Ditching the dad bod quickly London Daily Telegraph

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 (1.14 metres). According to an online calorie calculator, as a six-foot (1.82-m) moderately active 44-year-old male, I require about 2,400 calories a day. To lose up to three pounds (1.36 kg) 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.

Xand recommends eating either three meals a day if you don’t mind stretching your calories out; 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. 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. Instead, it’s up to you to understand what you are eating and how much (meaning, how little) you need.

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 some 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. 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 (4.5 kg) — a full inch off my waist.