Ditching the dad bod in time for beach escape
Doctor’s book offers common-sense approach to losing weight the right way
The biggest problem I have with the endless diets I find myself on is that I tend to forget which regime I’m supposed to be following.
Then staring summer in the eye, and with my clothes cinching around me so that I bulge like a fully weaned seal pup, I admit a need to restore some discipline if I’m not to disgrace myself on a foreign beach in the Mediterranean in six weeks’ time.
I arrange to meet Dr. Xand Van Tulleken, a qualified doctor and scientist, who has spent years studying what does and doesn’t work and has condensed his knowledge into a pithy book — How to Lose Weight Well: The Book (Quadrille Publishing Ltd.), named after the U.K. TV series he hosts — packed with healthy recipes.
With a copy of Xand’s book in hand, I head home to face my own dad-bod.
The first step was to weigh myself. The scales reveal I am a whopping 11 pounds (five kilograms) heavier than when I last hopped on. The tape measure confirms my gut as nudging 45 inches. According to an online calorie calculator, as a six-foot, moderately active 44-year-old male, I require about 2,400 calories a day. To lose up to three pounds a week, I will need to cut out at least 1,000 calories a day.
Which is where Xand’s regime comes to the rescue. Rather than prescribing what to eat, he merely sets down broad rules to live by.
Rule No. 1 is to ditch processed food. Rule No. 2 is to stop boozing “if you can” (we’ll see). Rule No. 3 is to eat only home-cooked whole foods: think miso and aubergine, steak salad, or roast carrot and goats’ cheese with lentils.
Finally, Rule No. 4 is about living well, which means getting active, as well as confronting the things that play on your mind which encourage emotional eating.
“It doesn’t have to be a set of dramatic stresses for you to end up managing with food,” he says. “Living in a house with another human, having children, trying to run a normal life and hold down a job is enough. And you must confront some of these horrible things about why we overeat.”
Xand recommends eating either three meals a day if you don’t mind stretching your calories out (oatmeal for breakfast; cheese and dressed salad for lunch; steak and veg for dinner); two meals a day if you’d like to lose even more weight (i.e., ditch the breakfast); or one meal a day for maximum weight loss (think, for my purposes, a big dinner of fish pie and pea and parsnip mash, with avocado, fennel and asparagus salad). And if you can’t stand the hunger pangs, he says in the book that “you can manage them by snacking” — just make sure not to exceed your daily calorie intake.
Ultimately, this diet is about being a grown-up. As such, no food is off the menu. But if it suggests a “cheese and a dressed salad” for lunch, it doesn’t tell you how much to eat. Instead, it’s up to you to understand what you are eating and how much (meaning, how little) you need.
I keep a daily food diary, and make a quick plan of what I will eat — knowing what to eat and that you have all the ingredients is crucial.
Each day, dumping breakfast for a big black coffee feels like the easiest way of shaving calories and meeting my daily target. If I really need a snack, I have a cube of cheese and a handful of almonds.
Lunch is a lightly dressed salad, or veg and brown pasta with lean protein such as grilled salmon. At about 4 p.m., I get hungry so I eat defensively — another handful of nuts with an espresso and, if desperate, a square of very dark chocolate or another cube of cheese. If I am out and about and hungry, I have water, a banana and a black coffee. Dinner is always a healthy blowout of veg, salad, pasta, or a few boiled potatoes with lots of protein.
Also part of the regime is to get more active, so I’m playing more tennis and wall-climbing, dialing up the calories a little to compensate for extra activity. And after just four weeks, I find that I have lost 10 pounds — a full inch off my waist.