The Dancing Irishman

This is a continuation of a previous article, Part 1 of which can be found here.

The best way to abs like this isn’t endless sit-ups (although they help), it’s a dedicated approach to what you eat. Now stop drooling and read the rest of the article.

Give yourself an Incentive
This idea may seem a little extreme to some but sometimes we need extreme incentives to get things done. Humans, unfortunately respond more strongly to the idea of losing something than to the idea of gaining something. What that means is that we will work harder when we think we will lose something than we will when we’re trying to achieve something.

The way to make this work to your advantage is to make a bet with a friend or group of friends. What you do is come up with a realistic goal and a time frame (e.g. drop 2% body-fat in a month). Tell your friend that if you don’t achieve your goal your friend has to ensure that there are consequences.

Now, the consequences are where things get interesting. You could keep it simple and just pay a monetary penalty (substantial enough to make you not want to lose it) to your friend or you could do this: give your “friend” the most embarrassing “fat-photo” you have of yourself and ask them to make it public, either by facebook or by mailing it to all your friends. For this you need a really trustworthy friend who is also ruthless (we all have them).

You’ll quickly see how easy it is to stick to your diet when you have the fear of public humiliation floating over your head!

Instead of “I can’t”, say “I don’t”
Studies have shown that simply using the phrase “I don’t eat that” instead of “I can’t eat that” improves adherence to a diet significantly.

The phrase “I don’t” is much more empowering than “I can’t” as it lets the speaker feel in control of their decisions. This feeling of control and empowerment makes sticking to a certain way of eating much easier and much more satisfying.

Remember, when you say “I don’t eat cake”, it’s because you know that it is not good for you and that it doesn’t help you with your goals of being healthier and looking better. When you say “I don’t eat cake” it’s because you are taking the conscious decision to be in control of what you eat and ultimately your health and your body.

Saying I can’t on the other hand makes you feel powerless, like there is some external force in control of you and dictating what you can and can do.

Change your vocabulary and change your results.

Be firm with others, especially your friends
You will encounter plenty of situations where people, especially your friends will offer you something that you shouldn’t have. It might be when your out for coffee or at a birthday party or maybe just at 11am in the office.

Whenever it is you need to put your foot down. Despite the best of intentions, friends can be persistent; “Go on, just have a small piece”, “A little bit won’t do you any harm” (If you’re Irish you know how bad we can be about things like this). You need to be firm and honest with them. Let them know that you appreciate the offer but you don’t eat that food. Ask them to respect your decision and not to offer again. It often helps to be specific and let them know why you don’t want it and that will keep them off your case in the future.

If all else fails just tell them your diabetic. That usually shuts people up.

Deal with your emotions
I could right a whole article on this point alone but this post is already long enough as it is.

The fact of the matter is, people often need some sort of a crutch to deal with difficult emotions. Everyone has something different; alcohol, drugs, cigarettes, food… even sex and exercise.

We need to learn to deal with these emotions so we don’t fall into the habit of emotional/stress eating i.e. Literally using to food to avoid dealing with stressful emotions. This is where relaxation techniques such as meditation can come in handy but I really recommend reading into Neuro Linguistic Programing (NLP) and how it can help you handle stress and other negative emotions. I’m not going to go into what it is hear so it’s time to get your google on!

Don’t let stress get to you so much that you end up turning to food for comfort.

Dealing with emotional eating can go a huge way towards dealing with problems you may have had with sticking to diets previously. Stress is a major issue in the modern world and the role it plays in our eating habits definitely shouldn’t be underestimated.

Learn to cook
There really is no better way to take control of what you eat than by cooking for yourself. However, it never ceases to amaze me how many people say they can’t cook.

If you’re one of these people it’s up to you to take the initiative to learn. I’m not saying you should try and become a gourmet chef but try learning a few basic (and very importantly, tasty) recipes that you can alternate throughout the week.

They say the most successful dieters stick to a limited range of recipes that they enjoy and this is the reason for their success. They keep things simple, tasty and regular (i.e. they have a routine).

