LOSE UP TO A STONE IN 8 WEEKS

No calorie-counting or fad diets Less than 30 minutes’ exercise a week Lose a stone in two months with ...

DO YOU feel out of shape, sluggish or tired all the time – and want to feel better, but don’t know where to start? With winter looming, it’s often tempting to banish thoughts of getting fit and healthy in favour of curling up on the sofa with a big bowl of comfort food.

Yet a lack of exercise and poor diet could be sending you to an early grave.

You can do something about it, and it needn’t be as hard as you think.

Using my two decades of experience in the field, I have devised a plan to help you lose a stone, sleep better, balance blood sugar, boost your heart health – and even fight dementia.

And it is all achievable with a simple diet and fitness plan that focuses on a set of exercises you can do at home in less than 30 minutes a week.

Evidence shows that being physically active delays the onset of chronic diseases, including type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease and cancer, as well as cognitive conditions such as dementia. You may have seen some of this research in action in the BBC series How To Stay Young, which aired earlier this year. I headed up a team of experts who put a group of volunteers through a raft of tests to determine their ‘body age’ from their birth age.

The results were startling. Some were decades ‘older’ than they should have been. Some were suffering from anxiety, memory loss and sleep problems. Others had hidden problems such as early-stage diabetes, high cholesterol and heart disease.

Under my supervision, the volunteers embarked on personalised programmes using healthy eating and exercise.

Central to this was walking more – aiming for 10,000 steps a day – and a seven-minute high-intensity interval training (HIIT) programme, which involves alternating bursts of high-intensity effort with periods of recovery.

This approach has been proven to work just as well, and in some cases even better, than regular, longerduration, moderate-intensity aerobic exercise such as jogging. The results were astonishing. In each of the cases, these relatively simple changes led to dramatic improvements.

And now, exclusively in today’s MoS, you can follow that same plan – and start to reap the benefits today. In the following pages, I’ll show you how just 10,000 steps a day, less than 30 minutes’ HIIT a week and a bit of watching what you eat could help you lose up to a stone in only eight weeks.

It really is that simple. And along the way, I’ll be sharing top tips to help you stay on course to a better you, from the benefits of tracking your progress to setting short-term goals.

Consult your GP before embarking on any new diet and exercise regime.

So, what are you waiting for? Let’s get started.