This is the program to follow for the rest of your life. It's about progress, not perfection.
This three-week program provides you with exactly what you need to start losing weight. Each day's topic is informative and inspirational. Daily eating guides map out what you need to eat lean and healthy, and daily exercise routines give you workouts you can easily fit into any busy schedule. And when you feel yourself slipping, Larry is right there with the daily tips and, most important, motivation to stay the course. This is just the beginning of your journey to a happier, healthier you, and Larry is with you every step of the way!
As I've said, the heart of the 21-Day Slimdown is eating. You eat to lose weight, and the first secret to the Slimdown is to eat more often in regular intervals.
Today, you're not going to worry so much about what to eat, but when to eat. All you must do today is eat every three to four hours. That's it! You're doing far more good for yourself than you know. Indeed, researchers have discovered that when people take the same amount of food they eat in their three regular meals regardless of what that food is and divide it into five meals, they start losing weight. Isn't that amazing? Just by sequencing your meals and spreading them out, you can start dropping weight without ever changing the food you eat!
Why are frequent meals so important? Although your goal is to get as much good food as you can past your fat cells and into your lean muscle tissue, you must be wary. Your lean muscle tissue can handle only a certain amount of food at a time. In other words, after you eat that amount, the cells in your muscles shut their doors and don't allow any more food in, no matter how nutritious it is, until it has burned up the food already there. So where does the excess food go? You guessed it: straight to your fat cells.
Let me give you an example of what I'm talking about. (I'm going to be mentioning calories here, but I'm only doing so to illustrate my point, not to make you think you have to count calories to succeed in this program.) Let's say it's lunchtime and you have the type of body that needs 500 calories to keep functioning until your next meal. But then you sit down at lunch and ingest enough food to add up to 1,000 calories. That excess 500 calories (no matter where it is coming from - chicken, fruit or cookies) is most likely to be stored as fat.
Are you getting the picture? If at some point during the day you eat a very large meal (which almost all of you do), you're liable to saturate your fat cells. And don't think you're doing yourself a favor if you overeat at one meal and then wait several hours before eating another meal. By then it's too late. Your body has already taken the extra calories from that first meal and sent them to its fat cells. What's more, all you're doing by waiting several hours to eat again is building up your appetite to the point that you'll almost certainly overeat the next time. In fact, your fat cells will play a vicious game with you if you try to lose weight by under-eating. The more meals you try to skip in the hope of losing weight, the more your fat cells (sensing an oncoming famine) will send out those notorious enzymes in order to grab most of the calories you ingest when you finally eat again.
Moreover, when you spend too much time between meals, your body isn't going to want healthful food. Every study done of eating patterns has found that the longer you wait between meals, the greater the amount of high-fat food you will consume at the next meal. Let's say you're trying to get lean, and you have a cup of coffee and toast for breakfast. Then you eat a salad and yogurt for lunch. Then you go from 1:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. without eating. When you walk into the house, exhausted and hungry, what do you think you're going to want to eat? Certainly not a healthful meal like a grilled chicken breast with steamed broccoli and brown rice. You are craving fatty foods and sugar - the very things your muscles will never take in.
This craving is a physical need, not just a psychological one. Your body is shutting down and requires energy in a hurry, and sugar and fat are two of the best ways to get that quick fix. The reason you also crave fat is because you want food that is instantly satisfying and fills you up fast. It's a fact: Under-eating always leads to overeating. Skipping meals will set off an increased craving in your body for the very foods you're trying to avoid.
Let me stop and guess what your thoughts might be at the moment. You think there is no way you can eat so much food four or five times per day, and you believe there is no way you can even find the time to squeeze in so many meals per day.
The fact of the matter is that most of you are already eating five times per day. There's no question about it. What many of you are conveniently ignoring is the caloric impact of your little 60-second "snacks" that you have in the mid-mornings and mid-afternoons. You're also forgetting about that quick graze in front of the refrigerator right before you go to bed at night. You don't realize that those little snacks are usually so high in fat and so loaded with calories that you may as well be eating a full meal.
