The 1990s have been dubbed the “The Bubble Decade,” a reference to the once-inflated share prices of technology stocks. Alas, it applies equally to America’s expanding waistline. Now the bubble has burst, and companies across the nation are shrinking to survive. Perhaps it’s time to jettison the excess baggage you’ve been carrying around your waistline as well?
As many of those corporations have learned, getting lean and mean again usually requires going back to basics. Whether you’re obese, somewhat overweight, or searching for traces of the six-pack abs that faded a few Coronas back, shaping up means rediscovering exercise and better eating. This chapter is your map back.
So how did we get lost in the first place? To paraphrase President Clinton, it’s the calories, stupid. Thanks largely to modern food-processing technology, way too many calories are way too accessible to way too many people. The percentage of U.S. men categorized as obese nearly doubled—to 20 percent—between 1991 and 2000, according to the National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion. A recent National Health and Nutrition survey says that 31 percent of all Americans can now be classified as obese. (Expand that cohort to include the merely overweight, and the percentage balloons to more than 60.) Grimmer still is this number: More than 90 percent of the people who diet away excess pounds gain them back later.
The problem isn’t lack of information—there’s certainly no shortage of that. Rather, it’s that the smorgasbord of diets and advice inundating the market has had little impact on the gut of America. Many of those books are marketing driven—they use hooks and extreme programs, creating diets that are simplistic and one-dimensional. This hook-driven approach may sell books, but it doesn’t give you the information that you need to really lose the weight and keep it off. My approach may not be sexy, and it certainly isn’t a simple, quick fix. Yet I can promise you something that other diets cannot: The advice you are about to read is based on real science conducted in real labs on real people who lost weight and kept it off. It’s the stuff that works.
Before you learn how to lose weight, however, you first must know how your body works from the inside out and how you can use that information to your advantage. Keep reading.
Here’s the simplest part. To lose weight, you must create an energy imbalance by consuming fewer calories than you burn. Of course, things are a bit more complex than that. Eat too few calories and you risk slowing your metabolism, for one. Eat the right types of calories and you can speed up your metabolism, coaxing your body to waste calories. Eat the wrong types of calories and you’ll feel hungrier on more food.
So, as you can see, weight loss is not as simple as cutting all of your meal sizes in half and calling it a day. To understand why, you must understand how your metabolism works; and to understand that, you must understand some basic terms.
Metabolism. This often-used but seldom-understood term refers to the chemical processes occurring within a living cell or organism that are necessary for the maintenance of life. In humans, much of that activity involves the breakdown of materials (i.e., calories) to provide the energy needed to keep that organism’s systems functioning; the remainder involves the synthesis of materials necessary for life.
Metabolic rate. The rate at which energy is produced in your body. It’s how much energy you burn per unit of work.
Basal metabolic rate. This is the amount of energy it takes to power your body’s involuntary processes, such as your heartbeat and kidney function. In other words, your basal metabolic rate equals the number of calories your body burns when you are lying on your back in a near-catatonic state. By providing you with enoughenergy to keep the nerves in your brain firing, it gives you enough to keep your lungs pumping, your heart beating, your organs functioning, and your immune system up and running.
Resting metabolic rate. People move, of course, so they burn more calories than their basal metabolic rate. Your basal metabolic rate plus the extra few calories you burn by getting up in the morning, going to the bathroom, and lying down again equals your resting metabolic rate. Resting metabolic rate only slightly exceeds your basal metabolic rate. Added to your resting metabolic rate are the calories that you expend for activity. The more you move, the more energy you burn. Sitting at a computer burns little; running a marathon burns a lot.
Thermic effect of food. Your body burns calories as it digests, absorbs, and processes food. Collectively, this is called the thermic effect of food. This expenditure is considerable, accounting for as much as 10 percent of the energy you burn in a day. Some foods take more energy for your body to break down than others, so gravitating toward foods with a high thermic effect can help boost your overall metabolism.
Leptin. This protein circulates in your bloodstream and, like the hormone insulin, is a key hormone in the weight-management equation. Leptin regulates your food intake as well as your body’s energy expenditure. When cells in your brain sense a rise in leptin, they signal other parts of your nervous system to turn down your appetite and turn up your metabolism. When researchers inject animal subjects with leptin, the critters lose weight through a suppression of their food intake and an increase in their metabolic rate and energy expenditure.
What’s happening in the animals—and perhaps in humans, as well—is that as the body senses it’s getting fatter, it cranks up the fat-burning process in response. Normally, leptin helps keep the body in a blissful state of homeostasis. If you eat a few too many calories, leptin rises, causing your metabolic rate to heat up and burn those calories off. Trouble is, in some people, the brain can become less responsive to increasing levels of leptin. So even though fat cells are filling up, the brain doesn’t react.
Body composition. A number of experts say that body composition (your ratio of lean tissue, such as muscle and bones, to fat) is in fact the most important predictor of metabolic rate. Particularly important is muscle, where energy is produced. Even when your muscles are not actively moving, they are burning calories as they break down and rebuild proteins. That’s why the more muscle you have, the easier it is to lose fat. Whether you’re sleeping, watching the Tour de France on TV, or pedaling in the race next to Lance Armstrong, the more muscle you have, the more calories you burn.
Your body composition has a huge impact on metabolic rate, and you can dictate your body composition to a large extent—that’s what a lot of this book is about.
Many other factors determine your rate of energy expenditure. Your gender has an influence; so do age, height, weight, and genetics. Yes, at least some of your metabolism is hardwired inside your DNA. I often see evidence of this in my private practice: I meet one guy who’s eating 3,500 calories a day, and then I meet another guy eating 2,500—and they look exactly the same. When it comes to metabolism, some guys are naturally faster and some guys are naturally slower, for reasons having to do with pituitary production and other primitive controls located in the brain stem.
Nutritionists agree that most diets aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on. They realize that the key to losing weight is adopting a sound, sustainable eating plan and then sticking with it, rather than opting for some wacko quick fix.
Diets don’t last. The problem with virtually all diets is the short-term mindset into which they feed. Most guys approach diets as an all-or-nothing proposition. Rather than making small, even incremental changes in lifestyle that can last a lifetime, diets encourage you to turn your life inside out for two weeks or so. Yet once those two weeks are over and you return to your old habits, guess what? Your body returns to its former state as well. If there’s a rule of thumb to be had in this regard, it’s that small changes last and big ones don’t. Saying that you’ll change everything you’re doing wrong starting on Monday morning and straight-line it from there might sound impressive—and earn you some pats on the back—but it doesn’t change your underlying behavior patterns. It’s the slow, steady route that ultimately leads to success.
Diets make you hungry. Diets typically treat fat loss as a function of nutrition only, when training is equally important. The diet world is about tearing down, and sports nutrition is about building up. In the The Powerfood Nutrition Plan program, you’ll lose weight by creating a calorie deficit—burning more calories than you eat. You’ll create that deficit, however, mostly through training and not through drastic dieting. The calories you burn in the weight room added to the metabolism boost you get from muscle growth will kick your body into fat-burning mode—without making you hungry.
Diets make you tired. A chronic problem with diets is that so many of them are simply too low in calories. Because they don’t provide enough energy for you to do your workouts and accomplish everything else you need to do in a day, they’re a short-term solution at best. Even when weight-loss programs incorporate exercise—and, astonishingly, many don’t—they typically ask you to eat like a gerbil and then train like a hamster by running or cycling endlessly in place. You may shed a few pounds in the short run, but you’ll also forsake muscle, and the resulting metabolic downshift will soon take you back to square one. Whether it’s being done on a treadmill, a stationary bike, or a squeaky metal cylinder, endless cardio performed on restricted calories is a road to nowhere, literally and figuratively.
This is especially true if you’re following one of the ultra-low-carb diets that are so popular now. Carbohydrates are the primary energy source for physical activity, and decades of research has shown that low-carb diets don’t adequately support strenuous physical activity or athletic performance for extended periods of time. In contrast, a diet moderate in carbs will supply enough energy for the average Joe to stay active and still burn fat. Endurance exercise requires more carbohydrates than strength training does, but in neither case will training be optimized without sufficient carbs.
If you’re a reasonably health-conscious guy and you eat out now and then, you know full well that, nutritionally speaking, ordering at a restaurant is basically a crapshoot. The key, then, is to make sound ordering decisions. Following these six recommendations would be a good starting point.
When ordering pasta, choose the red sauce over a white alternative.
When ordering a steak, choose a lean cut such as sirloin.
Make your appetizer a large salad. Request low-fat dressing on the side.
Split your dessert with your dinner companion. Doing so can save you in the neighborhood of 300 calories and 20 grams of fat.
Keep your plate balanced with a steak, chicken breast, or other protein source; a steamed veggie; a salad; and a sweet potato or rice.
Go easy on the bread basket, or you’ll be sporting one yourself.
Diets cannibalize your muscle. Diets also tend to pay too little attention to supporting muscle mass during periods of caloric restriction. This is important for more than just aesthetic reasons. As I’ve already discussed, when you lose muscle, your basal metabolic rate drops, and you don’t burn as many calories.
Most guys try to burn off the fat first and then build the muscle. To do that, you have to lower your calories so far that you don’t have the energy to train hard in the gym. You burn more muscle than fat, lowering your metabolic rate and setting the stage for weight gain. On the other hand, if you follow The Powerfood Nutrition Plan, you’ll train hard, build muscle, burn fat, and keep the fat off forever because you have raised your metabolic rate.
Now that you know what doesn’t work, here are the 20 Powerfood Nutrition Plan keys to successful fat loss. Drum roll, please.
1. Fat is less important than calories. You may have heard that your body lays down fat whenever it has more calories than it needs to satisfy its energy requirements, and that it deposits fat calories more easily than it deposits calories from protein or carbs. Fat also has twice as many calories as protein and carbs do per unit volume—9 versus 4 per gram. So if you’re going to cut out an ounce of something from your diet, fat gives you the best bang for your buck.
That said, you could double your fat consumption, or halve it, and still lose weight. Calories offer no such latitude—they constitute the bottom-line number that will determine how much weight you gain or, in this case, lose. At the end of the day, to burn fat and shift the energy balance away from fat accumulation, you need to consume fewer calories than you expend. One pound of body fat equals 3,500 calories, so if your goal is to lose 20 pounds, you need to create a deficit of 70,000 calories over time.
Also, all fats aren’t created equal when it comes to fat storage. Remember fish oils and omega-3 fats, those healthy fats I wrote about at length in chapter 2? Well, they may play a role in downshifting the machinery of fat building. So don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. Focus on eating healthy fats such as nuts, seeds, nut butters, olives, olive oil, avocados, and fatty fish, and lay off the Snickers bars and Cinnabons. With a little calorie control, your abs and your arteries will both benefit.
2. Limit your intake of processed foods. The over-processing of food may be the most insidious contributor to America’s bulging waistline. Not only does it remove vitamins, minerals, phytochemicals, fiber, and other stuff that’s good for you, it also replaces them with fat and carbs like sugars. As a result, they’ll be absorbed into your bloodstream rapid-fire. As I’ve already discussed, high-glycemic-index carbs trigger a heavy release of the anabolic hormone insulin, which quickly lowers blood sugar, making you feel hungry and tired. And if you’re not a serious athlete needing to store those sugar calories for muscle fuel, you’ll put them into fat storage faster than you can say “spare tire.”
I recommend you consume your carbs in the form of whole grains, vegetables, fruits, beans, nuts, and seeds, which allow for timed release into the bloodstream without the overbearing insulin response. If you’re not sure whether a food falls into the highly processed category, here are some hints.
Just about all highly processed foods come in either a box or a bag and are often shrink-wrapped as well.
The ingredients label will probably read more like your high school chemistry homework assignments than something edible.
Processed foods don’t exist in nature; there’s no tree that grows Cheetos or Oreo cookies, for example. These foods had to be processed to assume their current form, and to manufacture them, companies need to add things that otherwise wouldn’t be there.
3. Eat smaller, more-frequent meals. “Wait a minute! Here I am trying to lose fat—and you’re telling me I can eat more?” Slow down, hot shot. Not more—more often. Take what you currently ingest, and along with making the other dietary adjustments recommended here, divide that consumption among five to seven meals a day.
The goal here is twofold: to keep your metabolism humming along, and to prevent the sort of intense hunger pangs that bring willpower to its knees. Once you get really, really hungry, you probably won’t be very selective. You’ll feel like you need to eat quickly because you’re starving, causing you to outrace the “fullness” signal that would normally get transmitted to your stomach. So not only will you eat pork rinds that have been sitting in the back of your cupboard since 1976, you’ll eat the whole bag. (Note: See “Calories In, Calories Out” on this page for more info on this.)
Excluding sleep, you should almost never go longer than 4 hours without eating. However, an even better interval is to eat every 2½ to 3 hours—literally like clockwork. If you’re eating three times a day, a good way to start changing your frequency is to take roughly the same amount of food and spread it over four or five meals.
When you eat consistently throughout the day, your muscles will have plenty of fuel for exercise, wherever it falls in your schedule. Eating at shorter intervals will also help flatten out excessive rises and dips in your blood sugar. As an added bonus, you burn calories every time you eat and digest food, so grazing, as it’s called, helps you chisel off a few extra calories versus consuming the same amount of food in larger, less frequent chunks.
4. Pump up your protein consumption. Diet fads are often like old girlfriends: They can be hard to shake, but sometimes the one that you thought was nutty turns out to be a princess instead.
Although I don’t promote super-low-carb/high-protein diets, this eating approach has taught us all a few important facts about protein and its importance in weight loss.
