are high in sugar, the depression may be due to the strong dip in blood sugar that occurs in some people a few hours after eating sugary foods. Eating or drinking something sweet provides an instant boost, but it starts the vicious circle all over again. A deficiency of the mineral chromium substantially aggravates blood sugar problems. Chromium is mostly found in whole-grain foods and gets very depleted when you consume a lot of sugary foods and drinks.
EXERCISE
The more accustomed your body gets to hard exercise, the faster your cells will use up and burn calories. But your cells do not just step up their metabolism during the period of exercise itself. Your metabolic rate remains high for up to 15 hours afterwards—so your calories will be burned up faster even while you are asleep.
To help you lose weight, exercise must be regular, and hard enough to make you sweat or breathe faster for at least 20 minutes, about three times a week. Examples are weight or circuit training, hill-walking, jogging, swimming and aerobics. You should also walk briskly or cycle whenever you can, use stairs instead of lifts and elevators, walk up escalators, do the housework twice as fast, and go dancing instead of sitting in pubs and bars. Try to park your car a few minutes’ walk from where you’re going. All these things make a difference.
Experts in physiology have known for years that a body with more lean tissue (also known as muscle) makes for a more rapid metabolic rate. But both men and women start to lose muscle in their 20s, which is why, by middle age, it can be so hard to lose weight. Muscle can only be regained by exercising. In a study carried out by Tufts University, eight men and four women aged 56 to 80 carried out strength-building exercises for 30 minutes three times a week for 12 weeks. This boosted their resting metabolic rate by an amazing eight per cent, and they had to consume an extra 300 calories a day to keep their body weight at the same level. Their muscles did not grow any larger on this programme, but they did become stronger and more metabolically active.
Strength-building exercises involve sustaining a muscle’s effort—holding the muscle in its position of maximum tension for as long as possible. Weight-lifting is the best-known but not the only form of strength-building exercise. The body’s weight itself can be used to sustain maximum muscular effort—for instance in sit-up exercises which involve remaining in the stomach muscles’ position of maximum effort for a count of 10.
Most people live within reasonable distance of a local health club with a gym. An instructor is always available to give a supervised training programme to meet personal requirements, and teach clients how to follow it.
Women please note that a few hours’ strength-building a week is very unlikely to result in hard muscles! On the contrary, improving the lean-to-fat ratio gives a woman a great shape and makes her feel lighter and more energetic for the simple reason that her muscles will find it easier to carry her around.
Strength-building exercises are best combined with exercises designed to build cardiovascular fitness. You can tell roughly what your level of cardiovascular fitness is by how easily you get out of breath. Cycling, swimming, running, aerobics and rowing are all suitable forms, and it is surprising how quickly your fitness improves if you practise any of these a few times a week, even if only for 20 minutes.
If you find it hard to motivate yourself to exercise alone, try finding an exercise partner who agrees to meet up with you on a regular basis.
THE IMPORTANCE OF BREAKFAST
Some people try to lose weight by skipping breakfast, but this isn’t a good idea. Breakfast stimulates your metabolism to wake up after an overnight fast. The speed of your metabolism determines how quickly you burn calories, so if you don’t eat breakfast, your metabolism may remain at its night-time rate—slow!
Some people say they feel less hungry throughout the morning if they do skip breakfast. However, this is because several hormones are working to conserve your blood sugar and slow down your metabolism. The hunger you may have experienced after eating breakfast was probably caused by eating the wrong kind of breakfast. A bowl of cereal or toast and coffee for breakfast is mainly carbohydrate. It will raise your blood sugar levels quickly, but the faster they rise, the faster they will also fall and the sooner you will feel hungry again. On the other hand, if you eat a more substantial breakfast which includes more protein and a little good quality oil or fat, you should feel satisfied and energetic until shortly before lunchtime On the Big Healthy Soup Diet you may find you need a little top-up mid-morning, but that doesn’t matter; you can eat as often as you like as long as it’s only soup!
SUPPLEMENTS TO AID WEIGHT-LOSS
Supplements of conjugated linoleic acid (CLA)—a substance found in dairy fat—have been found in clinical trials to help improve body composition. After dieting, the test subjects who were taking CLA supplements put weight back on mostly in the form of lean tissue, whereas the control subjects (those not taking CLA) put weight back on mostly in the form of body fat.
Another useful supplement is the amino acid carnitine. This regulates the rate at which the body burns fat. Your body makes carnitine from lysine and methionine, with the help of vitamin C and iron, but if you are not making the maximum amount which your body can use to aid fat-burning, it will do you no harm to get a little extra in the form of supplements.
As with all other supplements. CLA and carnitine should be taken in accordance with the directions on the product label.
POWER SOUPS TO AID WEIGHT-LOSS
SOUP DIET PROGRAMMES
The two soup diet programmes in this book have been devised for you depending on your needs. If you want to clean out your system, shed some water retention and start getting into a more healthy state, Programme 1: the four-day Mini-detox, is for you.
If, on the other hand, you have some weight to lose, you can go straight to Programme 2: the 10-day Big Healthy Soup Diet. (This starts off with the same four-day Mini-detox.) You can repeat the diet as often as you like until you have reached your target weight. Alternatively, after the 10 days just begin to sample the other delicious soup recipes in this book. They are all designed to help you shed pounds.
Programme 1: Mini-detox
This is designed to
Cleanse and begin to regenerate your digestive system
Balance your blood sugar
Reduce stress on your adrenal glands
Re-hydrate your blood after too much alcohol, tea and coffee—but at the same time release unhealthy water retention from your tissues
Eliminate excess acidity caused by too much meat, fat and sugar
Provide extra antioxidants to combat toxins
Start off the fat-burning