Let's consider the typical American diet. Doughnuts or a couple of bagels in the morning, then lunch, then a vending machine snack in the afternoon, a big dinner and then ice cream late at night. That's five meals. And as you're going to learn tomorrow, if you ate the right foods that many times per day, you'd be overwhelmed by the amount of food you could eat. You'd be even more overwhelmed by the fact that you'd start losing weight.
Your task for Day 1 is very basic. You're not going to find any recommendations on what to eat - that will start tomorrow. I only want you to eat five meals today, each one coming approximately every three to four hours.
Please note: I'm giving you five meals each day because I count the snacks you're eating already as meals. (Considering the kind of quick food you probably eat during a normal snack, a snack is almost always higher in fat and often higher in calories than a regular meal.) Moreover, if you ever happen to note the times you eat during an average day, you will probably realize that when you include your snacks, you might be eating more than five times per day.
Another critical point to remember: This week, your third meal and fifth meal will look more like snacks and low-fat desserts. By next week, however, we will make those into light protein-carb meals just like the others.
I'm offering you times of the day you can eat, but again, I want this program to provide flexibility. You can decide when to have your first meal. Just make sure you start eating in regular intervals after you finish that first meal.
| Meal 1 | Meal 2 | Meal 3 | Meal 4 | Meal 5 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 8 a.m. | 12 p.m. | 3 p.m. | 6 p.m. | 9 p.m. |
| Eat your regular breakfast. | Eat your regular lunch. | Eat a snack | Eat your regular dinner. | Eat a late-night snack. |
I know to those of you who have spent much of your adult life trying out fad diets, I might sound a little bit off-the-wall. You are still stuck on that wildly outdated theory that our days should consist of three meals - breakfast, lunch and dinner. But what I'm giving you is the result of reports from the top researchers in the field who have studied permanent weight loss and determined exactly what it takes to get fat off your body forever.
Some of you are probably wondering what I'm holding back. I'm not holding back. I'm not holding back a thing. This is what true progress is all about. It's about moderation and balance. It's about creating small daily habits that will give you the ability to eat well for the rest of your life. You will never turn back once you see your body change.
You can make surprising changes in your eating behavior just by slowing down the speed at which you eat. A lot of people who eat too much of the wrong foods don't even know what they're eating because of how quickly they race through their meals. Today, time yourself and see if you're taking a bite of food every 5 or 10 seconds. Ideally, you want to do it somewhere between 15 and 30 seconds, and if you can hold out longer, that's even better.
Keep this in mind, too: Your brain needs about 20 minutes to recognize that you have eaten enough to satisfy your body's needs. If you eat more slowly during this 20-minute period, you'll consume less food but feel equally satisfied at the end of those 20 minutes, as compared to faster eaters who will consume much more food in those first 20 minutes but will have no idea how full they are until much later when they can barely move off the couch.
Today is another easy day. You will be continuing to work on your meal frequency, and you are going to add a couple of exercises to make your muscle tissue burn calories far more efficiently. All you have to do is two workouts today that last no more than 60 seconds each.
For those of you who haven't worked out in a long time: Don't be afraid of the word "muscle." Muscle is the best calorie-burning tissue the body has, and when the muscles are called into action, their calorie-burning ability can increase as much as twentyfold. And listen to me, you can get those results without having to use barbells. You don't have to do 10 reps while lying in a vulnerable position under a bulky machine. You do not, I repeat, do not need to devote several afternoons a week putting on workout clothes, going to a gym, spending an hour working up a sweat, showering, dressing again and going home.
I admit, I was once a bodybuilder wannabe. I devoted my life to the gym. But today, my workouts are a lot easier and shorter, and I don't feel like I am missing a thing. I want to let you in on a little secret. If you closely watch a big-time weightlifter do a series of repetitions with weights, you'll notice that the time he is actually lifting is about 60 seconds or less before he takes a long rest.