For instance, you need protein to build the muscles that boost your metabolism. When you restrict calories, your body will seek out protein to meet those energy demands unmet by carbs and fat. This siphoning-off process reduces the amount of protein available for muscle building. The effect will be magnified if your calorie restriction targets carbs especially (which is why super-low-carbohydrate diets aren’t the way to go). To provide an adequate amount of protein for all of the body’s important functions, you need to consume more protein. How much more? That depends on the source of the calorie deficit and the diet plan that you’re following. If you don’t exercise but you’re cutting calories in an attempt to lose weight, you need to eat about 60 percent more protein than someone who’s not trying to lose weight. A study conducted in Japan in 1987 estimated that on an energy-restricted diet, sedentary guys need to eat 0.6 grams per pound of body weight per day to achieve protein balance.
If you’re a vegetarian, you’ll need to eat even more. By the way, vegetarians also need more protein when they’re dieting. The plant proteins on which they rely are considered lower-quality proteins because they’re less-complete than animal proteins. Except for soy, all plant proteins lack adequate levels of at least one amino acid, and as a result, they must be combined with complementary plant proteins. All else being equal, vegetarians should consume up to 10 percent more protein than meat eaters should. They’ll need about 0.66 grams of protein per pound of body weight. (Remember, this research is on sedentary guys. If you’re exercising, expect to eat more.)
5. Trade fatty protein for lean. If you’ve got more body fat than you’d like, I’ll bet the farm that the culprit isn’t lean protein sources such as egg whites, chicken, turkey, and lean red meat. Most guys simply don’t sit in front of Monday Night Football and gorge themselves silly with skinless turkey breast meat.
In addition to helping build muscle, lean protein helps stoke the fat-burning fires—its thermogenic effect is 20 to 30 percent, compared with an anemic 3 to 12 percent for carbs. If you don’t have a blender and some protein powder already, buy them. When you crave a cheeseburger, fried chicken, or something else loaded with saturated fat, reach for a protein shake instead.
6. Try to spread your protein consumption throughout the day. To capitalize on the thermogenic effect of high-protein foods, consume them frequently throughout the day. This allows for the most efficient absorption of protein and helps maintain high levels of internal energy production to promote weight loss.
7. Control your portions by emphasizing low-energy-density foods. The National Weight Control Registry is a database that looks retrospectively at people who have successfully achieved and then maintained weight loss. When you sift through the data, two prerequisites for successful weight loss recur: on the expenditure side, exercise; and on the consumption side, portion control.
To control your portion sizes, favor foods that are low in something called energy density. The term refers to calories per gram, and the higher the energy density, the easier it is to overeat—more calories are packed into a smaller portion. Lower-energy-density foods include things like fruits and vegetables; higher-energy-density foods tend to be high in fat and sugar. (Energy density is different from nutrient density; vegetables, for example, have a low energy density but a high nutrient density.)
8. Don’t be an extremist concerning fats and carbs. On the one hand, you have the extreme diet advocated by the late Dr. Robert Atkins, which is very, very low in carbohydrates. On the other, you have the Dean Ornish extreme, where fewer than 10 percent of calories come from fat. Who’s right? The data suggest that the ideal probably lies somewhere between the two.
Carbs provide the lion’s share of the fuel for your workouts. If you cut carbs to the point where you can no longer sustain the desired intensity of your workouts—which is exactly what would happen if you followed some of these ultra-low-carb diets that are all the rage now—you’ll be shooting yourself in the foot.
Eat mixed meals, such as the ones outlined in the meal plans throughout this book, and at the end of the day, your diet will be balanced, which is what you’re after. Eating protein, fat, or both with carbs slows the latter’s absorption, preventing your blood sugar and insulin from going on roller coaster rides. If you have a bagel for breakfast, for example, find one with some whole grain in it or some seeds on top, and spread some all-natural peanut butter on it.
9. Reduce your liquid calories. I often hear from clients who complain, “I hardly eat anything, yet I’m still fat.” Often, once I do a little detective work, I realize they are telling the truth. They truly are not eating much, but they are drinking a lot. The calories in sodas and fruit juices—not to mention beer—add up quickly, often more quickly than most people realize. Liquid calories reach well beyond beverages, however. Salad dressings, sauces, and spreads account for more unconscious calorie consumption.
Your goal, then, should be to replace soft drinks with water, limit your intake of fruit juices, replace dressings with low-fat versions or something else entirely, and forego sweeteners altogether. Just switching from a regular 12-ounce Coke to the diet version can make a huge difference calorie-wise. A guy who drinks 10 Cokes a week can save 1,000 calories during that period just by switching to 5 regulars and 5 diets. That’s one-third of a pound right there. Just drinking water with your popcorn instead of having a belly-buster-size soda can save you an additional 500 calories.
Don’t booze it up, either. Drinking alcohol is a surefire way to add inches to your waist (they don’t call it a beer belly for nothing). Study after study has correlated increasing alcohol consumption with increasing waist measurements in men and women. Or you can just look at your Uncle Elmer, who kills a six-pack every weekend and hasn’t seen his shoes since LBJ was president.
10. Water yourself. Water is another key component of weight management. In a phrase, drink up. In fact, most guys who have managed to lose weight successfully—meaning once off, the fat stayed off—will tell you that they used water as an appetite suppressant. In fact, the well-known psychologist Kelly Brownell, Ph.D., who has been studying weight loss for years, developed a behavioral-modification program for weight loss that lists drinking water among its 10 best strategies.
Water does more than just make you feel full, however. As a healthy, noncaloric beverage, it provides a great alternative to the two or three cans of soda a day that many guys drink. That’s a great way to excise a couple hundred empty calories out of your diet.
Water also flushes out your internal systems. Most environmental contaminants are fat soluble, so, the reasoning goes, even when they enter the human body, they’re benign. They just go into fat cells and sit there. On a weight-loss diet, however, you’re mobilizing those fat stores and marching them into your bloodstream, where they need to go before being passed out of the body. The toxins reentering your bloodstream may have been sitting in storage, dormant, for a decade or more. Some of them—DDT and PCBs, for example—may actually slow your metabolism. You want to flush these out ASAP, and water is the key to doing just that.
When your body is well hydrated, it also helps your kidneys and liver go full tilt in processing fat and other toxins. In contrast, when you’re dehydrated, your liver has to work overtime to help the kidneys with detoxification, diminishing its ability to remove fat. Finally, when you drink plenty of water, your cells stay well hydrated, and cells that are well hydrated—or volumized, as the process is often called—promote more-efficient and more-effective protein metabolism. Because you’re trying to build muscle while you lose fat, the last thing you want to do is slow down protein metabolism. If you’re dehydrated, it will.
11. Eat more fiber. Eating 30 to 40 grams daily will keep you feeling fuller longer than you would otherwise. Not only does fiber occupy a lot of room in your stomach, but water-soluble fiber, the type found in oatmeal, apples, and beans, also absorbs some fat from your digestive tract, moving it through your system quickly enough to diminish your body’s ability to digest fat. Even if we’re talking about only an extra gram or two of fat every day, that’s another 9 to 18 calories that get eliminated along with the fiber you’re eating.
Fiber does more than escort excess calories out of your gut and help you to eat less. It also gives food a crisp, crunchy texture and a great mouth feel. When you’re hankering for something crunchy and you think you want potato chips or Fritos, try sprinkling some salt on a carrot or a piece of celery instead. Nowadays people treat saltshakers like they’re radioactive—it’s almost taboo to see one on a table—and that’s unnecessary. Unless you are a guy with hypertension (high blood pressure), don’t be scared of it. I’m not saying you should eat a saltshaker, but when you’re looking for that crispy, salty taste, lightly salted vegetables might do the trick.
Along with fibrous vegetables, good fiber sources include whole-grain breads, Shredded Wheat and Kashi cereals (there are others, too), fruits, and vegetables such as soybeans. Try something as simple as eating an orange rather than drinking a glass of orange juice. There’s a big difference in the way they’re metabolized. Because of the fiber in the orange, it takes a lot longer to digest it than a glass of juice.
You’ve probably heard mixed reviews on soy and its place in a man’s diet. Two things are important where weight loss and soy are concerned:
1. Because soybeans are high in fiber, they slow digestion and help control your insulin response. What’s more, they enhance fat oxidation by stimulating the release of the hormone glucagon in a way that animal sources don’t.
2. Nonvegetarians, who are trying to lose fat while holding onto muscle, should not rely heavily on soy to satisfy their protein needs. Even though soy has a complete distribution of essential amino acids to support health and growth in general, research is beginning to show that, when eaten as the sole source of complete protein, soy doesn’t support muscle building and repair as well as animal protein does. Some soy is great, but animal protein will help boost your results.
12. Consume starchy carbs earlier in the day, and water-rich carbs later. Your insulin sensitivity is highest in the morning. There appears to be a circadian rhythm to the way your body secretes insulin, and rates of insulin secretion fall around 6:00 P.M. At this point, your body becomes less capable of handling carbohydrates as efficiently. So frontload the breads, rice, oatmeal, potatoes, and other starchy complex carbs in your diet. Later in the day, begin to favor low-calorie vegetables, such as tomatoes, cucumbers, onions, broccoli, peppers, mushrooms, spinach, lettuce, and other so-called wet-carb sources. You can probably save a few calories from fat storage every day simply by giving your body different types of carbs at the times it can handle them most efficiently. Although that may not sound like much, every little bit helps.
13. Pull yourself together. Your lifestyle has to be compatible with fat loss. For example, if you don’t exercise, your dietary changes will produce limited results at best. In particular, getting enough sleep is a huge success factor in weight loss. Shortchanging it will slow your metabolism. Elevated stress is a problem, too, as it will stoke the release of the catabolic hormone cortisol. Marijuana and cocaine will depress your testosterone levels. All of the above will conspire to make your body lose muscle and store nutrients as fat. Not only do you need to watch what you eat, but you also must complement your food plan with a weight-loss-friendly life plan.
14. Reduce the amount of fast food you eat. Although it’s admittedly an extreme example, a Carl’s Jr. Double Western Bacon Cheeseburger saddles you with 900 calories and 49 grams of fat along with its 49 grams of protein. The average powder shake will give you the same amount of protein with 300 calories and a stingy 2.5 fat grams.
If you rely heavily on this prefab cuisine and want to lose body fat, you don’t necessarily have to go cold turkey, but you do have to cut back—way back. To that end, consider two complementary strategies. One is to say, “Look, when I go to McDonald’s, a Quarter Pounder with Cheese and fries is my thing, and I’m not messing with that.” If so, consider dropping the frequency of your drive-thrus from four times a week to two. Or you could say, “Instead of a Double Whopper with Cheese, I could have a Whopper with Cheese, and regular fries instead of supersize fries.” Switching from a bacon-cheeseburger to a grilled chicken sandwich sans mayo saves about 500 calories.
The dining-out dilemma isn’t limited to fast food. Restaurant meals often come in proportions that range from above average to obscene. Try brown-bagging your lunch for a few days instead of eating out. You’ll be amazed at how easy it is to go from a 1,000-calorie lunch to one containing 400 calories.
We’ve all seen them: Grown men who eat as if they were participating in one of those hot-dog-eating contests at the county fair—you know, the ones where some guy ends up shoving 19 wieners into his pie hole in under 2 minutes. Those displays involve an undeniable element of showmanship, but when a guy takes the same approach during a formal dinner party, he’s sealing his fate as a social pariah.
It makes you wonder where this impulse to speed-eat comes from. For many guys, it probably dates back to childhood. Maybe your parents ate like that, and you copied them. Maybe you shared the table with a pack of hungry siblings, whom you needed to outrace in order to get your fair share at mealtime. An overweight friend of mine knows exactly why he eats so fast: As a child, he had to sit around the table with a horribly dysfunctional family, so he ate as fast as he could to get away from them as quickly as possible. Old habits die hard, and as you age, the time pressures on your dining only grow. Eating on the run is the norm these days, which is one reason that fast food has become so ubiquitous.
Regardless of where the habit developed, eating too fast is a major contributor to being overweight. The faster you eat, the more calories you can shove in before your brain registers that you’re eating. During the same time that one guy is eating 300 or 400 calories, another guy might be shoving in 800. If you’re the 800 dude, you need to slow down, start chewing your food well, and pay more attention to what you’ve eaten. When you eat really fast, you get a feeling at the end that you don’t even know what you’ve eaten. You don’t even feel like you’ve had a meal, so you continue to look for food.
15. Eat slower. People who are overweight almost always eat so fast that they outrace their body’s fullness signals. They shove in a whole bunch of calories before their brain registers that they’ve eaten. If that sounds familiar, you need to train yourself to slow down. To do so, concentrate on what you are doing: eating. That means, at least until you get the hang of chewing and tasting your food, do nothing else while you eat—no television watching, no newspaper reading, no Internet surfing, and no report writing.
16. Eat fish often. When you study the experiences of most guys who have dieted successfully, one of the common denominators that jumps out, usually ranking among the top-five factors, is eating more fish. For many years, nutritionists assumed you lost weight when you ate fish because it has fewer calories, pound for pound, than red meat does. Now, however, it appears that reasons go above and beyond calories.
Most important, the type of fat found in fish appears to enhance the efficiency of the hormone leptin. That’s one more reason that incorporating a daily meal of fatty fish like salmon, halibut, or shellfish may help decrease the size of fat cells and assist with fat loss.
17. Stick to the low end of the glycemic index. Carbs are all categorized according to a sliding scale, the glycemic index (GI). This index ranks each carbohydrate according to how quickly the body converts it to glucose and shuttles it into your bloodstream. The higher the number, the faster your body converts that food to glucose. You can find a good, user-friendly list of the glycemic index of foods on the Internet at www.glycemicindex.com.
Keep in mind that these numbers aren’t etched in stone, partly because human digestion varies by individual. Also, the digestion speed of any carbohydrate is affected by what it’s being digested with. Fiber, protein, and fat all tend to slow digestion. And you can forget gaining many benefits if you stuff yourself with any carb, even low-GI ones.
Regardless, diets containing largely low-GI foods promote fat loss better than those loaded with high-GI foods. This was demonstrated in a recent study published in the journal Diabetes Care. For five weeks, one group of guys ate carbs that were predominantly low GI, and another group ate high-GI carbs. The low-GI diet produced greater losses in abdominal fat and overall fat, and spared more muscle.