If you need help just ask a friend who knows how to cook to teach you a few healthy recipes or just look for some online. There are loads of websites online full of amazing recipes for every particular eating style and diet on the face of the earth. There really is no excuse not to learn a few!

Do your absolute best to make the recipes tasty. There is no point in learning a super healthy recipe that tastes like cardboard and cat urine. If you don’t want to eat it you’ll just end up with an excuse to eat something unhealthy instead!

Know what your eating
The vast majority of diets require you measure (to a certain extent) the quantity of certain foods you eat. It really is for your benefit to learn what exactly is in each portion of the foods you consume regularly.

Learning to read food labels is an essential skill.
Better yet, avoid foods that come with food labels i.e. the processed kind!

The best way I’ve found to do this is to use the USDA Food Tables. This is a database of nutritional values for a huge range of foods. You just enter the food your looking for in the search bar and then it allows you to chose the quantity of the particular food (example: 100g of raw lentils). I always search the value of foods in there uncooked state because that’s when you have the best chance to accurately weigh them; when they’re separate from other foods.

This is particularly important if you apportion your food like I’ve already recommended. You can weigh all the ingredients before cooking and then apportion everything appropriately later. Which brings me to my next point…

Buy a kitchen scales
It is one of the ultimate tools in the dieters arsenal and if you don’t have one go out and get one ASAP. A kitchen scales allows you to accurately measure food portions and eventually you’ll learn how to estimate the nutritional value of some foods by sight.
Buy a scales now!

Cheat… a little
Having a scheduled cheat day or cheat meal is a great way to give yourself a mental break from dieting. Tim Ferris really championed cheat days in his “Slow Carb Diet” and “The 4 hour Body”. Everyone knows I have a serious man-crush on/ vicious rivalry with Tim Ferriss so of course I’m going to advocate this diet tip!

Basically a cheat day is a day that you schedule to eat the foods that you normally wouldn’t eat on a regular diet day. As I said it gives you a mental break but it can also counter some of the negative effects of extended caloric restriction. What I mean by this is that our bodies are designed to store fat (a genetic ability that we have maintained from our past when food was scarce and being able to store fat was advantageous) and when we reduce our calories our body automatically undergoes hormonal changes that make losing body-fat more difficult. Without getting into too much detail (this is an entire article on its own) an occasional spike in calories (and certain macro-nutrients) helps “reset” certain hormones in our bodies that can prevent these stalls in fat loss.

If “The Rock” says it’s ok to have a cheat day, who’s going to argue.

While cheat-days can sound like proof of the existence of God, they need to be done right to prevent you from going overboard. Here’s a few little tips for cheat days:

• Keep a list of the foods you’d like to have on your cheat day that you can update during the week.
• Skip breakfast and wait until lunch time to start eating. This prevents you from taking in too many calories during the day.
• Don’t stuff yourself late at night as this can result in a bad nights sleep and with you waking up with a “food-hangover” the next day. This can result in the food cravings I mentioned in the section on getting proper sleep (Part 1). In fact, try not to eat after 9pm.
• Get plenty of fibre during the day from fruits and vegetables which will help move those less-than-healthy foods through your system quicker. I usually finish of my day of gluttony with a couple of tablespoons of ground flaxseeds in water or a small bowl of porridge (oatmeal).
• Try and eat out of the house as much as possible or if you do eat in the house get rid of whatever leftovers there are at the end of the day to make sure you’re not tempted to eat them the next day or during the week.
• Ideally have your cheat day on a heavy exercise day. That way at least some of the extra calories will go towards muscle growth and repair instead of automatically getting sent to be stored as body fat.

Just try not to end up like this guy at the end of the day! Food-hangovers can be pretty bad!

A cheat day is a handy little trick to have if managed correctly. Just make sure that you go back to your regular, healthy way of eating the next day. Food-hedonism is great, but in moderation.

To check out a diabetes-inducing photo log of how I enjoy my own cheat days check this out!

Be flexible
We’re all human (I’m assuming) and that means that we are inherently imperfect. Life is going to throw things at you that will try to derail your progress but it’s how you deal with those situations that makes the difference.

