Losing that dad-bod in time for the holidays
I SHED 4.5kg in four weeks by following a few rules: two meals a day, painting the hallway and playing more tennis.
The biggest problem with my endless dieting is I forget which regime I’m on and start applying half-remembered rules from 20 years ago: low carbs, no carbs, only carbs. And at the end of each diet I end up eating loads of bread with cheese, olives and red wine. Now bulging like a weaned seal pup, I admit I need to restore some discipline if before the family holiday in a few weeks’ time.
Dr Xand van Tulleken [whose TV show How to Lose Weight Well is on Dstv’s channel 174, BBC Lifestyle, on Tuesdays at 3.39pm] is a doctor who has condensed years of study into a book packed with healthy recipes ( How to Lose Weight Well, on Kindle or from Amazon). Looking at him it’s difficult to believe he wasn’t always in such fine fettle. In 2008 his weight ballooned after some life-changing news – that, following an affair, he was to become a father. The mother of his child lives overseas.
“I had to work out how to have a relationship with my son living [far] away,” he recalls. It was when he reached 120kg that he realised he had taken to comfort eating and needed to fix not only his diet, but the issues causing his emotional responses to food.
This is the crux of his method. “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 horrible things about why we overeat.”
With the book in hand, I head home to face my own dad-bod. The first step is to weigh myself. Having avoided the scales for a year, it’s horrible. I am a whopping 5kg heavier. The tape measure confirms it: my gut is nudging 114cm.
An online calorie calculator tells me as a 1.8m (6ft) 44-year-old male, I require about 10 042 kiljoules (2 400 calories) a day. To lose a kilogram a week, I need to cut out at least 4 184kj (1 000cal) a day. Which is where Xand’s regime comes in. Rather than prescribing what to eat, he just sets down broad rules to live by.
Rule 1 is to ditch processed food, which puts paid to my daily bag of cereal. Rule 2 is to stop boozing “if you can” (we’ll see). Rule 3 is to eat only home-cooked whole foods: think steak salad, or roast carrot and goats’ cheese with lentils.
Finally, rule 4 is about living well, which means getting active – and also confronting the things that play on your mind and encourage emotional eating.
Xand recommends three meals a day if you don’t mind stretching your calories out (porridge 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 (ie ditch breakfast); or one a day for maximum weight loss. If you can’t stand the hunger pangs, he says, “manage them by snacking” – just make sure not to exceed your daily intake. It sounds like the kind of diet a bloke can stick to, and I find the twomealsplan suits me best.
But a key part of Xand’s approach is to wrestle with your issues, or take on jobs you’ve been putting off. I start by decorating the hall, and the paint fumes put me off food, which comes in handy.
Really this diet is about being a grownup. As such, no food is off the menu. But if it suggests “cheese and a dressed salad” it doesn’t tell you how much, or that you’re not to eat a wheel of brie with two lettuce leaves. It’s for you to understand what you are eating and how much (really, how little) you need.
Every day I keep a food diary, and make a quick plan of what I am going to eat. Knowing what to eat and that you have all the ingredients is crucial.
If I have a big event coming up, I have two fast days in the run-up. “Fasting,” Xand writes, “can mean going without food for between 14 and 24 hours.”
Day to day, dumping breakfast for a big black coffee feels like the easiest way of shaving calories; whether I eat breakfast or not, I am always starving by lunch. 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 fish. At about 4pm, I get hungry so 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 a healthy blowout of veg, salad, pasta, or a few boiled potatoes with lots of protein.
Part of the regime is to get more active, so I’m playing more tennis and wallclimbing. And after just four weeks – even with miserable self-control over portion sizes at weekends and the occasional beer-fuelled evening – I find I have lost a full 2.5cm off my waist.
Mercilessly recording everything I eat and planning meals have been vital. Now I crave black coffee and the simplicity of greens with olive oil and lemon juice. And I’m really looking forward to my holiday. — The Daily Telegraph