Essentially, that's what you'll be doing, except you won't be producing the stereotypical "pumping iron" muscle. This will be lean, silky, beautiful muscle. You'll be taking your long-dormant skeletal muscle tissue (which right now probably feels like fat) and you'll be rebuilding its elasticity and tone.
I can't tell you how many of my old-school colleagues give me a hard time about the idea of my 60-Second Workouts. They say, "Oh, come on, who can get in shape in 60 seconds?"
And I always reply, "Hey, I've met a lot of people who have turned their lives around with just one 60-Second Workout." As time passes, they add more 60-Second Workouts each day. I know people who were unable to get through 30 seconds of a 60-Second Workout, and a few weeks later were doing a dozen of them per day.
Despite all the huffing and puffing you see at health clubs, the truth is that the most elementary resistance exercise - leaning one arm against the wall, placing your two hands together and pushing - stimulates the kind of muscle activity that can burn calories. It's not the weight you use that counts, it's how you use the weight.That's one of the beauties of the 21-Day Slimdown. Rather than being inundated by a lot of restrictive instructions on how to work your biceps, triceps and abs, you only need to use your body weight on some simple exercises. In later weeks, you occasionally might use cans from your pantry as dumbbells, and somewhere down the road you might even join a gym. But that's up to you. All you have to do in this program are quick, easy exercises you will always be able to fit into your schedule.
In the Exercise Guide, you'll see photos and descriptions of the 60-Second Workouts. Some work your upper body, some your lower body, and there are others that stretch your muscles and give you the critical elasticity to keep your muscle tissue vibrant.
For today, your goal is to complete two 60-Second Workouts. Let's do an upper-body and lower-body workout. (As we continue through the program, I will not require you to do any specific workouts. In this program, any muscle-building exercise, regardless of where it is on the body, is going to get results.)
The first workout for you to do is what I call the Modified Push-up. Instead of being on the ground doing the far more difficult Marine-style push-up, this is a push-up you can perform from your desk at work, kitchen counter or dining room table. Stand about three feet away from the desk or table. Lean forward at an angle and place your hands, which should be shoulder-width apart, against the object. Do push-ups for about 60 seconds, or as long as you can last. The slower you perform the push-ups, the better your workout will be.
Now, let's do a lower-body workout: Standing Heel Raises. Stand with your feet together, go up on your toes, and when you come down, let your heels just barely touch the ground. Repeat over and over for 60 seconds, or as long as you can last.
If you were laughing before at the idea of 60-Second Workouts, I bet you aren't laughing now. I doubt very many of you are able to go the entire 60 seconds. That's normal. Now do you realize what kind of workout you can do in that short space of time?
There's no other way around it: To make your muscle cells work more efficiently, you've got to work them out. Allowing a muscle to go unused not only compromises your health, but also keeps you from full physical potential. Not as much blood travels through an unused muscle, which means that muscle won't get enough oxygen and calcium, which in turn means your tendons and ligaments become fragile. 80 percent of all low-back pain may be attributed to muscular deficiency. Studies also show that those who do not do any kind of muscle toning are more likely to develop osteoporosis, a condition in which your bones weaken and you start to hunch over as you get older.
If you're worried you're going to look like a bodybuilder, forget it. Research professors on women's health have verified that a basic resistance exercise program (i.e., something like the 60-Second Workouts) will lead to phenomenal gains in a woman's strength with very little change in the overall size of her muscle. Instead of worrying about your appearance as a result of the 60-Second Workouts, you should be celebrating the fact that what you'll see is a decrease in the size of your hips and thighs because of the significant amount of fat that you'll lose. You don't get bigger. You only look better. Who can complain about that?
I have no doubt you are quickly going to realize your time to exercise is precious in your life. But like everything else, don't overdo your workouts. Relax. More weight is not great. You don't gain through pain. To me, pain only means one thing - you're hurting. And I think by now you know all too well that if you feel pain or burn out too quickly, you're going to call it quits.