18. Switch from saturated and hydrogenated fats to monounsaturated fats. The kinds of fat you eat can influence your energy expenditure and body weight. Energy is released through heat production in a process called nonshivering thermogenesis, which is controlled by uncoupling proteins (UCP) in the cells of brown fat, white fat, and muscle. Researchers interested in finding out if diet can influence this process investigated possible dietary enhancements of thermogenesis in rats. They found that olive oil, which is high in monounsaturated fats, increased the activity of the UCPs, and hence of metabolic rates. Because of the short duration of the study, published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, no differences in body weight were recorded between the rats fed olive oil and those fed other fats. The authors speculate that because UCPs are found in the muscle of humans, this may pose a promising new area in obesity research.
19. Exercise. No surprise here, given what you’ve learned so far. Fat loss comes down to 50 percent training, 50 percent nutrition. It doesn’twork otherwise. In fact, the meal plans throughout this book are for physically active men. To be blunt, if you’re sedentary, none of this will work as well as it should. You’re not going to achieve the results that you want unless you exercise.
Why not? If you’re sedentary and you cut calories, you’ll start to lose more muscle than you want, your metabolic rate will dip, and you’ll be burning fewer calories, which will force you to cut calories even more. As you get thinner, you’ll actually be getting less toned and flabbier. The minute you add back calories, you’re going to get fat again—make that fatter.
Here’s yet another benefit of moderate exercise: It makes your body use protein more efficiently. In fact, you get more work out of each protein gram when you exercise at 40 to 50 percent of your max, even while dieting. If you want to lose weight by burning more calories through exercise rather than by cutting calories, you might not need much more protein.
When exercising at higher intensities, though, the same protein-efficiency effect doesn’t apply. In fact, exercising at 65 percent or more of your max while dieting may decrease protein efficiency, which would require even more consumption to compensate.
20. Avoid the fat-free and carb-free trap. Many guys read a label that says “fat-free ice cream,” and they think not only that it’s okay for them to eat it, but that they can have a double- or triple-size portion to boot. The snack foods and packaged cookies and cakes that are promoted as fat-free and carb-free and that come in strange colors and strange shapes are highly engineered foods. They may be fat-free thanks to Olestra and other fat replacements, but they’re chock-full of chemicals. The low-carb and carb-free products are just as high in calories, due to added fat and carb replacements. They’ve been taken apart and reassembled by some dude in a lab coat, not Mother Nature. The finished products are often so unnatural that I hesitate to call many of them food. They certainly don’t look like it.
One caveat to this anti-fat-free-food diatribe concerns people who have heart disease already, or who are at high risk of getting it. Those individuals, whose goal isn’t necessarily to lose body fat but to decrease the amount of fat in their diet, can benefit from these kinds of foods. The research has borne this out. For people sticking with a low-fat, low-cholesterol diet, fat-reduced foods can give them some variety that they otherwise couldn’t have. They’re happy just to have something that resembles whatever this food originally was, and they’re disciplined enough to not overeat it.
But for the general population, there are no data showing that most reduced-fat foods can help you lose weight. In no way should these products be considered health foods, no matter how manufacturers spin them. Just because they’re a little less unhealthy than they were before doesn’t mean they’re healthy.
In addition to all the added chemicals, these fat-free and reduced-fat products are often still quite high in carbohydrates because companies replace some of the fat with sugar. Worst of all, perhaps, are fat-free cakes and cookies. They taste nightmarishly bad, and after you’ve eaten them, you still won’t feel satisfied. You won’t have achieved the pleasure sensation you’re looking for. You will have consumed a bunch of calories and a lot of carbohydrates, but you’ll still want to go eat something else.
What you end up with are chemical-laden products with virtually the same number of calories as the products they’re replacing. However, they’re probably even higher in carbohydrates, which likely affects your fat-loss diet more negatively than the fat would have in the first place. How could that be? Because your insulin levels spike, and the calories convert to fat, rather than being used as energy or stored as glycogen in your muscles. When you eat fat and protein, your insulin levels barely change. So take a single-portion serving of the food that you really want rather than settle for its reduced-fat cousin.
There are a few exceptions to this rule. Examples include selected reduced-fat nonprocessed foods such as low-fat or fat-free yogurt, cream cheese, and milk, where the manufacturer has skimmed off some or all of that fat but left the underlying product essentially intact. They’ve siphoned off mostly saturated fats and left all the good parts. Baked chips rather than fried chips are also good: They really hit the spot for most guys, who often prefer the baked stuff to oily fried chips. The baked ones aren’t fat-free—there is a certain amount of natural fat in the corn—and they aren’t promoted as such. They’re very crunchy and tasty, and once you’re sticking them in salsa, it doesn’t make any difference taste-wise. Just remember: Don’t eat the whole bag.
I’ve saved possibly the most important weight-loss tactic until last. To shed fat, you must wean yourself off foods that contain an additive called high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS).
Far more insidious than reduced-fat foods is the rise of HFCS, a sweetener manufactured from cornstarch. Although corn syrups contain varying proportions of glucose and other simple sugars, HFCS starts out with a high proportion of glucose, which is then treated with an enzyme that converts part of that glucose to fructose, which is much sweeter. The result of this process is a very inexpensive replacement for traditional cane sugar. The HFCS found in beverages contains about 55 percent fructose, and the HFCS in some food products may contain up to 90 percent fructose.
The commercial use of HFCS began in the 1970s, and I first heard about it in 1980, while attending grad school. I was taking a course called Food Science, which involved the study of how food ingredients work during cooking and processing. During a lecture on sweetening agents in food, my professor said something to this effect: “High-fructose corn syrup has recently been introduced into the food supply. Compared with sucrose, it is a very inexpensive sweetener and will likely replace sugar in most processed foods. Our understanding of how fructose works in the body is very limited, and we have no idea how this will affect the population once it is found almost everywhere in large amounts in the processed food supply.” How prophetic. By 1985, HFCS accounted for approximately 35 percent of the total amount (measured by dry weight) of all sweeteners in the U.S. food supply. In 1970, per capita use of HFCS was ½ pound; by 1997, the last year for which such data were collected, the number was 62½ pounds. By that time, the average American was consuming 97 grams of HFCS, or 388 calories’ worth, per day.
Yikes.
Eight years later, those figures are without a doubt significantly higher. After all, the major source of HFCS is soft drinks, and they’re more popular than ever. In a 1998 study on soft-drink consumption titled “Liquid Candy,” the nonprofit Center for Science in the Public Interest reported that Americans are drinking twice as much soda as they did a quarter-century ago. The average American teenage male today drinks between 1.6 and 2 cans of soda per day, depending on the study you use. Two cans daily is equal to 40 grams, or 160 calories, of fructose every day (because HFCS is 55 percent fructose), good for just under 10 percent of a guy’s energy need. Remember, that’s just from soda—it doesn’t take into account other sources of fructose in your diet.
Might there be a connection between this rise in fructose consumption and the remarkable increase in obesity over the past two decades? Researchers from the Department of Nutrition at the University of California, Davis; the U.S. Department of Agriculture Western Human Nutrition Research Center at Davis; the Monell Chemical Sense Institute; and the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, have recently published a landmark review of the scientific literature on fructose, weight gain, and the insulin resistance syndrome, known as Syndrome X. They theorize that fructose in the form of the ingredient HFCS may be primarily responsible for the epidemic of obesity and abnormalities seen as part of Syndrome X, including insulin resistance, impaired glucose tolerance, hyperinsulinemia, hypertriacylglycerolemia, and hypertension.
How could one substitute ingredient be wreaking such havoc with America’s waistline? The problem is the way the human body metabolizes it. The body prefers to turn glucose into energy or store it as glycogen, the fuel in muscle cells. Not so with fructose, which the body metabolizes in the liver and prefers turning into fat. Studies have shown that although ingesting fructose increases the rate of fat production, ingesting the same number of calories of glucose does not cause the same response.
Not only does fructose turn preferentially into fat, it also shuts down the mechanisms your body has for preventing fat accumulation. Numerous studies on animals—and a handful on some human guinea pigs—have shown that fructose doesn’t stimulate the production of two key hormones that are intimately involved in the regulation of energy balance—the dietary dynamic duo, insulin and leptin. Unlike glucose, fructose doesn’t stimulate the secretion of insulin from the pancreas. If you want to lose body fat, this is a bad deal. Here’s why: Insulin helps control the accumulation of body fat, inhibiting food intake and increasing energy expenditure. That’s why your body secretes insulin after you eat carbohydrates. Along with ushering glucose into cells, insulin signals how much food you’ve eaten and tells you when it’s time to stop. Flick off that insulin switch altogether and there’s nothing to turn off your appetite. This increases the likelihood of gaining weight or even becoming obese.
Because HFCS flies under insulin’s radar screen, leptin also gets left in the lurch. After all, leptin is waiting to receive its cue from insulin, after which leptin abates hunger and increases energy production. When HFCS is consumed, this cascade of events is bypassed, crippling the body’s in-house mechanisms for calorie control and energy balance.
Though animal studies consistently show that high-fructose diets have an alarming connection to weight gain, a smattering of studies have begun to study the same effect in humans. What these researchers have done is add 300 calories a day from soft drinks to their subjects’ diets. Usually, when that sort of energy is added to a person’s diet, the body figures out a way to balance it out over time, reaching a steady state. However, when those calories come in the form of fructose-laden soft drinks, the body doesn’t balance it out. The net result is weight gain, likely for the reasons I’ve just discussed.
One study used overweight subjects to gauge what effect a sucrose-sweetened beverage might have on their food consumption and weight, compared with the effect on the same parameters of beverages sweetened with noncaloric sweeteners. Sucrose, a.k.a. table sugar, is a disaccharide—half glucose, half fructose—so you can figure that the sucrose drinks were about half fructose. Ten weeks into the study, members of the sucrose group had higher energy intakes (up 28 percent), body weight, fat mass, and blood pressure than they did when they started. In contrast, the group drinking the artificially sweetened beverages measured lower in all four categories than they had at the start of the study.
Another study looked at the effect of liquid and solid carbs on consumption and body weight. Subjects added extra carbs to their diet by eating jelly beans or drinking soda before eating on their own. During the four-week period when they were eating jelly beans, the subjects’ energy intake remained balanced; they were compensating for the extra calories. However, during the four-week “liquid” period, the extra calories weren’t compensated for, and total daily calorie intake increased by 17 percent. Body weight and BMI both increased significantly, indicating that the liquid-carb calories went unrecognized by the physiological systems that control energy balance.
In spite of the fact that fructose is commonly known as “fruit sugar,” these warnings about the perils of HFCS shouldn’t be extended to the fructose occurring naturally in fruits and vegetables. Fruits contain only a small amount of fructose, and they house it inside a nutritious package of fiber and other healthful nutrients, which counteract the effect of fructose in the body. In the form of big slugs of HFCS, however, mounting evidence strongly suggests that fructose is an undesirable ingredient in the diet. Although small amounts are probably not harmful and wouldn’t interfere with energy metabolism, the large amounts found in soft drinks and many processed foods may be at the root of the body’s inability to maintain energy balance and control body weight.
CONSIDER THESE STATISTICS BEFORE YOU DOWN THAT CAN OF SODA.
Per capita consumption of added sugars has risen by 28 percent since 1983. The average American consumes at least 64 pounds of sugar per year, and the average teenage boy at least 109 pounds.
The typical American gets 16 percent of his or her calories from added sugars. Children (age 6 to 11) get 18 percent of their calories from added sugars. Teenagers (age 12 to 19) get 20 percent of their calories from added sugars.
The USDA projects that if consumption trends continue, added-sugar intake will increase almost 20 percent by 2005.
People who consume diets high in added sugars consume lower levels of fiber; vitamins A, C, E, and folate; magnesium; calcium; and other nutrients. By displacing protective nutrients and foods in the diet, added sugars may increase the risk of osteoporosis, cancer, high blood pressure, heart disease, and other health problems. For instance, drinking soft drinks instead of milk may increase the risk of osteoporosis.
Calorie-dense foods, which are typically high in sugar and/or fat, contribute to obesity. Between 1976 to 1980 and 1988 to 1994, overweight rates in teenage boys rose from 5 to 12 percent, in teenage girls from 7 to 11 percent, and in adults from 25 to 35 percent.
The soft drink and corn industry are combating these claims by saying that HFCS has no more fructose than sugar. Yet the HFCS commonly used in foods probably has about 5 percent more fructose than sugar. Second, HFCS is found in a much wider variety of foods than table sugar ever was. According to a study in the Journal of Obesity Research, worldwide consumption of total sugar, including HFCS increased by 74 calories per day from 1962 to 2000. Sugar consumption in the United States increased by even more, rising by 83 calories per day from 1977 to 1996. In the end, we’re getting much more fructose than ever before.
If you’re serious about eating better and willing to lift weights and do cardio consistently, you can probably lose that lard hanging over your belt faster than you think. The guy whose physique is shot to hell to begin with will almost always achieve the most dramatic improvements at first, if only because he has the most room for improvement. It’s sort of like the bounce you get after a market crash—not a cause for celebration, per se, but a reflection of how bad things had gotten. It’s not unheard of for guys in really bad shape to lose 2 to 4 pounds a week right off the bat, although such a rapid rate of loss will undoubtedly be short-lived.
With the exception of the “beginner’s effect,” you can expect to lose 1½ pounds in a week. That’s a good thing. Lose any more than that and you’ll likely rob your body of muscle cells, the calorie-burning machines within the machine. Losing too much too soon can also throw your hormones out of whack.
Before you start losing that weight, however, you need to pinpoint your destination and figure out how much fat you need to lose. Sounds simple enough, but this can be a surprisingly tough question to answer. For the average person, the readings you get from the scale are nearly meaningless. The scale measures body weight, when what really matters is body composition. At the extreme, it’s pretty obvious that someone who is 100 pounds overweight has a body-weight problem, but the more common and more subtle problem concerns someone who has too much fat relative to the amount of muscle he’s carrying on his frame.
