Get Ready To Lose Weight Fast For Summer

Getting ready to diet is a bit like the warm-up before you exercise. You not only need to know what to do – follow my low GL diet, but also how to actually get motivated and do it. I’ll give you some quick wins to kickstart your weight loss at the end of this report.

Realistically, you’ll need a week to prepare – restock your fridge with low glycemic load (GL) foods (see The Low GL Diet Made Easy), find the best alternative foods and drinks and your nearest suppliers, and get used to some of the new foods. It’s good to start with a low GL breakfast and Get Up & Go breakfast shake made with berries, is a perfect way to start.

Remove temptations

You’ll also need to remove any edible temptations. Start by using up or throwing away any of the foods you’ll need to avoid from your fridge or larder. This is a great time to have people round for dinner! Restock your kitchen with the recommended foods and drinks. Do the same at work.

Some of the foods on this diet may be new to you, but all of them are readily available in your local health food shop, supermarket or good greengrocer’s. There’s a shopping list for you in my books.

Setting your targets

Most people start diets hoping to lose in a month what they gained in a year. They vow never to eat chocolate again and to exercise every day. This approach usually ends in failure. So here’s my advice on easing into this new way of eating and exercising.

Be realistic

Be realistic, and take it one step at a time. Set yourself targets for changing your diet and taking exercise that you know you will reach. The weight will look after itself. It is far better to take one step towards permanently changing your lifestyle than to take four steps forward and four steps back because you were overambitious to start with.

After all, we often eat because we are under pressure or stressed. Boredom, frustration, anger or a lack of direction all lead to feelings that can be temporarily suppressed with food. Even making small dietary changes is, to begin with, stressful. It takes time to adjust. So don’t add to your stress by expecting too much from yourself and then failing to meet your targets.

You begin to make more lean muscle so you won’t lose so much weight, because lean muscle is heavier than the fat your burn off. But you will lose inches, since muscle is more compact than fat.

Making muscle is good news not only because you’ll look leaner. Muscle cells are more metabolically active and therefore have the capacity to burn off fat, while fat cells don’t. So, as you make more lean muscle, your ability to burn fat increases.

Week-by week planning

When setting your target, it is good to have long-term and short-term objectives. Let’s call your long-term objective your goal. What weight would you like to be, ideally? The following questions help to give you a realistic yardstick to go by.

• What do you weigh now?
• What, in your opinion, is your ideal weight?
• When were you last that weight?
• What is the most you’ve ever lost on a diet?

When you’ve answered these questions, you’ll have a good idea of your ultimate goal. Once you’ve set it, you can work out your target, week by week.

For example, if you want to lose 15lb, your target after one week would be to weigh 1½lb less and so on for 10 weeks, until you achieve your goal.

For more support on following a low GL diet read The Low GL Diet Made Easy or Low Gl Diet Bible. which contains the Low Gl Diet Counter. The Low Gl Diet Cookbook gives you further recipes. Also, if you’re entertaining, try one of the recipes in Delicious, Healthy, Sugar-Free which are all low GL. Talking of sugar, make sure you have some xylitol, which has a ninth of the GL of regular sugar. If you’re tempted, one sachet is only 1 GLs.

Three quick wins to kickstart your metabolism

1. Have a 13 hour break from food. How? Finish dinner before 8pm and don’t have breakfast before 9am, for example.

Thirteen hours without food is all it takes to switch your body into fat burning mode and also switch on autophagy, the amazing self-detox process that gets rid of old cellular matter and gives you a face lift that I wrote about in the May issue of my 100% Health newsletter.

2. Go Fishkins For Three Days. Now we’ve all heard of the Atkins type meat/cheese heavy no carb diet. Short term it can force you into ketosis, which leads to more weight loss. But this way of eating is not healthy.

However, you can get a weight loss boost by something similar which I call ‘Go Fishkins’. You do it with fish. This is another variation of a low GL diet but an excellent kick start to get out of the sugar slump. You only need to do it for three days in a row to drive your weight loss forward and detox from sugar. Oily fish is best.

This means one of three breakfasts. Variations of scrambled/boiled/poached egg or omelette with smoked salmon; a kipper, with egg if you like; or kedgeree (recipes in The Low GL Diet Made Easy).

You can also have Get Up & Go – which is the vegetarian option. You must limit accompanying carbs to two.

3. Crank Up Insulin Sensitivity. There are two ways to do this and it’s dead easy. The first is simply to supplement the mineral chromium (200mcg) with Cinnulin (100mg – a potent extract equivalent to 1 gram of cinnamon), twice a day eg breakfast and lunch.

As well as following my low GL principles, you want to keep your blood glucose level dead even. Any peaks push up insulin demand.

Blood sugar levels go up after meals, but not if you have a teaspoon (3 grams) of my Carboslow glucomannan fibre with a glass of water just before a meal. Just this has been shown to accelerate weight loss taken with the right kind of diet. Ideally, do this two or three times a day, eg before each meal, but even once a day makes a difference.

Helpful information:

Summer is the ideal time two diet, as we are less likely to turn to the heavy, rich, comfort foods that we love so much in the winter.

Weight gain is sadly common at menopause, but bioidentical progesterone can help you lose weight as it acts as a natural diuretic.