There will be times when the only food available to you is something you would rather not have. You have two valid options:

1. Don’t eat: Yes I’m serious! There are very few situations in life where you absolutely “have to” eat at a certain time. If it’s socially acceptable to do so just skip the food and wait until you get home or until you can get some healthy food. Believe me, we, as a society, eat far too regularly as it is. A little bit of fasting will do you absolutely no harm whatsoever.
2. Eat the food available… but do it consciously: Dieters have a tendency to see any break-down in their plan, no matter how small it is, as an opportunity/excuse to go crazy and “compensate eat” like it’s going out of fashion. Instead, eat more consciously. What that means is, eat the food available in normal/small portion and leave it at that. You don’t need to eat a second portion, nor do you need dessert nor do you need to visit the donut shop after just because you’ve strayed from the one true path. Accept that you’ve eaten something that wasn’t ideal and be aware that the best way to get over that is just to go back to your healthy eating patterns at the next meal i.e. not to lose your cool and eat everything in sight.

These little hiccups happen. Just make sure they remain isolated hiccups and don’t end up turning into chronic indigestion!

…and that’s that! These are some of the tips that I’ve found most useful for sticking to my eating plans, whatever they are at the time.

As I said in Part 1, you don’t need to use them all but they definitely have a cumulative effect so the more you can incorporate into your routine the faster you should see results.

If you have any tips you’ve used yourself go ahead and let me know in the comments.

Best of luck and Eat Well.

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Have you been working-out lately? Because you look spectacular 🙂 If you liked this article go ahead and share it with your friends via the Facebook or Twitter buttons below and if you use Stumbleupon please give it a “Thumbs Up”. I’d really appreciate it 😉

A body like this doesn’t come easy (nor does her phone number) but with the right strategy, it is possible!

How many times have you started out on a new diet with the greatest of intentions of getting healthier and losing weight only for everything to fall apart faster than you can say “white chocolate and raspberry cheescake”?

I probably shouldn’t be showing such a tempting picture in this post but my God this is a thing of beauty.

Many of you who have tried dieting before know just how easy it is to “fall off the wagon” and how one little mishap can ultimately destroy whatever progress you’ve already made on a diet.

Falling off the wagon is not necessarily just one little isolated incident where you just dust yourself off and hop back on (although we’ll talk about how to do that a little later). On the contrary, “one little incident” can often be enough to set off a snowball effect of “compensation eating” (trying to compensate for all the things you’ve been avoiding on a diet by eating as much of them as possible) that ends up with you feeling awful both physically and emotionally and hating yourself and your self-destructive behavior. Believe me, I’m talking from experience.

Why fight it?
I really believe that in order for us to be happy  we have to “take control of the controllable variables” in our lives. What I mean by “controllable variables” are the things that we can change ourselves; exercise, the people we spend time with, our food, use of our free time etc. Taking control of your food and exercise habits is a fundamental step towards a healthier and happier you.

In my case, I used to be chubby but I decided to change that when I was 15 years old. I took control of what I ate and started exercising and while it was never easy I have learned many things over the years that can really help you to stick to your dieting guns.

I’ve also learned that when it comes to losing weight, your diet is much more important than your exercise habits (losing weight is maybe 80% diet and 20% exercise). What I mean is that you can exercise all you want but if you’re not taking care of your diet you’re gonna find it very difficult to strip off excess body fat.

Bullet-Proof your Diet
While actually deciding to start eating more healthily is a hugely important step, it’s not going to do anything for you if you mess up at your first hunger-pang,  craving for sweets or the scent of a bakery.

Willpower is an exhaustible resource so you can’t rely on it to keep you on track. Instead, I’ve compiled a list of tips that I have found to be crucial in sticking to ANY eating plan by making it harder to mess-up. Follow these tips and Bullet Proof your diet making it nearly “impossible for you to fail”. You don’t have to use all these tips but the more you incorporate into your daily life the greater their cumulative effect.