Another tool that people use that’s not entirely reliable is the Ideal Body Weight Chart, which gives ideal weights for specific heights. (You might have seen one of these taped to the inside of the exam room door the last time you sat and waited—and waited—for your physician.) The Ideal Body Weight charts are flawed because their supporting data was not collected in a scientific fashion. Ultimately, the recommendations aren’t meaningful.
A more useful tool is the Body Mass Index, commonly known as the BMI, which is your weight in kilograms divided by your height in meters squared. The BMI is useful because it represents a relationship between body mass and risk of chronic disease. If you’re an average guy, the greater your BMI, the higher your health risk. For guys who aren’t average—who fall outside the usual norms of body type—the BMI is problematic at best. If you are thin, but poorly muscled and overly fat (after you’ve been ill, for example), your BMI might actually register as normal even though you’re probably not very healthy. Conversely, an athlete who is very muscular with a low percent of body fat would likely register as overweight with a high BMI.
To make the BMI a more accurate tool, it has been combined with the measurement of waist circumference to give you some notion of how much fat you’re carrying. If your BMI is normal but your waist measurement is high, then you probably have a beer belly and need to lose some fat. If you’re a bodybuilder, your BMI will probably be in the overweight range, but you’re lean and your waist will be well within the range of normal. If your BMI is high and so is your waist circumference, you’ve got some work to do.
Step 1. Calculate your body mass index using the chart on page 000.
Step 2. Measure your waist circumference by wrapping a flexible measuring tape around your abdomen just above your belly button.
Step 3. Look at your results. If your BMI is greater than 25 and your waist circumference is more than 40 inches, you’re too fat. As you lose weight, continue to calculate your BMI and waist measurement. Once one or both is in the normal range, you may have reached your goal.
Even more accurate than the BMI is to know your body composition, the percentage of lean muscle and body fat on your frame. That’s really the ideal way to figure out how much fat you need to lose. Do you know what this is, offhand? Didn’t think so. Most guys don’t. I have a research-quality tool (called a bioelectrical impedance meter) that I use to measure body composition; and, even with that, guys need to follow a fairly elaborate protocol over the 12 hours before measurement to ensure accuracy. The absolute best way to measure body composition is through a very expensive medical scanning device called DEXA (Dual Energy X-ray Absorptiometry). But that level of accuracy is usually not necessary for the average guy. Though there are bathroom versions of bioelectrical impedance scales on the market, the readings they give can be fairly unreliable, especially if you get on the scale just after you’ve worked out or stepped out of the shower.
For the sake of practicality and reliability, use the BMI and the measurement of your waist circumference to give you some notion of how much fat you’re carrying. Once you put those numbers together, you should have some idea of where you fall along the body-fat continuum.
If your fat-loss diet isn’t built on what you realistically can do, it’s doomed to failure. If it isn’t formulated in the context of your lifestyle and personal preferences, the most sophisticated plan in the world is useless. It’s got to be something that you really can do, that you’re really going to follow. Whether you’re speaking with a nutritionist, watching a nutrition show on TV, or reading a book like The Powerfood Nutrition Plan, evaluate the different suggestions being made and say, “This I like, this I can do, this I’m already doing, so I can continue. . . .” Build from there. Don’t try to turn yourself into something you’re not. Only the most-intense Type-A personalities can do that. Everybody else who follows the route reaches a dead end soon enough.
Right off the bat, you need to evaluate your own diet the way I evaluated Matt’s. Keep a food journal to figure out how many calories you’re taking in now, and in what form. Log everything you eat and drink for a week, and then use either a book or an online program to translate this consumption into total calories. This will give you a baseline from which you can make adjustments. It will also establish a pattern of what you like to eat, which might not be obvious even to you until you see it in print. Without question, jotting down what, when, and how much you eat and drink is the best way to understand where you are nutrition-wise.
That’s the information I use to plan a guy’s diet, and you can do the same. If you eat a specific cereal at the same time every day, and it’s a good choice, use that. In that situation, I wouldn’t ask the client to ditch that cereal in favor of oatmeal. I use what they’re already doing. Like I said, though, it has to be a good cereal. If it were Crunchy Marshmallow Surprise, I would definitely find something better.
Losing fat is as much about making good decisions as it is about anything else. Along those lines, here are five items you should include in your diet and four others that you should give the heave-ho. Items are ranked in no particular order.
Five items you should eat:
Soy nuts
Grapefruit
Fat-free yogurt
100 percent protein-enriched (low-GI) pasta with a tomato-base sauce
Fresh spinach for salads
Four items you should avoid:
Hot dogs
Bologna
Onion rings
Beer
Starting from that foundation, you can begin systematically adding in all the things you need to add in while subtracting what needs to go. But even the things you want to keep must be adapted to your new diet if you’re trying to control calories. Through time, the not-so-healthy stuff will go, because as you look back over your day’s consumption, the focus will always be, “What haven’t I eaten that I really need to eat?” That’s the mindset I try to foster in clients, and it’s the correct mindset for you. When 7:00 P.M. arrives and you’re hungry, think, “What do I still need to eat?” Don’t look back and obsess over what you ate that you shouldn’t have eaten. That doesn’t matter anymore—it’s over. It’s all about what you still need to eat. And 95 percent of the time, that will be fruits and vegetables, so that’s what you should eat. Day by day, you’ll realize earlier and earlier that you haven’t eaten your fruits and vegetables, and you’ll respond accordingly. It won’t take long until you’ve dropped a whole bunch of stuff from your diet that you thought you could never give up.
THIS CHART WORKS FOR MEN’S BODIES. Find your height in the left column. Then find your weight in that row. The number at the top of that column is your BMI.
Source: National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute
The meal plans in this chapter will give you a rough rule of thumb for daily nutrition. You can either follow them to a T, or you can use the amounts of suggested food groups and vary them as needed. The main point is that you should eat the foods on your list first and the ones not on your list second. At the end of the day, when you are rummaging through the fridge and not sure what to eat, it may help to ask yourself the following:
Have I consumed enough water and fluids?
Did I have all of my milk today?
Have I eaten all of my fruits in a variety of colors?
Did I have enough vegetables?
Have I eaten any nuts or nut butter?
What about healthy oils, olives, or avocado?
Do I need some more protein?
When summer rolls around, you might decide that you want to go from being in better, leaner shape to being in no-woman-on-the-beach-will-be-able-to-resist-my-Michelangelo-worthy-body shape. Alas, the most potent symbol of that process, the six-pack, has always been obscured as much by myth as by stubborn layers of fat. Years ago, the sit-up was lauded as the premier ab exercise, when in fact the crunch was a more stomach-specific movement. Hundreds of reps done every day became the common prescription, but that almost always represented overtraining.
In reality, whether or not your stomach is flat has more to do with diet and genetics than anything else, including training. And staying in bed for two or three years eating Ding Dongs is most assuredly not the answer. It’s almost a cliché at this point, but next to finding parents with better genes, in order to expose those ab muscles lurking under your belly fat, you’re going to have to pay even more attention to what you put into it than you have so far in this chapter.
Because you’ve already burned some of your body fat with our 20 rules for fat burning, what you need to do now is walk a fine line. You really need to know what you’re doing to achieve the results you’re after. You’re going to have to do some fairly intense cardiovascular work in order to burn fat and achieve your goal, but at the same time you need to fuel that effort. Here are some tips.
One of the most intractable challenges facing a guy who wants to eat better is the nighttime craving. If you get these a lot, you probably need to eat more during the day. Also, make sure you’re really hungry and not just thirsty. Guys often misconstrue hunger for thirst, and thirst for hunger. When clients say to me, “I wake up in the middle of the night hungry,” aside from revamping their diet so that they’re getting more calories and fluids during the day, I suggest that before they eat anything, they drink something. If nothing else, it makes them wait a minute before reaching for some sort of instant gratification. If you give it maybe 5 or 10 minutes, by the time you’ve prepared, say, a cup of decaffeinated tea, you may realize that you’re not really hungry but that you were bored, or worried. Or maybe you’re really tired and you should just go to sleep.
Late-night cravings can also be masking emotional issues. Is there a reason you’re avoiding going to bed? I’ve encountered clients who feel like they’re in okay relationships, but they consistently avoid going to bed, and they stay up and eat instead. Often they aren’t aware of what they’re doing, and they certainly don’t verbalize it. Maybe it’s because of a partner, or maybe it’s because there is no partner, but they avoid going to bed because it’s depressing. When you’ve got the TV on or you’re sitting at the computer, food keeps you company and you don’t have that sense of being alone. It’s much more common than people realize.
Eat 250 fewer calories. To shed body fat without sacrificing much, if any, of your hard-earned muscle, try dropping your calories by 250 or so a day, although that figure will vary by individual. If you’re a 5-foot, 11-inch, 270-pound bodybuilder like two-time Mr. Olympia Ronnie Coleman, you’ll have to cut significantly more calories than that to achieve your desired result. If your build falls closer to Gary Coleman’s, however, a smallish calorie cut will pack a punch worthy of the diminutive former sitcom star with an appropriately short fuse. Most of you should fall somewhere between those two living legends—probably 250 to 300 calories.
Cut out the empty calories. Start making the calories you consume really count. In particular, avoid simple sugars, particularly those found in junk foods and sweets. You need to watch out for anything that might provide excess calories. It’s easy to grab a bag of M&Ms and think you’re not doing much damage by eating a handful, but those extra hundred or so calories might put you over the top and not allow your body to burn extra fat.
Eat only the best fats. Emphasize monounsaturated fats (like olive oil), polyunsaturated fats (such as corn and soybeans), and essential fatty acids (like oily fish), and limit your intake of saturated fats (such as fatty meats and cheese) and trans fatty acids (like French fries and packaged cookies). Where fat normally might account for roughly 25 percent of your calories, it should account for only 20 percent or so if you want killer abs. Don’t go much lower than that, though. Fat plays important roles in providing energy, enhancing the absorption of fat-soluble vitamins, making testosterone, and supporting the immune system, so don’t shortchange yourself there.
Make every carb count. Focus on consuming complex, low-GI carbohydrates like those found in oatmeal, vegetables, and whole-grain breads and cereals. Be careful about reducing your carbs excessively—such reductions often trick people into thinking they’re burning fat. When you’re training hard to get lean but want to maintain the gains you just worked so hard to achieve, you need to consume energy in the form of carbohydrates, not just protein. Although your calorie needs decrease, they decrease only slightly. Muscle requires more calories than body fat does, so you’ve got to feed them to keep them.
Keep in mind that for every gram of carbohydrate you store in muscle, you store anywhere from 3 to 4 grams of water. So if you don’t eat many carbs, you lose water along with the carbs and, yes, you start to see better-defined muscles. But if your goal is to lose fat weight, you need to put in carbs to fuel those high-intensity workouts. Then, by creating just a small calorie deficit, fat supplies a little more of the energy and you start to see it coming off, leading to more-visible definition.
Good carb sources include sweet (not white) potatoes, brown rice, oatmeal, butternut squash, peas, and whole grains such as millet, quinoa, and wild rice. Because they have a low to moderate GI, these carbs cause smaller fluctuations in blood glucose and insulin than more rapidly digested sugars. That’s important because insulin spikes will promote fat storage when you’re trying to get lean, so remember to keep portion sizes under control.
Keep protein consumption high. Continue consuming roughly 1 gram of protein per pound of body weight per day. Protein sources often contain quite a bit of fat, though, so emphasize lean sources more than usual. If you’ve already switched from 2-percent-fat milk to 1-percent, try drinking skim milk during this phase. Emphasize lean meats like chicken and turkey, and remove visible fat from any type or cut of meat. Protein powders, which contain extremely limited amounts of fat, can be used very effectively here.
That’s about as fancy as you need to get, though. Be disciplined and use common sense, and there’s no need to go overboard with fat-burning pills and potions. If you can hold true to that for four to six weeks, you’ll see some serious results.
Regarding pills and potions, they’re often treated as the first line of defense against fat, when they should be the last. You’re not going to lose weight just by taking a pill in the absence of dieting and exercise. But if you do those things, a few of the fat-loss supplements on the market might give you a slight edge with appetite control and fat burning. How slight is slight? Add a thermogenic to a good plan, and you might bump up your burn another 20 to 50 calories a day. Depending on your goals, that could be a significant windfall.
For other guys, the cost and the risks, such as they are, might outweigh the benefits. It’s up to you.
EPHEDRA AND MA HUANG. These compounds have been virtually removed from the marketplace due to liabilities faced by the supplement manufacturers. However, similar ephedra-free products are discussed below.
SYNEPHRINE. This is one of a family of thermogenic compounds known as synephrine alkaloids, which are extracted from certain types of ripe citrus fruit. To know if the product you’re considering contains it, check the fine print, not the front of the label. It’ll probably be listed as Citrus aurantium—caffeine will probably be on there as well—and it’s included in products with names such as Xenadrine, Ephedra-free and Phen-free.
To the extent that it works—studies suggest it may elevate metabolic rate, but no studies prove that it can help you successfully shed weight—it appears to do so by stimulating the central nervous system.
Dose: The doses used in research for synephrine have ranged from 40 to 58.5 milligrams.
Warnings: This and products like it aren’t for the faint of heart, literally and figuratively. Synephrine’s possible side effects resemble those of ephedrine: dizziness, headache, tremor, euphoria, insomnia, dry mouth, increased blood pressure, heart palpitations, and constipation. Also, check the label for health conditions that contraindicate its use. Regardless, check with your physician before using products containing synephrine.
7-KETO DEHYDROEPIANDROSTERONE. In the one major study using this thyroid supplement, 7-Keto showed promise. All subjects exercised and reduced their calories moderately for eight weeks, but only a portion took the supplement. They lost three times as much weight—6.4 pounds versus 2.1—and experienced a 2.2 percent decline in body fat that the others didn’t.
