake on these open days. Obviously the fewer calories you consume, the more weight you will lose.
2.) If you find that it is difficult to get back on track after the open days, then I’d try to have some limits on your carbs on these open days and not go carb crazy.
Chris Moore October 12, 2017 at 8:24 pm
A standard keto diet allows for vegetables for micro nutrient already. Only avoid starchy ones mostly out of the ground. Dark leafy greens, cruciferous vegetables, cabbage etc should be an important part of every keto diet that is worth a shit. Fruits are more taboo because of how they process in the liver..though after being fat adapted with a good metabolism a few berries here and there or in a smoothie should not do much harm. Veges will not kick you out of ketosis..I eat them with every meal, its not just meat and fat unless you enjoy only having bowel movements twice a week.
Matt Fitzgerald October 14, 2017 at 10:01 am
Thanks for your comment, Chris.
The Standard Keto Diet allows for just 5-10% of your calories to come from carbs. Because most micro-nutrients are found in fruits and vegetables (carbs), many people who are following the Standard Ketogenic Diet are deficient in micros. That is the problem we are trying to solve.
We tried creating a few “keto-approved” smoothie recipes that would not take you out of ketosis, but they were horrible tasting. So the reality is -> if you drink a smoothie, you will take your body out of Ketosis and ‘break’ the standard keto diet’s rules. If you are eating veggies with every meal, you may also be breaking the rules of the Standard Keto Diet (if those veggies are accounting for more than 5-10% of the total calories of the meal).
We feel this is the biggest flaw to the Standard Ketogenic Diet … the 5-10% allowance does not give enough room for getting an adequate amount of fruits and vegetables – thus creating a deficiency in micros.
Because of this, we recommend the Daily Cyclical Ketogenic Diet – which will take your body in and out of ketosis each day, so you can have 1 meal a day that is high in micros; yet be in the ketogenic state for 18+ hrs/day.