The Tips
Get enough quality sleep
You’re probably thinking “what on earth could sleep have to do with sticking to my diet?”. Surprisingly it plays a fundamentally important role. Not getting enough quality sleep can have a whole host of negative effects on your body and one of those is it’s effect on appetite and control of cravings. That’s right, not getting sufficient sleep not only makes you cranky but it also makes you more prone to give in to cravings and even binge on undesirable food. This is something I noticed years ago and I have often “slipped up” with my food choices due a lack of sleep the night before.

Make getting a good nights sleep a priority. If you need more impetus to do so just remember that we need sufficient sleep to secrete growth hormone which not only increases muscle mass and reduces body-fat but also keeps you looking younger (I totally understand if these effects sound repulsive to you 😉 ). Make yourself go to bed at an appropriate time (7-8 hours before you plan to wake up) and sleep in a quiet, dark room (or use ear-buds and an eye mask like I do). Just make sure you get enough sleep and you can expect to see a big drop in your food cravings.

Prepare your food in advance
Following a particular diet often means you have to prepare your own food and this is where a lot of people often falter. How many times have you been on your way home from work and decided to pick up a less than healthy take-away meal on the way instead of preparing something that you know is healthy when you get home?

The problem many people find with cooking is that it’s time consuming and it can get monotonous if you have to prepare the same thing every day. Add to that the clean-up afterward and the fact that you might not always have the ingredients you need in the house and it’s no wonder most people just grab a sandwich and a chocolate bar (or 3) at the local supermarket.

However if you’re Super-OCD like myself, there is a way around this. I prepare the vast majority of my food in advance, in bulk and then I apportion it and freeze it, ready for whenever I need it.

If you look in my freezer you’ll find a selection of different Ziploc bags filled with different colored foods. I have portions of cooked meat and vegetables, cooked and seasoned beans and lentils, cooked vegetables in different sauces and even portions of raw meats for quick cooking. Everything is flattened out in the Ziploc bag to make it easy to store/stack in the freezer and it makes defrost/cooking them a whole lot faster too.

Just a little selection of the “ready-to-go” foods I keep in my freezer.
Clockwise from top-right: cooked chickpeas, cooked lentil and vegetable stew, raw minced beef and raw cubed chicken. I know how much of everything (cals, fat, protein, carbs) is in each Ziploc bag.

The great thing about this is, because I’ve cooked these myself,  I know exactly  how many how many calories and how much fat, protein and carbohydrate is in each portion. This takes all of the guess work out of preparing my dinner. For example I know that every portion of chilli-beef that I make has about 50 grams of protein and 8 grams of fat, each bag of brown rice (200g uncooked weight) has about 740 calories (for a post workout meal). I use the dry/uncooked weights of food to calculate the nutritional contents of the food I cook and then I divide it by the number of portions I put the food into.

This way, I only have to do a lot of cooking once or twice a week (on an evening I have free) and all I have to do is defrost something or heat it up directly from frozen and I have a complete, healthy meal with virtually no hassle. And no excuses for not eating healthily.

People will also complement you on how well organized your freezer is 😀

Remove Temptation
There is NO EXCUSE for having unhealthy “trigger foods” in your house.

Do you think that drug rehab centers leave small bags of heroin or cocaine lying around in the kitchen? Hell no! As the great Oscar Wilde once said, “I can resist everything but temptation”. If temptation is staring you in the face, in your own home, chances are your going to fold like tissue paper.

The only way to eliminate temptation is to… well… eliminate temptation. This is one of those “controllable variables” I mentioned. You control what to keep in your house so make sure you don’t have any unhealthy foods or drinks lying around. You don’t need them. No chocolate bars in the cupboard, no sugar-laden soft-drinks in the fridge, no ice-cream in the freezer, no cookies in the cookie-jar. I’m not saying that you’re never going to have these foods again but I am saying that you’re definitely not going to have them in your home. You should not have to feel the burden of temptation in a place where your should feel relaxed and safe.

You can do a big symbolic clean-out and remove all the unhealthy foods from your house. Either give it to a neighbor or a homeless shelter or just throw it out. It will genuinely feel amazing to “get that monkey off your back” while your at home.

