Get Slim For Life

Break your bad habits now - and start a smart eating plan today. Your goal: strip the fat and reveal your muscles 
IN YOUR PREPARATION FOR A BEACH-READY BODY, there’s one simple lesson you need to take on board:

the less body fat you carry, the better your abs will show. And it makes sense to start your summer beach-body programme long before shirtless weather arrives. Your goal is to strip your winter flab so your core work can show through.

Start by performing triage on your eating habits. “Target one or two behaviors that you can make the most difference by changing,” says dietician Jennifer McDaniel. Take a moment to think about your typical day, and pick your worst habit (weekend pig-outs, salty snacks or beer). Then work for a week c eliminating that habit.

The following week, move to your next-weakest link. We have only so much will power, a recent study in the journal Psychology and Health shows. That’s why trying to break several habits at once can be overwhelming: you drain your capacity for power — what researchers call “self-regulation”, says study auth - Kathleen Martin Ginis, a professor of kinesiology at McMastity in the US. This is one time when being too ambitious c

On the next page we list six bad eating habits. Don’t become discouraged — lots of men fall victim to these. See how many of them you recognize in yourself, and try the easy fixes we’ve gathered from experts. Then add a few good habits and attitude adjustments that just make sense. In no time you’ll feel confident on the beach and looking good with your shirt on or off.

Guy habit 1Skipping meats or snacks

Not eating can mess with your body’s ability to control your appetite. But it also destroys will power, which is just as damaging. “Regulating yourself is a brain activity and your brain runs on glucose,” says dinis. If you skip breakfast or a healthy snack, your brain doesn’t have the energy to say no to the inevitable binge.

So skipping a feed helps turn us into gluttons at night. Your starving brain “just doesn’t have the fuel it needs to keep you on track, monitoring your diet”.

Break it This one’s easy. Spread your kilojoules out into three meals of about 2 l0OkJ each, and two snacks of 420 to 840kJ each, says Dr Liz Applegate, director of sports nutrition at the University of California. Most men who are trying to lose weight still need at least 7 500 to 9 200kJ a day, says Applegate. More important, change your mindset, she says. Think I’m going to start a new routine, not I’m going to restrict myself Restriction leads to overeating.

Guy habit 2

Speed-eating

Use the non-diet approach: you’re not denying yourself food, you’re just eating it more slowly. Savoring it. Allowing your body some time so you don’t keep eating when you’re full.

In an experiment published in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism, 17 healthy men ate one-and- a-quarter cups of ice cream. They either scarfed it in five minutes or took half an hour to savor it. According to study author Dr Alexander Kokkinos, levels of fullness-causing hormones (called PYYand GLP-1), which signal the brain to stop eating, were higher among the 30-minute men. In real life, the scarfers wouldn’t feel as full and could be moving on to another course.

Break it Your body is trying to tell you something, so give it a chance. Slow down and enjoy your food, says Kokkinos. Put away the newspaper and turn off the TV. Try this breathing trick from The Yoga Body Diet: inhale while counting slowly to five; exhale and count slowly to five; repeat three to five times before eating. A study in a 2009 issue of Journal of the American Dietetic Association shows that yoga

increases mindful eating and results

in less weight gain over time.

Guy habit 3

Pigging out on weekends

Weekend feasts can cause trouble beyond Sunday. In a recent study in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, researchers used rats to examine the effects of palmitic acid on leptin, a hormone that helps regulate appetite. Palmitic acid is found in saturated fat, an ingredient often featured in your favorite weekend grub.

“We found that within three days, the saturated fat blunts or blocks the ability of leptin to regulate food intake and body weight,” says study author Deborah Clegg. So a Friday to Sunday of burgers, chips and chicken wings may prime your brain to overeat on Monday.

Break it You don’t have to go cold turkey (though turkey on whole-wheat is always smart). McDaniel suggests that your reward for a healthy week should be one cheat meal, not an entire weekend of them. After all, having an all-you-can-eat weekend is like eating poorly for nearly 30 percent of your week. That means you’d be eating well just 70 percent of the time. We call that a C minus. Do you really want below- average results?

Guy habit 4 Gorging on salty snacks

Sodium is insidious — it causes us to eat unconsciously. It adds up fast: popcorn at the movies, chips during the game, peanuts at the bar.

Break it Salt cravings go away after a couple of weeks on a reduced-salt diet, says Dr Thomas Moore of Boston University Medical Centre. Not many men can replace their favourite snacks with carrots or celery, but give them a try: the crunch maybe what you crave. Otherwise, try small amounts of low-sodium chips and pretzels. As you’re cooking a dish, skip the salt and, if you want, add just a dash at the table. “Salt added to the surface of a food item is far more noticeable than the same amount of salt cooked into a recipe,” says Moore. A slow reduction of your salt habit pays off in fewer cravings, he says.

Guy habit 5

Drinking

Alcohol, that is. Here’s an exercise to start tonight: write down how much beer, wine and other drinks you consume in a week. (Use that cocktail napkin.) You may surprise yourself. Calculate the kilojoules and expect another surprise. A reasonable-sounding two beers a night can mean more than 8300kJ a week — almost an extra day’s worth. It can take more than two hours of running to burn that off. You call that a weight-loss plan? Besides the empty kilojoules, booze undermines your will power, says dietician Dawn Jackson Blatner. This leads to impulse orders of, say, slap chips.

Break it Try quitting — for just a week. Check your weight and how your pants fit. See if you can live on less. When you do drink, switch to lower-carb dry red wine (about four grams of carbohydrates compared with almost 13 in a regular beer) or light, low-carb beer.