Are you continuing to spread out your meals evenly? If you are the type who has tried all your life to eat twice per day at most, you're probably wondering if you can make yourself eat every three hours. All I want you to do is try. Add meals, whatever they are. You have to get yourself into the routine of meal frequency. If you are the type who nibbles and eats all the time, then try to limit yourself to five specific mealtimes every three hours. Don't get impatient and think there is so much more to do. Just by spreading out your meals, you are reconditioning your body to lose weight.
| Meal 1 | Meal 2 | Meal 3 | Meal 4 | Meal 5 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 8 a.m. | 12 p.m. | 3 p.m. | 6 p.m. | 9 p.m. |
| Eat your regular breakfast. | Eat your regular lunch. | Eat a snack | Eat your regular dinner. | Eat a late-night snack. |
My feelings about vitamins have flip-flopped in the past few years. I once believed you should take everything that was made, from liver tablets to protein powders to megavitamins. Then I went through a phase where I felt no vitamins were necessary. Today, I believe vitamins have a place as long as they are used in moderation and not as substitutes for healthy eating. Here's what I would do: Take a good multivitamin or packet of vitamins as recommended. It's a great addition to your program because even with the best eating, you can still use some added vitamins. For those of you who are vegetarians, a protein supplement such as a protein powder can help.
Today we learn about another cornerstone of the 21-Day Slimdown: what you will be eating. By the end of the day, you are going to eat one perfectly balanced meal. In the 21-Day Slimdown, it is imperative you have both a lean protein and a starchy carb at each meal with a fibrous vegetable thrown in as often as you wish. The lean protein and starchy carb are the two vital elements in your eating program, and you want to do your best to get both on your plate at every meal.
I have no doubt that some of you are already thinking, "Lean proteins, starchy carbs and fibrous vegetables? You call that appetizing?" If you see the simple recipes and meals I provide for you each day, you'll realize very little is being removed from your usual choices of foods. You'll only end up preparing or ordering some of those foods differently.
Here is the beauty of eating this kind of balanced meal. You will be eating twice the amount of actual food you usually eat in a typical high-fat meal, and you'll still be taking in fewer calories! I can't tell you enough that by eating more high-quality foods, you lose weight faster!
Every time you eat, it is important for you to remind yourself that all calories are not created equal. The calories you get when you eat a french fry are far different from the calories in a baked potato. If you eat a bite of food that contains just 1 gram of fat, you will have ingested 9 calories (those are called fat calories). But food from 1 gram of starchy carbs provides 4 calories, and food from 1 gram of lean protein also has just 4 calories.
Do you realize the implication of these numbers? Here is what you could substitute for 2 teaspoons of butter: ½ cup of oatmeal, four egg whites, 2 cups of broccoli, 4 cups of lettuce or 1½ cups of air-popped popcorn. That's a heck of a lot of food. At the University of Alabama, doctors asked a group of volunteers to eat low-fat foods until they felt full. The doctors then asked another group to eat high-fat foods until they felt full. On the high-fat diet, the volunteers usually started feeling full after having about 3,000 calories per day. On the low-fat diet, the volunteers started feeling full after eating just 1,570 calories per day.
The hosts stared at the food and then looked at me dubiously. "You mean to tell us you can eat all this food in one day and actually lose weight?" one of the hosts asked.
"Easily," I said. "I can do it because all the food you're looking at is composed of starchy carbs and lean protein. That kind of food doesn't get stored as fat. Do you realize that one hamburger, a large order of fries and a chocolate shake have more calories than four grilled chicken breasts, two baked potatoes, 2 cups of rice and 6 cups of fibrous vegetables?"
The hosts' jaws dropped.
"And do you know that your 12-ounce soda and candy bar are equivalent in calories to the 10 egg whites, 1 cup of oatmeal and toast that I eat in the mornings? And here's the kicker. That kind of food you're eating is more inclined to go to your fat cells and make you look fat. My food acts like fuel."
The hosts weren't sure what to say. I think I had made my point.
The lean protein and starchy carb combination is the ideal way to regulate your blood sugar level, fuel your muscles and give you the immediate energy to function properly. It keeps you from experiencing sugar cravings that can lead to wild chocolate binges, and it can prevent those insulin-caused peaks and valleys that can make you pig out.
