our lives, we’ve been conditioned to believe that if one thing is good for us, then more of it must be better. If you eliminate 100 calories from your daily diet, then eliminating 400 must qualify you for size 2. If you walk to lose weight, then running a marathon must nuke the fat right off your body. Well, neither idea is true. Worse, not only aren’t they true, but many of the diet myths perpetuated today actually hurt our bodies. Food deprivation, for example, drops your metabolism and makes your body want to store fat. Many of the rules, ideas, and principles you may believe about dieting—that you assume work when dieting—simply aren’t true and can very well contribute to weight issues because they keep the vicious cycle of fat loss and fat gain revolving faster than Lance Armstrong’s front wheel.
FACTOID
In men, the supplement L-carnitine-at a dose of 3 grams a day-helps muscles use carbohydrates, but it is also good for blood vessel function in both men and women.
In a way, we live on the two extremes of a pendulum. Either we swing all the way in one direction (strict, tedious dieting with a draconian low daily calorie intake), or we swing all the way in the other direction (popping cream-cheese-smothered bagels like grapes). We have to stop swinging so much and start living in the middle of that pendulum by striking a balance and avoiding the periods of extreme “ons” and “offs.”
One of the reasons why most so-called diets fail is because of a psychological and behavioral flaw that many dieters have. We desperately want to believe the simple, comforting promises that diets make—that doing A always gets us B. Because once we see that A (eating wheat germ 24–7) doesn’t always equal B (the cover of Vogue), then we get frustrated and angry, and give in to the gods of cream-filled baked goods.
Unfortunately, your body and your fat do not have a linear, two-step relationship. Instead, think of your body as an orchestra. All of its systems, organs, muscles, cells, fluids, hormones, and chemicals play different instruments, make different sounds (your intestines have dibs on first-chair tuba), and produce different results depending on how you use them. They work independently, but only when they’re played together can you appreciate the magnificent symphony of your own biology. As the conductor of your biological orchestra, you control how the instruments interact and what the final result will be.
YOU Will Make Dieting Automatic
While we want you to “not think” about eating good foods, we also know that “not thinking” may be how you got into this pants-stretching mess in the first place. When you don’t think about the consequences of ordering football-size cal-zones, you wind up with such pleasantries as high LDL (lousy type of) cholesterol, low HDL (healthy type of) cholesterol, inflammation in your arteries, and a higher risk of aging arteries that cause memory loss, heart disease, even wrinkles, as well as a steady stream of coupon offers from the large men’s department. We want your body to guide you to the right choices—without thinking about them—so that they’ll lead to the results you want. It will take some effort at the start to retrain your habits, palate, and muscles, but this program will serve as a lifelong eating, activity, and behavior plan that will become as routine as going to the bathroom before bed.
Unless you’re the rare kind of person who responds to dietary drill sergeants, you won’t find long-term solutions using traditional weight-loss methods: willpower, deprivation, fads, phases, or dead-bolting the lid of the butter pecan. Instead, using this plan, you will train yourself to never think about how much you’re eating, never think about getting on a diet or worry about coming off one, and never have to figure out formulas, zones, or, for the love of (fill in the deity of your choice), place a chicken breast on a food scale.
YOU Will Focus on Waist Management
Our society seems almost as obsessed with pounds as it is with celebrity breakups, but it’s time to shift your thinking: Studies have shown that waist circumference, not overall weight, is the most important indicator of mortality related to being overweight. Of course you’ll lose pounds on this plan, but we want you to switch your focus from a number that measures your weight to one that measures your waist. Because of its proximity to your organs, your belly fat is the most dangerous fat you can carry.
YOU Test
Take Out the Tape
Some people haven’t stepped on a scale since Laverne & Shirley played prime time. And that’s a good thing. For our purposes, you don’t need to know how much you weigh (but if you want to check your progress on this program, then go ahead and peek). All you need is a tape measure. Measure the circumference of your waist at the point of your belly button, and record the score here. (Depending on how your weight is distributed, you may need to make an adjustment to where you place the tape. If you’re obese, keep the tape measure parallel to the floor during measurement.)
YOUR SIZE:
For optimum health, the ideal waist size for women is 32½ inches; once you hit 37 inches, the dangers to your health increase. For men, the ideal is 35 inches, and the dangers to your health increase once you hit 40 inches.
While we’re going to emphasize waist over weight in this book, we also know that many of you won’t be able to resist the siren of the scale. When it comes to actual weight, you do need to stop thinking about one specific number. (“I want to get down to one hundred thirty.”) All of us have an ideal playing weight-not a weight for running marathons or making All Pro linebacker or posing for an airbrushed-anyway centerfold. This ideal playing weight is a range in which you live lean and healthy, and one in which you significantly reduce the risks of aging diseases associated with being overweight (more on all of this in Part 2).
In addition to helping you shrink your waist through diet, well also teach you the exercises that will help you achieve and maintain a healthy waist size. Now, we don’t want you to think that exercise must involve sweating like a waterfall and panting like an obscene caller, because it doesn’t. But you do need to start thinking about your body as a dartboard: it’s all about what’s in the center. You’ll be focusing on the physical activities that will help control your waist size—specifically walking and foundation-muscle training of your entire body (without growing igloo-size muscles). Well teach you simple moves that will develop all of your foundation muscles, and well teach you how to tighten your belly, improve your posture, and develop the muscles that will make you fit into your clothes better. That translates into a shapelier waist, which, studies show, makes you more attractive to others.
But let’s not overlook the management part of the waist management equation. We all know how good managers work: they plan ahead and create systems that play to people’s strengths, they set realistic goals, they measure progress, and they don’t force their employees down roads that are designed to give them a pack-your-things meeting with HR. You need to train yourself to be a good waist manager by following a plan that’s designed to help you become the CEO of your body.
You Will Focus on YOU, but Not Rely on YOU
It doesn’t matter whether you look at presidents (Lincoln or Taft), musicians (Usher or Heavy D), or tennis players (Sharapova or Serena), it’s clear that we all have different builds, just as we all have different genetics, metabolic rates, and chemical interactions. Still, there are some fundamental biological facts that are true whether you’re built like a branch or a stump. As a species, we’re programmed to gain and preserve the right amount of weight. That’s simply what our