Dose: For research, 200 milligrams a day. The typical product on the market contains 25 to 50 milligrams.
Warnings: The “sterone” in this might make you wonder if 7-Keto will turn you into a baritone, but a subset of subjects in the aforementioned study showed no change in testosterone levels. Measurements of more than 20 blood markers also showed no problems. But this was a short-term study; no long-term studies have been conducted.
PYRUVATE. This naturally occurring substance helps kick-start something called the Krebs cycle, which ultimately leads to adenosine triphosphate (ATP) being produced (see this page). It may also stimulate cellular respiration and inhibit fat production.
Whether it does much as a supplement is debatable. Much of the research on pyruvate was done using very, very fat women as subjects, so it’s tough to extrapolate the fat loss shown there to men looking to shed a few pounds.
Dose: 2 grams a day—much less than what’s been used in studies, which is one reason a lot of skepticism surrounds pyruvate. There’s no evidence to show it will do much of anything in those amounts.
Warnings: Read label instructions.
VITAMIN/MINERAL SUPPLEMENTS. You should be taking one of these daily anyway, but because deficiencies in minerals such as chromium can slow fat loss, there’s a specific connection here.
Dose: 100 percent of daily value.
Warnings: Read label instructions.
CARNITINE. Made in the body from two amino acids, this serves various protective purposes, particularly relating to the heart. It also increases fat metabolism, raising some hope that it might be an effective fat-loss supplement.
The research results have been equivocal. So far, there isn’t much here to get excited about.
Dose: 500 milligrams taken twice daily.
Warnings: Follow label instructions.
Eat these foods to turn up your metabolism:
Chili peppers
Fatty fish: salmon, herring, mackerel, black cod
Flaxseed
Green tea
Milk
Nuts
Olive oil
Olives
Soy
Tomatoes
Water
Whole fruits
Whole grains
Yogurt
GREEN TEA. The data here look good, but the research is still young. In 1999, scientists in Switzerland studied whether a green tea extract in capsular form could increase energy expenditure and fat utilization in 10 men over 24 hours. The green tea extract increased energy expenditure by 4 percent relative to a placebo treatment, which shakes out to about 82 calories in 24 hours. Fat utilization also increased. When compared with caffeine alone, energy expenditure increased by 3 percent.
Dose: Depends on the form in which you’re taking it. Overall, the studies showing benefits have used extracts rather than the beverage.
Warnings: The researchers in Switzerland also examined the heart rates of the subjects because of the possible negative cardiovascular effects of caffeine. None of the subjects reported any side effects, including no significant differences in heart rate.
Eat these foods with caution:
Fried foods
High-fructose corn syrup
Refined carbohydrates: cookies, cakes, candies, snack foods, chips
Sugar
Sugar-sweetened soft drinks and beverages
White breads and refined grains and cereals
THIS PLAN IS FOR THE GUY WHO WORKS OUT but just doesn’t know how to eat. Armed with a diet plan that gives him enough fuel for exercise, he should shed the pounds fast. The key here is cutting out some carbs by reducing consumption of refined foods and keeping consumption of alcohol to a minimum, while including plenty of high-quality proteins, vegetables, and fruit.
2,239 calories
265 grams carbohydrates
153 grams protein
63 grams fat
7 bread
5 fruit
3 milk
6 teaspoons added sugar
5 vegetable
8 very lean protein
5 lean protein
1 medium-fat protein
5 fat
Note: Occasionally, a fat-free product, like mustard or cooking spray, is included on the menus. These do not count toward your daily breakdown but should not be overused.
*Use every day.
†Based on a 185-pound man.
Breakfast
| 2 bread | 1 cup Shredded Wheat |
| 1 milk | 1 cup fat-free milk |
| 1 fruit | 1 cup fresh raspberries |
| 1 medium-fat protein | 1 egg, scrambled in a nonstick pan |
| 1 very lean protein | 2 egg whites, scrambled with whole egg |
| 1 fat | 1½ tablespoons ground flaxseed |
| Water | |
| Oil-free cooking spray (for eggs) |
Lunch
| 2 bread | 2 slices whole-wheat bread |
| 2 vegetable | Salad with 2 cups romaine lettuce, ½ cup tomato, ½ cup cucumber |
| 1 fruit | 1 nectarine |
| 4 very lean protein | 4 ounces turkey |
| 1 fat | 2 tablespoons low-fat dressing |
Dinner
| 3 bread | 1 sweet potato, baked |
| 1 small multigrain roll | |
| 1 fruit | 1 slice watermelon |
| 2 vegetable | 1 cup cooked broccoli and/or cauliflower |
| 5 lean protein | 5 ounces salmon, grilled |
| 2 fat | 8 Kalamata olives |
| 1 teaspoon butter |
| 1 fat | 10 peanuts |
| 1 milk | 1 cup fat-free unsweetened yogurt |
| 1 vegetable | 1 cup veggie sticks |
| Water |
Workout
| Water |
Post-Workout
SMOOTHIE
Blend until smooth.
| 1 milk | 1 cup fat-free milk |
| 2 fruit | ½ cup orange juice |
| ½ cup frozen pineapple | |
| ½ cup frozen strawberries | |
| 6 teaspoons added sugar | 2 tablespoons honey |
| 3 very lean protein | 21 grams whey protein powder |
Breakfast
Combine yogurt, fruit, and honey. Combine muffin and egg for sandwich.
| 2 bread | 1 whole-wheat English muffin |
| 1 milk | 1 cup fat-free unsweetened yogurt |
| 1 fruit | 1¼ cups fresh strawberries |
| 1 medium-fat protein | 1 egg, hard-cooked |
| 1 very lean protein | 2 eggs, hard-cooked (discard yolks) |
| 1 fat | 1½ tablespoons ground flaxseed |
| Water |
Lunch
| 2 bread | 2 slices whole-grain bread |
| 2 vegetable | Large salad with 2 cups romaine lettuce, plus tomato, grilled eggplant, roasted red pepper |
| Fat-free dressing | |
| 1 fruit | 1 kiwi, sliced |
| 4 very lean protein | 4 ounces skinless white-meat chicken, grilled with lime juice |
| 1 fat | 1 teaspoon olive oil (for grilling) |
| 3 bread | 1 cup cooked pasta |
| 1 slice garlic bread | |
| 1 fruit | 1 cup strawberries |
| 2 vegetable | ½ cup ratatouille (over pasta) |
| Salad with 1 cup lettuce, ¼ cup tomato, ¼ cup cucumber | |
| 5 lean protein | 5 ounces lean ground beef (added to ratatouille) |
| 2 fat | 2 tablespoons low-fat dressing |
| 1 teaspoon butter (for garlic bread) |
Pre-Workout Snack
| 1 fat | 1 tablespoon almond butter |
| 1 milk | 1 cup fat-free milk |
| 1 vegetable | 1 cup veggie sticks |
| Water |
Workout
| Water |
Post-Workout
SMOOTHIE
Blend until smooth.
| 1 milk | 1 cup fat-free milk |
| 2 fruit | ½ cup orange juice |
| ½ cup frozen pineapple | |
| ½ cup frozen strawberries | |
| 6 teaspoons added sugar | 2 tablespoons honey |
| 3 very lean protein | 21 grams whey protein powder |
Breakfast
| 2 bread | 2 slices whole-wheat bread |
| 1 milk | 1 cup fat-free cottage cheese (on bread; sprinkle with no-calorie sweetener and cinnamon) |
| 1 fruit | 4 ounces freshly squeezed orange juice (with pulp) |
| 1 medium-fat protein | 1 egg, cooked sunny-side up in a nonstick pan |
| 1 very lean protein | 2 egg whites, cooked with sunny-side up egg |
| 1 fat | 1½ tablespoons ground flaxseed |
| Water | |
| Oil-free cooking spray (for eggs) |
| 2 bread | 2⁄3 cup brown rice |
| 2 vegetable | 1 cup Chinese vegetables, stir-fried with garlic, onion, fresh ginger |
| 1 fruit | ½ cup citrus sections |
| 4 very lean protein | 4 ounces scallops, stir-fried |
| 1 fat | 1 teaspoon oil (for stir-frying) |
Dinner
| 3 bread | 2-inch square of corn bread |
| 1 cup kidney beans (add to chili) | |
| 1 fruit | 1 pear |
| 2 vegetable | 1 cup chopped cooked tomatoes, with chili seasoning |
| ½ onion, garlic for seasoning | |
| Salad with 1 cup lettuce, ¼ cup tomato, ¼ cup cucumber | |
| 5 lean protein | Included (in beans) |
| 3 ounces soy crumbles (for chili) | |
| 2 fat | 2 slices bacon, cooked very crisp and crumbled into chili |
| Included (in corn bread) |
Pre-Workout Snack
| 1 fat | 1 tablespoon ranch dressing (for dipping) |
| 1 milk | 1 cup fat-free milk |
| 1 vegetable | 1 cup veggie sticks |
| Water |
Workout
| Water |
Post-Workout
SMOOTHIE
Blend until smooth.
| 1 milk | 1 cup fat-free milk |
| 2 fruit | ½ cup orange juice |
| ½ cup frozen pineapple | |
| ½ cup frozen strawberries | |
| 6 teaspoons added sugar | 2 tablespoons honey |
| 3 very lean protein | 21 grams whey protein powder |
Breakfast
| 1 fruit | 1 cup raspberries |
| 1 milk | 1 cup fat-free milk (½ cup for French toast) |
FRENCH TOAST (See recipe directions on this page.)
| 2 bread | 2 slices whole-wheat bread |
| 1 medium-fat protein | 1 egg |
| 1 very lean protein | 2 egg whites |
| 1 fat | 1½ tablespoons ground flaxseed |
| Water | |
| Oil-free cooking spray | |
| 1 tablespoon no-sugar maple-flavored syrup |
Lunch
| 1 fruit | ¾ cup blueberries |
FAJITAS
Combine ingredients.
| 2 bread | 2 tortillas |
| 2 vegetable | 1 cup sautéed onions and peppers |
| 2 tablespoons salsa | |
| 4 very lean protein | 4 ounces skinless white-meat chicken, grilled with lime juice |
| 1 fat | 1 teaspoon olive oil (for cooking) |
Dinner
| 3 bread | 1 ounce croutons (for salad) |
| 1 cup chicken noodle soup | |
| 4 crackers | |
| 1 fruit | 1 nectarine |
| 2 vegetable | Salad with 2 cups romaine lettuce, ½ cup tomato, ½ cup cucumber |
| 5 lean protein | 5 ounces swordfish, grilled with ginger and scallions |
| 2 fat | 2 tablespoons dressing |
| 1 fat | 10 mixed nuts |
| 1 milk | 1 cup fat-free unsweetened yogurt |
| 1 vegetable | ½ cup V8 juice |
| Water |
Workout
| Water |
Post-Workout
SMOOTHIE
Blend until smooth.
| 1 milk | 1 cup fat-free milk |
| 2 fruit | ½ cup orange juice |
| ½ cup frozen pineapple | |
| ½ cup frozen strawberries | |
| 6 teaspoons added sugar | 2 tablespoons honey |
| 3 very lean protein | 21 grams whey protein powder |
Breakfast
| 2 bread | 1 cup quick oats (not instant) |
| 1 milk | 1 cup fat-free milk |
| 1 fruit | 1 cup apples, diced |
| 1 medium-fat protein | 1 egg, scrambled in a nonstick pan |
| 1 very lean protein | 2 egg whites, scramble with whole egg |
| 1 fat | 1½ tablespoons ground flaxseed |
| Water | |
| Oil-free cooking spray (for eggs) |
Lunch
| 2 bread | 1 cup cooked linguini |
| 2 vegetable | Salad with 1 cup lettuce, ¼ cup tomato, ¼ cup cucumber |
| Fat-free dressing | |
| ½ cup marinara sauce | |
| 1 fruit | ½ grapefruit, sectioned |
| 4 very lean protein | 4 ounces shrimp, grilled |
| 1 fat | 1 teaspoon olive oil (for cooking) |
| 3 bread | 1 large pita |
| 1 ounce croutons | |
| 1 fruit | 2 large figs |
| 2 vegetable | Salad with 2 cups romaine lettuce, ½ cup tomato, ½ cup cucumber |
| 5 lean protein | 5 ounces lean lamb, grilled with lime juice |
| 2 fat | 2 tablespoons vinaigrette |
Pre-Workout Snack
| 1 fat | 1 tablespoon peanut butter |
| 1 milk | 1 cup fat-free milk |
| 1 vegetable | 1 cup celery sticks |
| Water |
Workout
| Water |
Post-Workout
SMOOTHIE
Blend until smooth.
| 1 milk | 1 cup fat-free milk |
| 2 fruit | ½ cup orange juice |
| ½ cup frozen pineapple | |
| ½ cup frozen strawberries | |
| 6 teaspoons added sugar | 2 tablespoons honey |
| 3 very lean protein | 21 grams whey protein powder |
Breakfast
| 2 bread | 2 slices multigrain toast |
| 1 medium-fat protein | 1 egg, scrambled in a nonstick pan |
| 1 very lean protein | 2 egg whites, scrambled with whole egg Oil-free cooking spray (for eggs) |
SMOOTHIE
Blend until smooth.