Most important, if you eat the proper balance of starchy carbs and lean proteins at every meal, you are essentially shooting the equivalent of jet fuel into your body and forcing your metabolism to operate at a much more rapid rate! The faster your metabolism, the faster your calories are burned off.
Let's say that you were very conscientious about spacing every meal evenly apart during the day. But in one meal, all you ate were starchy carbs (for instance, a large baked potato), in another meal it was all protein (a serving of chicken the size of your palm) and in another meal it was all fibrous vegetables (a large salad). The problem with this kind of eating is that your muscle tissue will only take in so many carbs and so much lean protein at a time. If you eat more than the proper amount of starchy carbs and proteins at one meal, your muscle tissue won't be able to absorb it. Off to the fat cells the excess carbs and protein go.
On the other hand, if you don't eat a protein and starchy carb at each meal, your blood sugar might lower too quickly and lead you to binge on high-fat foods. With a balanced eating program, the desire for fat significantly diminishes.
Again, it's very simple. You must complete only two 60-Second Workouts. For your upper-body workout, do a Bicep Curl. Stand with your knees and hips slightly bent to create a slight forward tilt with the upper body. Keep your back straight and shoulders back, and your arms should be straight down at your sides with your elbows slightly bent. Now, raise your lower arms as far as possible without moving your shoulders or upper arms. When you reach the top of the movement, squeeze the biceps, then slowly lower them back down and repeat for 60 seconds. If you wish, you can hold a soup or vegetable can in each hand while performing the exercise for extra resistance.
For your lower-body workout, do the Reverse Lunge. This is a great overall leg exercise. Stand with your feet shoulder-width apart with your knees and hips slightly bent. Hold your arms to your sides. Take one foot and take a giant step backward. Plant your toe firmly against the ground with the knee only slightly bent. Hold for a couple of seconds, maintain your balance and then return to your starting position. Make sure to keep your back straight. Then begin again, this time stepping back with the other leg.
By now, you've had your first 21-Day Slimdown meal, and I promise you, your fat cells are in trouble. In the coming days, as you add more Slimdown meals to your eating guide and start your exercise program, your body will start going through incredible changes! Just hold on. As long as you follow this program, it will be impossible for you not to lose weight!
As I said earlier, we're going to take it slow as we move into our eating plan. Today, all I want you to do is try to make Meal 4 perfectly balanced. As for the other meals, I want you to find ways to cut back your normal intake of fat or at least substitute slightly better foods for the ones you normally eat.
Below is a list of sample meals. But please take note: You do not have to eat those foods if you don't like them. If you hate turkey sandwiches, for example, then come up with a different protein to eat. Forcing yourself to eat foods you hate is a guarantee you will quit this program before the week is over.
| MEAL | EATING GUIDE |
|---|---|
| Breakfast | Cereal with skim milk, two slices of toast with jam. |
| Lunch | A turkey sandwich with mustard (never mayonnaise) and chips. |
| Snack | For your afternoon snack, try crunchy vegetables (such as a bag of baby carrots from the grocery store) instead of a candy bar. |
| Dinner | Here is your perfectly balanced meal. One chicken filled grilled with no oil or butter, a baked potato with fat-free cheese, fat-free sour cream, chives, and a salad with fat-free dressing. |
| Snack | For your evening snack, try a bowl of oatmeal (using little or no sugar) instead of something like ice cream. |
Here is the standard rule I follow for men and women: Your protein (such as a piece of lean meat) should be able to fit into your hand, your starchy carb should be about the size of your fist and your fibrous vegetable should be able to fit into a small cereal bowl. That's it. If you're a larger person, you might add a little more food, but anyone staying within the above parameters is going to be on track.
You never really have to carry around one of those 500-page books that tell you the calorie content of everything. If you're eating the right kinds of food at each meal, and if they are approximately the sizes I mentioned, the number of calories and fat grams will take care of themselves. You just have to make sure you're getting the right balance and right proportions of food!