Become a creature of routine
Routines get a bad rap (mostly from people who never even genuinely try to follow them) but they are one of the most solid ways of sticking to habit changes. Just like an exercise routine where you usually know what you’re going to do before you do it, you should follow a similar pattern with your food.

Have a set time for meals (with a certain amount of flexibility, obviously) and stick to it. Know what foods you’re going to eat or prepare and fit them into whatever allowances you have on your particular diet.

If you’re having snacks, know what they’re going to be and have them with you so you don’t have to go looking for a unhealthy alternative. The same goes for your lunch at work.

Try and maintain a regular sleep cycle too. This helps balance your hormones so you should start to feel hunger at the same time every day. Otherwise you could find yourself craving food at very inopportune times. Remember, “Failing to prepare is preparing to fail”.

Keep yourself motivated
If you lose sight of the prize it can be very easy to give up when you feel challenged so your objective should be to keep the prize in view as much as possible.

For this I’m a big fan of both negative and positive reinforcement and I find photographs are one of the best ways to accomplish this.

For the positive reinforcement you can look at pictures of the type of body you want. There are hundreds of groups on facebook or pages on the internet with photographs of people who have built a great physique that you can emulate. I personally find that looking a pictures of FEMALE fitness models really motivates me (go figure!) to stick to my guns. Check out pages like “Fitness Girls”, “Fitness Selfies”, “Sexy Freak” etc. on Facebook, there’s plenty of motivation for both guys and girls.

Ladies, I know you want this ass.
Gentlemen, I know you also want this ass!!
Best motivation to eat well in the world!

For negative reinforcement you can keep an awful picture of yourself looking your absolute worst (bad bathing suit pictures anyone?) with you at all times. Whenever you feel like giving in and eating a whole pint of Hagen-Daz just take a look at that photo and remember what your working for. A copy of some bad medical-exam results or blood work should be equally effective.

It’s much easier to stay in the game when we know what we’re playing for.

Measure your progress
This is another great way to keep yourself motivated. It’s much easier to stick with a diet when you can actually see the progress that you’ve already made on it.

There are a few ways to do this, some better than others. A lot of people like to use their weight which is fine at the start if you have a particularly large amount of weight to lose. It’s easy to measure and a good indication of progress.

However, if you’re below 20% body fat the weight on the scale is not the best marker to follow. The reason is that your weight varies according to both your muscle mass and body fat. As muscle weighs more than fat it is possible to gain muscle, lose fat and still maintain the same weight. In this case the scales would tell you that you haven’t made any progress when in fact you probably look a lot better.

Which brings me to two, more reliable methods. One is measuring your body fat percentage. Your BF% is a great indication of the progress you make on a diet. The only problem is it’s not easy to measure at home (don’t trust those scales that claim to have a built in body fat monitor, they are notoriously inaccurate). Instead, you should get yourself measured by a professional on a regular basis (once every two weeks is good) using the skin-fold/caliper method. Try and get the same person to measure you each time for consistency.

This leaves us with what I consider to be the easiest and most relevant method… selfies (i.e. self-photographs). Take photographs of yourself in a mirror on a weekly basis. Do it on a set day of the week and wear the same clothes (or similar clothes) (the less the better). Ideally you should take a picture of yourself in a bikini/swimsuit or in your underwear. You want to be able to see as much of yourself as possible. Optimally do it in the same place and in the same lighting (same time of day/night) so you can monitor the changes in your body more easily.

Taking selfies is the easiest way to monitor your physical progress on a particular diet or training regime.

I think it’s great to do this on a weekly basis for consistency but the real changes are seen on more of a monthly interval. Keep the photos in a file on your computer and look at them regularly to show you just how much progress you’ve made.

To be continued… I’ve got a whole bunch of extra tips to help you with your diet goals that you can read in part 2 of this article here. Give these tips a try and see how it works for you.

Eat well

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Have you been working-out lately? Because you look spectacular 🙂 If you liked this article go ahead and share it with your friends via the Facebook or Twitter buttons below and if you use Stumbleupon please give it a “Thumbs Up”. I’d really appreciate it 😉