| 1 milk | 1 cup fat-free milk |
| 1 fruit | ¼ cup orange juice |
| ¼ cup fresh peaches | |
| 1 fat | 1½ tablespoons ground flaxseed |
| No-calorie sweetener to taste | |
| Water |
| 2 bread | 1 whole-wheat bagel |
| 2 vegetable | 1 cup carrot sticks |
| Onion, tomato | |
| 1 fruit | 1⁄8 honeydew |
| 4 very lean protein | 4 ounces smoked salmon |
| 1 fat | 1½ tablespoons reduced-fat cream cheese |
Dinner
| 3 bread | 2 slices rye bread |
| ½ cup pasta salad | |
| 1 fruit | 17 grapes |
| 2 vegetable | ½ cup coleslaw |
| ½ cup chopped vegetables (cucumbers, carrots, onions); mix into tuna | |
| 5 lean protein | 5 ounces tuna in olive oil, drained |
| 2 fat | 2 tablespoons reduced-fat mayonnaise (for tuna) |
| Included (in coleslaw, pasta salad) |
Pre-Workout Snack
| 1 fat | 1 tablespoon sunflower seeds |
| 1 milk | 1 cup fat-free cottage cheese |
| 1 vegetable | 1 cup sliced bell pepper |
| Water |
Workout
| Water |
Post-Workout
SMOOTHIE
Blend until smooth.
| 1 milk | 1 cup fat-free milk |
| 2 fruit | ½ cup orange juice |
| ½ cup frozen pineapple | |
| ½ cup frozen strawberries | |
| 6 teaspoons added sugar | 2 tablespoons honey |
| 3 very lean protein | 21 grams whey protein powder |
Breakfast
| 2 bread | 1 cup Shredded Wheat |
| 1 milk | 1 cup fat-free milk |
| 1 fruit | ¾ cup blueberries |
| 1 medium-fat protein | 1 egg, hard-cooked, for egg salad |
| 1 very lean protein | 2 eggs, hard-cooked, for egg salad (discard yolks) |
| 1 fat | 1½ tablespoons ground flaxseed |
| 1 tablespoon fat-free mayonnaise (for egg salad) | |
| Mustard (for egg salad) | |
| Water |
Lunch
| 2 bread | 1 large multigrain roll |
| 2 vegetable | Sliced tomato, lettuce (for sandwich) |
| 1 cup radishes, celery, carrots | |
| 1 fruit | 1 nectarine |
| 4 very lean protein | 4 ounces skinless white-meat chicken, grilled with lime juice |
| 1 fat | 2 tablespoons low-fat ranch dressing (for dipping) |
Dinner
| 3 bread | 3-inch square of corn bread |
| 1 ounce croutons | |
| 1 fruit | 1 large tangerine |
| 2 vegetable | Salad with 2 cups romaine lettuce, ½ cup tomato, ½ cup cucumber |
| 5 lean protein | 5 ounces salmon, poached |
| 2 fat | 2 tablespoons low-fat Caesar dressing |
| Included (in corn bread) |
Pre-Workout Snack
| 1 fat | 2 tablespoons reduced-fat ranch dressing |
| 1 milk | 1 cup fat-free milk |
| 1 vegetable | 1 cup cucumber sticks |
| Water |
Post-Workout
SMOOTHIE
Blend until smooth.
| 1 milk | 1 cup fat-free milk |
| 2 fruit | ½ cup orange juice |
| ½ cup frozen pineapple | |
| ½ cup frozen strawberries | |
| 6 teaspoons added sugar | 2 tablespoons honey |
| 3 very lean protein | 21 grams whey protein powder |
THIS IS FOR THE OVERWEIGHT GUY WHO ALREADY HAS SOME HEALTH ISSUES, such as diabetes or high blood pressure. The body of an old man is just around the corner. But if he changes his lifestyle, he can still salvage himself. He needs to put the brakes on refined foods, especially high-fructose corn syrup. He’ll have to start reading labels in the grocery store before the food goes into the cart. And he’s got to add healthy oils into his diet to replace all that refined sugar. Doing so will help him lose weight and improve his blood-sugar and -cholesterol profiles. (Make sure you read chapter 7 before continuing.)
2,003 calories
196 grams carbohydrates
154 grams protein
67 grams fat
5 bread
4 fruit
3 milk
5 vegetable
9 very lean protein
5 lean protein
1 medium-fat protein
6 fat
0 teaspoons added sugar
Note: Occasionally, a fat-free product, like mustard or cooking spray, is included on the menus. These do not count toward your daily breakdown but should not be overused.
*Use every day.
†Based on a 185-pound man.
Breakfast
| 1 bread | ½ cup Shredded Wheat |
| 1 milk | 1 cup fat-free milk |
| 1 fruit | 1 cup fresh blueberries |
| 1 medium-fat protein | 1 egg, scrambled in a nonstick pan |
| 1 very lean protein | 2 egg whites, scrambled with whole egg |
| 1 fat | 1½ tablespoons ground flaxseed |
| Water | |
| Oil-free cooking spray (for eggs) |
Snack
| 1 bread | ½ cup edamame |
| 1 vegetable | 1 cup vegetable sticks |
| 1 very lean protein | Included (in edamame) |
Lunch
| 1 bread | 2 very small boiled potatoes (for salad Niçoise) |
| 2 vegetable | 2 cups romaine lettuce, tomato Green beans |
| 4 very lean protein | 4 ounces albacore tuna in water, drained |
| 2 fat | 2 tablespoons low-fat dressing |
| 8 black olives |
Snack
| 1 fruit | ½ cup unsweetened applesauce |
| 1 lean protein | ½ cup cottage cheese |
SMOOTHIE
Blend until smooth.
| 1 milk | 1 cup fat-free milk |
| 1 fruit | ½ cup orange juice with calcium |
| 3 very lean protein | 21 grams whey protein powder |
Dinner
| 2 bread | 1 small ear corn on the cob |
| 1 slice crusty French bread | |
| 1 fruit | 12 cherries |
| 1 milk | 1 cup fat-free milk |
| 2 vegetable | 1 cup grilled vegetables (peppers, zucchini, mushrooms, tomatoes) |
| 4 lean protein | 4 ounces dark-meat chicken, barbecued |
| 3 fat | 1 tablespoon garlic-infused olive oil (for dipping) |
Breakfast
Combine yogurt, fruit, and honey. Combine muffin and egg for sandwich.
| 1 bread | ½ whole-wheat English muffin |
| 1 milk | 1 cup fat-free unsweetened yogurt |
| 1 fruit | 1¼ cups fresh strawberries |
| 1 medium-fat protein | 1 egg, hard-cooked |
| 1 very lean protein | 2 eggs, hard-cooked (discard yolks) |
| 1 fat | 1½ tablespoons ground flaxseed |
| Water |
Snack
| 1 bread | ½ bagel |
| 1 vegetable | Sliced tomato, onion |
| 1 very lean protein | 1 ounce lox or smoked salmon |
| 1 tablespoon fat-free cream cheese |
| 1 bread | 1 slice whole-grain bread |
| 2 vegetable | Large salad with 2 cups romaine lettuce, plus tomato, grilled eggplant, roasted red pepper |
| 4 very lean protein | 4 ounces skinless white-meat chicken, grilled with lime juice |
| 2 fat | Low-fat dressing |
| 2 teaspoons olive oil (for roasted vegetables) |
Snack
| 1 fruit | ½ mango |
| 1 lean protein | 1 ounce reduced-fat ricotta cheese |
Post-Workout
SMOOTHIE
Blend until smooth.
| 1 milk | 1 cup fat-free milk |
| 1 fruit | ½ cup orange juice with calcium |
| 3 very lean protein | 21 grams whey protein powder |
Dinner
| 2 bread | 1 cup cooked pasta |
| 1 fruit | 1¼ cups strawberries |
| 1 milk | 1 cup fat-free milk |
| 2 vegetable | ½ cup ratatouille (over pasta) |
| Salad with 1 cup lettuce, ¼ cup tomato, ¼ cup cucumber | |
| 4 lean protein | 4 ounces lean ground beef (add to ratatouille) |
| 3 fat | 1 tablespoon dressing |
Breakfast
| 1 bread | 1 slice whole-wheat bread |
| 1 milk | 1 cup fat-free cottage cheese (on bread; sprinkle with no-calorie sweetener and cinnamon) |
| 1 fruit | 4 ounces freshly squeezed orange juice (with pulp) |
| 1 medium-fat protein | 1 egg, cooked sunny-side up in a nonstick pan |
| 1 very lean protein | 2 egg whites, cooked with sunny-side up egg |
| 1 fat | 1½ tablespoons ground flaxseed |
| Water | |
| Oil-free cooking spray (for eggs) |
Snack
| 1 bread | 8 Wheat Thins |
| 1 vegetable | 1 cup diced bell pepper |
| 1 very lean protein | ¾ cup fat-free cottage cheese |
| 1 bread | 1⁄3 cup brown rice |
| 2 vegetable | 1 cup Chinese vegetables, stir-fried with garlic, onion, fresh ginger |
| 4 very lean protein | 4 ounces scallops, stir-fried |
| 2 fat | 2 teaspoons oil (for stir-frying) |
Snack
| 1 fruit | 1 cup sliced melon |
| 1 lean protein | 1 ounce reduced-fat cheddar cheese |
Post-Workout
SMOOTHIE
Blend until smooth.
| 1 milk | 1 cup fat-free milk |
| 1 fruit | ½ cup orange juice with calcium |
| 3 very lean protein | 21 grams whey protein powder |
Dinner
| 2 bread | 1 cup kidney beans (add to chili) |
| 1 fruit | 1 pear |
| 1 milk | 1 cup fat-free milk |
| 2 vegetable | 1 cup chopped cooked tomatoes with chili seasoning |
| ½ onion, garlic for seasoning | |
| Salad with 1 cup lettuce, ¼ cup tomato, ¼ cup cucumber | |
| 4 lean protein | Included (in beans) |
| 2 ounces soy crumbles (for chili) | |
| 3 fat | 2 slices bacon, cooked very crisp, crumbled into chili |
| 1⁄8 avocado, diced |
Breakfast
| 1 fruit | 1 cup raspberries |
| 1 milk | 1 cup fat-free milk (½ cup for French toast) |
FRENCH TOAST (See recipe directions on this page.)
| 1 bread | 1 slice whole-wheat bread |
| 1 medium-fat protein | 1 egg |
| 1 very lean protein | 2 egg whites |
| 1 fat | 1½ tablespoons ground flaxseed |
| Water | |
| Oil-free cooking spray |
Snack
| 1 bread | 1 slice multigrain bread |
| 1 vegetable | Sliced tomato |
| 1 very lean protein | 1 ounce fat-free cheese |
FAJITAS
Combine ingredients.
| 1 bread | 1 tortilla |
| 2 vegetable | 1 cup sautéed onions, peppers |
| 2 tablespoons salsa | |
| 4 very lean protein | 4 ounces skinless white-meat chicken, grilled with lime juice |
| 2 fat | 2 teaspoons olive oil (for cooking) |
Snack
| 1 fruit | 1¼ cups strawberries |
| 1 lean protein | 1 ounce reduced-fat ricotta cheese |
Post-Workout
SMOOTHIE
Blend until smooth.
| 1 milk | 1 cup fat-free milk |
| 1 fruit | ½ cup orange juice with calcium |
| 3 very lean protein | 21 grams whey protein powder |
Dinner
| 2 bread | 1 ounce croutons for salad |
| 1 cup chicken noodle soup | |
| 1 fruit | 1 nectarine |
| 1 milk | 1 cup fat-free milk |
| 2 vegetable | Salad with 2 cups romaine lettuce, ½ cup tomato, ½ cup cucumber |
| 4 lean protein | 4 ounces swordfish, grilled with ginger and scallions |
| 3 fat | 2 tablespoons dressing |
| 1 teaspoon olive oil (for fish) |
Breakfast
| 1 bread | ½ cup quick oats (not instant) |
| 1 milk | 1 cup fat-free milk |
| 1 fruit | 1 apple, diced |
| 1 medium-fat protein | 1 egg, scrambled in a nonstick pan |
| 1 very lean protein | 2 egg whites, scrambled with whole egg |
| 1 fat | 1½ tablespoons ground flaxseed |
| Water |
| 1 bread | ¾ ounce baked tortilla chips |
| 1 vegetable | ½ cup salsa |
| 1 very lean protein | 1 ounce shredded fat-free cheese |
Lunch
| 1 bread | ½ cup cooked linguini |
| 2 vegetable | Salad with 1 cup lettuce, ¼ cup tomato, ¼ cup cucumber |
| Fat-free dressing | |
| ½ cup marinara sauce | |
| 4 very lean protein | 4 ounces shrimp, grilled |
| 2 fat | 2 teaspoons olive oil (for cooking) |
Snack
| 1 fruit | 1 medium peach |
| 1 lean protein | ¼ cup cottage cheese |
Post-Workout
SMOOTHIE
Blend until smooth.
| 1 milk | 1 cup fat-free milk |
| 1 fruit | ½ cup orange juice with calcium |
| 3 very lean protein | 21 grams whey protein powder |
Dinner
| 2 bread | 1 large pita |
| 1 fruit | 2 large figs |
| 1 milk | 1 cup fat-free milk |
| 2 vegetable | Salad with 2 cups romaine lettuce, ½ cup tomato, ½ cup cucumber |
| 4 lean protein | 4 ounces lean lamb, grilled with lime juice |
| 3 fat | 2 tablespoons vinaigrette |
| 1 tablespoon cucumber-yogurt dressing (for lamb) |
Breakfast
| 1 bread | 1 slice multigrain toast |
| 1 medium-fat protein | 1 egg, scrambled |
| 1 very lean protein | 2 egg whites, scrambled with whole egg |
Blend until smooth.
| 1 milk | 1 cup fat-free milk |
| 1 fruit | ¼ cup orange juice |
| 1 fresh peach, small | |
| 1 fat | 1½ tablespoons ground flaxseed |
| Water |
Snack
Place vegetables on pita, top with cheese, heat.
| 1 bread | 1 small pita |
| 1 vegetable | 1 cup diced tomato, mushrooms |
| 1 very lean protein | 1 ounce fat-free mozzarella |
Lunch
| 1 bread | ½ whole-wheat bagel |
| 2 vegetable | 1 cup carrot sticks |
| Onion, tomato | |
| 4 very lean protein | 4 ounces smoked salmon |
| 2 fat | 2 tablespoons cream cheese |
Snack
| 1 fruit | 1 orange, small |
| 1 lean protein | 1 ounce turkey |
Post-Workout
SMOOTHIE
Blend until smooth.
