National Post (National Edition)
Walk like a Kardashian
Celebrity trainer Harley Pasternak finds fitness for the rest of us
The other week on Keeping Up
with the Kardashians, Kim was drinking a green shake recommended by Harley Pasternak, the Canadian-born trainer to the stars, when Kourtney more or less blew a gasket. “Eeeew, that’s disgusting!” she screeched, as Kim sat there, drinking in both her shake and her sister’s derision. However, because she wants to be among Hollywood royalty, people such as Megan Fox and Halle Berry, Kourtney eventually came to her senses — soon enough, she was another new member of the Pasternak tribe.
“You have more celebrity trainers than celebrities — anybody who trained a local weatherman calls themselves a celebrity trainer these days,” Pasternak says over coffee in Toronto, doing a whirlwind tour to promote his new book, The Body Reset Diet. “I have the largest celebrity client roster in the history of the business, but it doesn’t mean anything. Everybody’s motivated to look and feel better, but there’s this thing that gets in the way of that motivation, and that thing’s life.” Life gets better on The Body
Reset Diet thanks to Pasternak’s three-tiered plan that he developed while working on his show The Revolution. On the program, Pasternak was no longer working with millionaires blessed with impossible bodies, but regular women, looking to lose weight fast. There are more gyms in America than any other country; more obesity, too. Pasternak, who consults for Microsoft, New Balance, Nintendo and CocaCola, holds a masters degree from the University of Toronto in exercise physiology and nutritional science and has already written three health books. After meeting scores of Americans, he decided he needed to move in a more extreme way.
“The traditional method of slow and steady and moderation works when you want to lose a few pounds, but if you have 40 pounds to lose, who wants to wait 80 weeks?” asks Pasternak, whose 15-day diet begins with three smoothies a day and two snacks, and introduces solid food on Day 6. “People are more likely to stick to a diet when they see it working; the goal was to create something that works quickly, but in a healthy way.”
The diet, which Alicia Keys vouches for, requires only a blender and a pedometer, and stresses exercise and healthy eating, naturally. Its distinguish- ing characteristics, however, are at-home resistance training (beginning Day 6), the diversity of the smoothie recipes (unpeeled orange, Swiss chard) and the promised results after 15 days. Since eating less more often lowers insulin levels, which is the secret ingredient of almost every sane diet, Pasternak advises two protein-laden snacks between shakes — crackers with hummus, for instance, or peanut butter with celery. Meanwhile, the pedometer’s to keep track of your recommended dosage of 10,000 steps per day.
“We sleep eight hours then sit in our car for an hour, work eight hours, then get back in the car and get home in time to sit for dinner and watch TV before bed — a 45-minute spin class isn’t going to make up for that,” says Pasternak, who advocates against extreme workouts such as marathon running for two reasons: 1) the high injury rate and 2) propensity toward over-indulging in caloric rewards after mediocre workouts. He says, “Nobody who goes for a walk comes home, like: ‘I can have cake!’ No, you walked around the block.”
Meanwhile, diet books and books about food remain all the rage. Michael Moss, author of Salt Sugar Fat, has the No. 1 book on The New York Times’ bestseller list, while Pasternak’s diet, out for a week, is already in the Top 10 in the U.S. and Canada. But while weight loss supplements remain a US$2.4billion industry, and everyone from Marisa Tomei to Sylvester Stallone ( Sly Moves: My Proven Program to Lose Weight, Build Strength, Gain Will Power and Live your Dream) is pushing get-thin products, Pasternak insists he’s the real deal.
“There was a time when Body by Jake — Jake Steinfeld back in the ’70s — when he was the only celebrity trainer, doing Indiana Jones and George Lucas, that it meant something,” he says. “Today, I don’t know the exact number, but for sure nine out of 10 people who write diet books — at least nine out of 10 — have absolutely no training in nutrition. It makes me frustrated.”