The "No Snack Diet", your key to a great body, enduring performance and fantastic health!
When I woke this morning, I was not hungry, so I got stuck straight into work. By 11 am I was hungry, so I had a good feed. So much for breakfast being the most important meal of the day!
While in my 20's and running marathon consistently faster than 2 hours and 40 minutes, my weight was 60-61 Kg. I was like a salty pretzel.
By 50 years of age, my weight had climbed to about 64-65 kg and I was not healthy. I began measuring my body fatness. I also began questioning what I had learned about nutrition while at university, including the need to snack. What I was doing and what I was telling my clients to do was clearly not working for me!
From 60 years of age, my body fat had declined from 17% down to about 8% and I now weigh from 61-63 kg. I carry more muscle now than during my 20's and this is despite not having stepped inside a gym in the last 15 years!
This goes completely against everything we are told about what happens to our bodies as we age: we lose lean tissue and we gain fat!
I'll tell you what I did with my diet to reverse this process of decline (of course, I did a whole lot more including diet, but the way we eat is hugely important).
Please make Dr. Penny your heroine. She looks great and it is not from Botox and image airbrushing. One reason why she looks so good is the way she eats.
Please visit her website, read her articles and purchase her book:
General Rules for fantastic health, athletic endurance and a great body:
No snacks between meals. You may take your vitamins and have a cup of tea. No calories between meals, please.
Have at least five hours between meals. That equates to three hours digesting, then at least two hours of burning fat stores.
Eat well. Eat foods that are nutritious. Favour foods that YOU have prepared yourself from their raw ingredients. Give preference for meat, eggs, fish, vegetables, fruit and so on. Avoid foods that do not look like what they originally came from.
Avoid toxins. Avoid foods that come with a long list of flavourings, colouring and stabilisers, and preservatives, especially nitrates. Avoid chlorinated and fluoridated water. Chlorine and fluorine are halides that interfere with iodine in the body, thus suppressing the thyroid which then causes chronic fatigue and weight gain. Our home has a rainwater collection system that is passed through a filter. The water is delicious and healthy!
Take your time with meals. Eat Mediterranean-style which means eating with family and friends, resting between courses. Do not gobble and scoff your food. No rushing.
If you are not hungry then do not eat. Wait until you are hungry, then eat. Eat only when hungry, even if that means skipping a meal like breakfast.
Fast one day a week. Do not eat anything from between dawn and dusk. This was a common practice in just about all ancient societies and religions. I wonder why? Pick a busy day for your fast. It is easier to get through the day without eating when busy. Have your vitamins and fluids, but no calories please.
With time, this will become very easy to do. Your body will progressively become more and more efficient at running off your body fat stores.
Just two or three meals a day is the key!
Spacing eating so that there is a maximum of two to three meals a day, and having one day a week of no eating is the way humanity used to eat over many thousands of years. This is the way it was before the days of the fridge, the electric stove, the supermarket and the muesli bar came along and messed it all up.
Our physiology is designed for this way of eating. That is why we store fat. It is for a "rainy" day when gathering food and cooking may not have been possible. The problem with Modern Man and Woman is their fat-burning systems have become weak and wasted, similar to that of muscles that have not been exercised on a daily basis. It is time to give your fat-burning systems a daily workout.
I recommend that people have "Brunch" with the first meal being around 10 or 11 am then having an early evening meal, not much later than 6 pm. This is easy to do once the routine is in place.