| 1 milk | 1 cup fat-free milk |
| 1 fruit | ½ cup orange juice with calcium |
| 3 very lean protein | 21 grams whey protein powder |
Dinner
| 2 bread | 2 slices rye bread |
| 1 fruit | 17 grapes |
| 1 milk | 1 cup fat-free milk |
| 2 vegetable | ½ cup coleslaw |
| ½ cup chopped vegetables (cucumber, carrots, onion; mix into tuna) | |
| 4 lean protein | 4 ounces tuna in olive oil, drained |
| 3 fat | 2 tablespoons mayonnaise |
| Included (in coleslaw) |
Breakfast
| 1 bread | ½ cup Shredded Wheat |
| 1 milk | 1 cup fat-free milk |
| 1 fruit | 1 cup raspberries |
| 1 medium-fat protein | 1 egg, hard-cooked (for egg salad) |
| 1 very lean protein | 1 egg, hard-cooked (for egg salad; discard yolks) |
| 1 fat | 1½ tablespoons ground flaxseed |
| 1 tablespoon fat-free mayonnaise (for egg salad) | |
| Mustard (for egg salad) | |
| Water |
Snack
| 1 bread | 5 slices melba toast |
| 1 vegetable | Celery sticks |
| 1 very lean protein | ¾ cup fat-free ricotta |
| (Put dry onion soup mix into ricotta to make dip.) |
Lunch
| 1 bread | 1 small multigrain roll |
| 2 vegetable | Sliced tomato, lettuce (for sandwich) |
| 1 cup radishes, celery, carrots | |
| 4 very lean protein | 4 ounces skinless white-meat chicken, grilled with lime juice |
| 2 fat | 2 tablespoons ranch dressing (for dipping) |
Snack
| 1 fruit | 1 kiwi |
| 1 lean protein | 1 ounce low-fat ham |
Post-Workout
SMOOTHIE
Blend until smooth.
| 1 milk | 1 cup fat-free milk |
| 1 fruit | ½ cup orange juice with calcium |
| 3 very lean protein | 21 grams whey protein powder |
Dinner
| 2 bread | 3-inch square of corn bread |
| 1 fruit | 1 large tangerine |
| 1 milk | 1 cup fat-free milk |
| 2 vegetable | Salad with 2 cups romaine lettuce, ½ cup tomato, ½ cup cucumber |
| 4 lean protein | 4 ounces salmon, poached |
| 3 fat | 4 tablespoons low-fat Caesar dressing |
| Included (in corn bread) |
I DESIGNED THIS MENU FOR THE GUY WHO WANTS TO LOSE 10 POUNDS FAST—by any means necessary. Don’t forget that exercise is required to make this work without losing lots of muscle. You’ll probably want to work out in the morning while your energy levels are high to gain the metabolic boost of exercise for an extra calorie burn all day long. But no matter what, if you follow this diet for much longer than 2 to 4 weeks, your tank will hit empty. This diet definitely cries out for supplementation. Take a multivitamin/mineral with antioxidants, plus 400 milligrams of calcium and 400 international units (IU) of vitamin D daily.
1,800 calories
104 grams carbohydrates
184 grams protein
72 grams fat
2 bread
2 fruit
2 milk
4 vegetable
15 very lean protein
6 lean protein
1 medium-fat protein
6 fat
0 teaspoons added sugar
Note: Occasionally, a fat-free product, like mustard or cooking spray, is included on the menus. These do not count toward your daily breakdown but should not be overused.
*Use every day.
†Based on a 185-pound man.
Pre-Workout Drink
| 4 very lean protein | 28 grams whey protein powder |
| Water, ice cubes |
Breakfast
| 1 bread | ½ cup Shredded Wheat |
| 1 milk | 1 cup fat-free milk |
| 1 fruit | 1 cup fresh blueberries |
| 1 medium-fat protein | 1 egg, scrambled in a nonstick pan |
| 3 very lean protein | 6 egg whites, scrambled with whole egg |
| 1 fat | 1½ tablespoons ground flaxseed |
| Water | |
| Oil-free cooking spray (for eggs) |
Snack
| 1 vegetable | 1 cup vegetable sticks |
| 2 fat | 1 tablespoon peanut butter |
Lunch
| 1 vegetable | Salad with 1 cup lettuce, ¼ cup tomato |
| ¼ cup green beans | |
| 6 very lean protein | 6 ounces albacore tuna in water, drained |
| 2 fat | 2 tablespoons low-fat dressing |
| 8 black olives |
| 1 vegetable | 1 cup vegetable sticks |
| 2 very lean protein | ½ cup low-fat cottage cheese |
Dinner
| 1 bread | 1 small ear corn on the cob |
| 1 fruit | 12 cherries |
| 1 milk | 1 cup fat-free milk |
| 1 vegetable | ½ cup grilled vegetables: peppers, zucchini, mushrooms, tomatoes |
| 6 lean protein | 6 ounces skinless dark-meat chicken, grilled with lime juice |
| 1 fat | 8 Kalamata olives |
Pre-Workout Drink
| 4 very lean protein | 28 grams whey protein powder |
| Water, ice cubes |
Breakfast
Combine yogurt, fruit, and honey. Combine muffin and egg for sandwich.
| 1 bread | ½ whole-wheat English muffin |
| 1 milk | 1 cup fat-free unsweetened yogurt |
| 1 fruit | 1¼ cups fresh strawberries |
| 1 medium-fat protein | 1 egg, hard-cooked |
| 3 very lean protein | 6 eggs, hard-cooked (discard yolks) |
| 1 fat | 1½ tablespoons ground flaxseed |
| Water |
Snack
| 1 vegetable | Sliced tomato, onion |
| 2 fat | 2 ounces cream cheese |
Lunch
| 1 vegetable | Salad with 1 cup romaine lettuce, plus ½ cup tomato, grilled eggplant, roasted red pepper |
| 6 very lean protein | 6 ounces skinless white-meat chicken, grilled with lime juice |
| 2 fat | Fat-free dressing |
| 2 teaspoons olive oil for roasted vegetables |
| 1 vegetable | ½ cup V8 juice |
| 2 very lean protein | 2 ounces fat-free cheese |
Dinner
| 1 bread | ½ cup cooked pasta |
| 1 fruit | 1¼ cups strawberries |
| 1 milk | 1 cup fat-free milk |
| 1 vegetable | ¼ cup ratatouille (over pasta) |
| Salad with 1 cup lettuce, ¼ cup tomato, ¼ cup cucumber | |
| 6 lean protein | 6 ounces lean ground beef (add to ratatouille) |
| 1 fat | 2 tablespoons low-fat dressing |
Pre-Workout Drink
| 4 very lean protein | 28 grams whey protein powder |
| Water, ice cubes |
Breakfast
| 1 bread | 1 slice whole-wheat bread |
| 1 milk | 1 cup fat-free cottage cheese (on bread; sprinkle with no-calorie sweetener and cinnamon) |
| 1 fruit | 4 ounces freshly squeezed orange juice (with pulp) |
| 1 medium-fat protein | 1 egg, cooked sunny-side up in a nonstick pan |
| 3 very lean protein | 6 egg whites, cooked with sunny-side up egg |
| 1 fat | 1½ tablespoons ground flaxseed |
| Water | |
| Oil-free cooking spray (for eggs) |
Snack
| 1 vegetable | 1 cup carrot sticks |
| 2 fat | 4 tablespoons low-fat ranch dressing |
Lunch
| 1 vegetable | 1 cup Chinese vegetables, stir-fried with garlic, onion, fresh ginger |
| 6 very lean protein | 6 ounces scallops, stir-fried |
| 2 fat | 2 teaspoons oil (for stir-frying) |
Snack
| 1 vegetable | 1 cup diced bell pepper |
| 2 very lean protein | ½ cup low-fat cottage cheese |
| 1 bread | ½ cup kidney beans (add to chili) |
| 1 fruit | 1 pear |
| 1 milk | 1 cup fat-free milk |
| 1 vegetable | ½ cup chopped cooked tomatoes with chili seasoning |
| ½ onion, garlic for seasoning | |
| 6 lean protein | Included (in beans) |
| 5 ounces soy crumbles (for chili) | |
| 1 fat | 1⁄8 avocado, diced |
Pre-Workout Drink
| 4 very lean protein | 28 grams whey protein powder |
| Water, ice cubes |
Breakfast
| 1 fruit | 1 cup raspberries |
| 1 milk | 1 cup fat-free milk (½ cup for French toast) |
FRENCH TOAST (See recipe directions on this page.)
| 1 bread | 1 slice whole-wheat bread |
| 1 medium-fat protein | 1 egg |
| 3 very lean protein | 6 egg whites |
| 1 fat | 1½ tablespoons ground flaxseed |
| Water Oil-free cooking spray |
Snack
| 1 vegetable | 1 cup celery sticks |
| 2 fat | 1 tablespoon almond butter |
Lunch
FAJITAS
Combine ingredients.
| 1 vegetable | ½ cup sautéed onions, peppers |
| 2 tablespoons salsa | |
| 6 very lean protein | 6 ounces skinless white-meat chicken, grilled with lime juice |
| 2 fat | 2 teaspoons olive oil (for cooking) |
| 1 vegetable | 1 cup cherry tomatoes |
| 2 very lean protein | 2 ounces fat-free cheese |
Dinner
| 1 bread | 1 cup chicken noodle soup |
| 1 fruit | 1 nectarine |
| 1 milk | 1 cup fat-free milk |
| 1 vegetable | Salad with 1 cup lettuce, ¼ cup tomato, ¼ cup cucumbers |
| 6 lean protein | 6 ounces swordfish, grilled with ginger and scallions |
| 1 fat | 2 tablespoons low-fat dressing |
| 1 teaspoon olive oil (for fish) |
Pre-Workout Drink
| 4 very lean protein | 28 grams whey protein powder |
| Water, ice cubes |
Breakfast
| 1 bread | ½ cup quick oats (not instant) |
| 1 milk | 1 cup fat-free milk |
| 1 fruit | 1 apple, diced |
| 1 medium-fat protein | 1 egg, scrambled in a nonstick pan |
| 3 very lean protein | 6 egg whites, scrambled with whole egg |
| 1 fat | 1½ tablespoons ground flaxseed |
| Water | |
| Oil-free cooking spray (for eggs) |
Snack
| 1 vegetable | 1 cup raw broccoli and/or cauliflower |
| 2 fat | 2 tablespoons Thousand Island dressing |
Lunch
| 1 vegetable | Salad with 1 cup lettuce, ¼ cup tomato, ¼ cup cucumber |
| Fat-free dressing | |
| 6 very lean protein | 6 ounces shrimp, grilled |
| 2 fat | 2 teaspoons olive oil (for cooking) |
| 1 vegetable | ½ cup salsa |
| 1 cup celery sticks | |
| 2 very lean protein | 2 ounces shredded fat-free cheese |
Dinner
| 1 bread | 1 small pita |
| 1 fruit | 2 large figs |
| 1 milk | 1 cup fat-free milk |
| 1 vegetable | 1 cup cucumber, tomato, sprouts |
| 6 lean protein | 6 ounces lean lamb, grilled with lime juice |
| 1 fat | 2 tablespoons low-fat cucumber-yogurt dressing (for lamb) |
Pre-Workout Drink
| 4 very lean protein | 28 grams whey protein powder |
| Water, ice cubes |
Breakfast
| 1 bread | 1 slice multigrain bread, toasted |
| 1 medium-fat protein | 1 egg, scrambled in a nonstick pan |
| 3 very lean protein | 6 egg whites, scrambled with whole egg |
| Oil-free cooking spray (for eggs) |
SMOOTHIE
Blend until smooth.
| 1 milk | 1 cup fat-free milk |
| 1 fruit | ¼ cup orange juice |
| ½ fresh peach | |
| 1 fat | 1½ tablespoons ground flaxseed |
| Water |
Snack
| 1 vegetable | 1 cup fresh raw green beans |
| 2 fat | 2 tablespoons sliced almonds |
Roll lox, cream cheese, veggies inside lettuce.
| 1 vegetable | Lettuce leaves, onion, tomato |
| 6 very lean protein | 6 ounces lox or smoked salmon |
| 2 fat | 2 tablespoons cream cheese |
Snack
| 1 vegetable | 1 cup cherry tomatoes, mushrooms |
| 2 very lean protein | 2 ounces fat-free mozzarella |
Dinner
| 1 bread | 1 slice rye bread |
| 1 fruit | 17 grapes |
| 1 milk | 1 cup fat-free milk |
| 1 vegetable | ½ cup chopped vegetables (cucumbers, carrots, onions; mix into tuna) |
| 6 lean protein | 6 ounces tuna in olive oil, drained |
| 1 fat | 2 tablespoons reduced-fat mayonnaise |
Pre-Workout Drink
| 4 very lean protein | 28 grams whey protein powder |
| Water, ice cubes |
Breakfast
| 1 bread | ½ cup Shredded Wheat |
| 1 milk | 1 cup fat-free milk |
| 1 fruit | 1 cup raspberries |
| 1 medium-fat protein | 1 egg, hard-cooked (for egg salad) |
| 3 very lean protein | 6 eggs, hard-cooked (for egg salad; discard yolks) |
| 1 fat | 1½ tablespoons ground flaxseed |
| 1 tablespoon fat-free mayonnaise (for egg salad) | |
| Mustard (for egg salad) | |
| Water |
Snack
| 1 vegetable | ½ cup V8 juice |
| 2 fat | 20 peanuts |
| 1 vegetable | Sliced tomato, lettuce (for sandwich) |
| ½ cup radishes, celery, carrots | |
| 6 very lean protein | 6 ounces skinless white-meat chicken, grilled with lime juice |
| 2 fat | 2 tablespoons ranch dressing (for dipping) |
Snack
| 1 vegetable | 1 cup celery sticks |
| 2 very lean protein | ¾ cup fat-free ricotta (Put dry onion soup mix into ricotta to make dip.) |
Dinner
| 1 bread | 1 small whole-wheat dinner roll |
| 1 fruit | 1 large tangerine |
| 1 milk | 1 cup fat-free milk |
| 1 vegetable | Salad with 1 cup lettuce, ¼ cup tomato, ¼ cup cucumber |
| 6 lean protein | 6 ounces salmon, poached |
| 1 fat | 2 tablespoons reduced-fat Caesar dressing |
THIS GUY HAS GONE ON AND OFF SO MANY DIETS, gained and lost pounds so many times, that his metabolic rate is in the cellar. When he diets, he basically fasts, eating as little as possible. He doesn’t work out while he’s dieting because he’s too tired. He needs to get active, eat at regular intervals, and increase his caloric intake if he’s ever going to have a chance of losing fat and gaining some muscle. That’s the only way he can bump his metabolic rate back up to its starting point.
2,003 calories
196 grams carbohydrates
154 grams protein
67 grams fat
5 bread
4 fruit
3 milk
5 vegetable
9 very lean protein
5 lean protein
1 medium-fat protein
6 fat
0 teaspoons added sugar
Note: Occasionally, a fat-free product, like mustard or cooking spray, is included on the menus. These do not count toward your daily breakdown but should not be overused.
*Use every day.
†Based on a 185-pound man.
Pre-Workout Drink
| 1 milk | 1 cup fat-free milk |
| 1 fruit | ½ cup orange juice with calcium |
| 2 very lean protein | 14 grams whey protein powder |
Breakfast
| 1 bread | ½ cup Shredded Wheat |
| 1 milk | 1 cup fat-free milk |
| 1 fruit | ¾ cup fresh blueberries |
| 1 medium-fat protein | 1 egg, scrambled in a nonstick pan |
| 2 very lean protein | 4 egg whites, scrambled with whole egg |
| 1 fat | 1½ tablespoons ground flaxseed |
| Water | |
| Oil-free cooking spray (for eggs) |
Snack
| 1 bread | ½ cup edamame |
| 1 vegetable | 1 cup vegetable sticks |
| 1 very lean protein | Included (in edamame) |
Lunch
| 1 bread | 2 very small boiled potatoes (for salad Niçoise) |
| 2 vegetable | 2 cups lettuce, ½ cup tomato |
| ½ cup green beans | |
| 4 very lean protein | 4 ounces albacore tuna in water, drained |
| 2 fat | 2 tablespoons low-fat dressing |
| 8 black olives |
| 1 fruit | ½ cup unsweetened applesauce |
| 1 lean protein | ¼ cup cottage cheese |
Dinner
| 2 bread | 1 small ear corn on the cob |
| 1 slice crusty French bread | |
| 1 fruit | 12 cherries |
| 1 milk | 1 cup fat-free milk |
| 2 vegetable | 1 cup grilled vegetables (peppers, zucchini, mushrooms, tomatoes) |
| 4 lean protein | 4 ounces barbecued chicken |
| 3 fat | 1 tablespoon garlic-infused olive oil with 1 teaspoon balsamic vinegar (for dipping) |
Pre-Workout Drink
| 1 milk | 1 cup fat-free milk |
| 1 fruit | ½ cup orange juice with calcium |
| 2 very lean protein | 14 grams whey protein powder |
Breakfast
Combine yogurt, fruit, and honey. Combine muffin and egg for sandwich.
| 1 bread | ½ whole-wheat English muffin |
| 1 milk | 1 cup fat-free unsweetened yogurt |
| 1 fruit | 1¼ cups fresh strawberries |
| 1 medium-fat protein | 1 egg, hard-cooked |
| 2 very lean protein | 4 eggs, hard-cooked (discard yolks) |
| 1 fat | 1½ tablespoons ground flaxseed |
| Water |
Snack
| 1 bread | ½ bagel |
| 1 vegetable | Sliced tomato, onion |
| 1 very lean protein | 1 ounce lox or smoked salmon |
| 1 tablespoon fat-free cream cheese |
| 1 bread | 1 slice whole-grain bread |
| 2 vegetable | Large salad with 2 cups romaine lettuce, plus tomato, grilled eggplant, roasted red pepper |
| Fat-free dressing | |
| 4 very lean protein | 4 ounces skinless white-meat chicken, grilled with lime juice |
| 2 fat | 2 teaspoons olive oil (for roasted vegetables) |
Snack
| 1 fruit | ½ mango |
| 1 lean protein | 1 ounce reduced-fat ricotta cheese |
Dinner
| 2 bread | 1 cup cooked pasta |
| 1 fruit | 1¼ cups strawberries |
| 1 milk | 1 cup fat-free milk |
| 2 vegetable | ½ cup ratatouille (over pasta) |
| Salad with 1 cup lettuce, ¼ cup tomato, ¼ cup cucumber | |
| 4 lean protein | 4 ounces lean ground beef (add to ratatouille) |
| 3 fat | 1 tablespoon dressing |
Pre-Workout Drink
| 1 milk | 1 cup fat-free milk |
| 1 fruit | ½ cup orange juice with calcium |
| 2 very lean protein | 14 grams whey protein powder |
Breakfast
| 1 bread | 1 slice whole-wheat bread |
| 1 milk | 1 cup fat-free cottage cheese (on bread; sprinkle with no-calorie sweetener and cinnamon) |
| 1 fruit | 4 ounces freshly squeezed orange juice (with pulp) |
| 1 medium-fat protein | 1 egg, cooked sunny-side up in a nonstick pan |
| 2 very lean protein | 4 egg whites, cooked with sunny-side up egg |
| 1 fat | 1½ tablespoons ground flaxseed |
| Water | |
| Oil-free cooking spray (for eggs) |
Snack
| 1 bread | 8 Wheat Thins |
| 1 vegetable | 1 cup diced bell pepper |
| 1 very lean protein | ¼ cup low-fat cottage cheese |
| 1 bread | 1⁄3 cup rice |
| 2 vegetable | 1 cup Chinese vegetables, stir-fried with garlic, onion, fresh ginger |
| 4 very lean protein | 4 ounces scallops, stir-fried |
| 2 fat | 2 teaspoons oil (for stir-frying) |
Snack
| 1 fruit | 1 cup sliced melon |
| 1 lean protein | 1 ounce reduced-fat cheddar cheese |
Dinner
| 2 bread | 1 cup kidney beans (add to chili) |
| 1 fruit | 1 pear |
| 1 milk | 1 cup fat-free milk |
| 2 vegetable | 1 cup chopped cooked tomatoes with chili seasoning |
| ½ onion, garlic for seasoning | |
| Salad with 1 cup lettuce, ¼ cup tomato, ¼ cup cucumber | |
| 4 lean protein | Included (in beans) |
| 2 ounces soy crumbles (add to chili) | |
| 3 fat | 2 slices bacon, cooked very crisp, crumbled into chili 1⁄8 avocado, diced |
Pre-Workout Drink
| 1 milk | 1 cup fat-free milk |
| 1 fruit | ½ cup orange juice with calcium |
| 2 very lean protein | 14 grams whey protein powder |
Breakfast
| 1 fruit | 1 cup raspberries |
| 1 milk | 1 cup fat-free milk (½ cup for French toast) |
FRENCH TOAST (See recipe directions on this page.)
| 1 bread | 1 slice whole-wheat bread |
| 1 medium-fat protein | 1 egg |
| 2 very lean protein | 4 egg whites |
| 1 fat | 1½ tablespoons ground flaxseed |
| Water |
| 1 bread | 1 slice multigrain bread |
| 1 vegetable | Sliced tomato |
| 1 very lean protein | 1 ounce fat-free cheese |
Lunch
FAJITAS
Combine ingredients.
| 1 bread | 1 tortilla |
| 2 vegetable | 1 cup sautéed onions, peppers |
| 2 tablespoons salsa | |
| 4 very lean protein | 4 ounces skinless white-meat chicken, grilled with lime juice |
| 2 fat | 2 teaspoons olive oil (for cooking) |
Snack
| 1 fruit | 1¼ cups strawberries |
| 1 lean protein | ¾ cup reduced-fat ricotta cheese |
Dinner
| 2 bread | 1 ounce croutons (for salad) |
| 1 cup chicken noodle soup | |
| 1 fruit | 1 nectarine |
| 1 milk | 1 cup fat-free milk |
| 2 vegetable | Salad with 2 cups romaine lettuce, ½ cup tomato, ½ cup cucumber |
| 4 lean protein | 4 ounces swordfish, grilled with ginger and scallions |
| 3 fat | 2 tablespoons dressing |
| 1 teaspoon olive oil (for fish) |
Pre-Workout Drink
| 1 milk | 1 cup fat-free milk |
| 1 fruit | ½ cup orange juice with calcium |
| 2 very lean protein | 14 grams whey protein powder |
Breakfast
| 1 bread | ½ cup quick oats (not instant) |
| 1 milk | 1 cup fat-free milk |
| 1 fruit | 1 apple, diced |
| 1 medium-fat protein | 1 egg, scrambled in a nonstick pan |
| 2 very lean protein | 4 egg whites, scrambled with whole egg |
| 1 fat | 1½ tablespoons ground flaxseed |
| Water |
| 1 bread | ¾ ounce baked tortilla chips |
| 1 vegetable | ½ cup salsa |
| 1 very lean protein | 1 ounce shredded fat-free cheese |
Lunch
| 1 bread | ½ cup cooked linguini |
| 2 vegetable | Salad with 1 cup lettuce, ¼ cup tomato, ¼ cup cucumber |
| Fat-free dressing | |
| ½ cup marinara sauce | |
| 4 very lean protein | 4 ounces shrimp, grilled |
| 2 fat | 2 teaspoons olive oil (for cooking) |
Snack
| 1 fruit | 1 medium peach |
| 1 lean protein | ¼ cup cottage cheese |
Dinner
| 2 bread | 1 large pita |
| 1 fruit | 2 large figs |
| 1 milk | 1 cup fat-free milk |
| 2 vegetable | Salad with 2 cups romaine lettuce, ½ cup tomato, ½ cup cucumber |
| 4 lean protein | 4 ounces lean lamb, grilled with lime juice |
| 3 fat | 2 tablespoons vinaigrette |
| 1 tablespoon cucumber-yogurt dressing (for lamb) |
Pre-Workout Drink
| 1 milk | 1 cup fat-free milk |
| 1 fruit | ½ cup orange juice with calcium |
| 2 very lean protein | 14 grams whey protein powder |
Breakfast
| 1 bread | 1 slice multigrain bread, toasted |
| 1 medium-fat protein | 1 egg, scrambled in a nonstick pan |
| 2 very lean protein | 4 egg whites, scrambled with whole egg |
Blend until smooth.
| 1 milk | 1 cup fat-free milk |
| 1 fruit | ¼ cup orange juice |
| ½ fresh peach | |
| 1 fat | 1½ tablespoons ground flaxseed |
| Water |
Snack
Place vegetables on pita, top with cheese, heat.
| 1 bread | 1 small pita |
| 1 vegetable | 1 cup diced tomato, mushrooms |
| 1 very lean protein | 1 ounce fat-free mozzarella |
Lunch
| 1 bread | ½ whole-wheat bagel |
| 2 vegetable | 1 cup carrot sticks |
| Onion, tomato | |
| 4 very lean protein | 4 ounces smoked salmon |
| 2 fat | 2 tablespoons cream cheese |
Snack
| 1 fruit | 1 small orange |
| 1 lean protein | 1 ounce turkey |
Dinner
| 2 bread | 2 slices rye bread |
| 1 fruit | 17 grapes |
| 1 milk | 1 cup fat-free milk |
| 2 vegetable | 1 cup coleslaw |
| ½ cup chopped vegetables (cucumbers, carrots, onions; mix into tuna) | |
| 4 lean protein | 4 ounces tuna in olive oil, drained |
| 3 fat | 2 tablespoons mayonnaise |
| Included (in coleslaw) |
Pre-Workout Drink
| 1 milk | 1 cup fat-free milk |
| 1 fruit | ½ cup orange juice with calcium |
| 2 very lean protein | 14 grams whey protein powder |
| 1 bread | ½ cup Shredded Wheat |
| 1 milk | 1 cup fat-free milk |
| 1 fruit | 1 cup raspberries |
| 1 medium-fat protein | 1 egg, hard-cooked (for egg salad) |
| 2 very lean protein | 4 eggs, hard-cooked (for egg salad; discard yolks) |
| 1 fat | 1½ tablespoons ground flaxseed |
| 1 tablespoon fat-free mayonnaise (for egg salad) | |
| Mustard (for egg salad) | |
| Water |
Snack
| 1 bread | 5 slices melba toast |
| 1 vegetable | 1 cup celery sticks |
| 1 very lean protein | ¾ cup fat-free ricotta |
| (Stir dry onion soup mix into ricotta to make dip.) |
Lunch
| 1 bread | 1 small multigrain roll |
| 2 vegetable | Sliced tomato, lettuce (for sandwich) |
| ½ cup radishes, celery, carrots | |
| 4 very lean protein | 4 ounces skinless white-meat chicken, grilled with lime juice |
| 2 fat | 2 tablespoons ranch dressing (for dipping) |
Snack
| 1 fruit | 1 kiwi |
| 1 lean protein | 1 ounce low-fat ham |
Dinner
| 2 bread | 3-inch square of corn bread |
| 1 fruit | 1 large tangerine |
| 1 milk | 1 cup fat-free milk |
| 2 vegetable | Salad with 1 cup romaine lettuce, ½ cup tomato, ½ cup cucumber |
| 4 lean protein | 4 ounces salmon, poached |
| 3 fat | 4 tablespoons low-fat Caesar dressing |
| Included (in corn bread) |