The Petite Advantage Diet (25 page)

Intensity Up = Metabolism Up

• Repair muscles. You are about to learn that the key to a rockin’ metabolism is to build those long, lean, calorie-burning muscles. Well, tea helps to repair them faster, enabling you to work out harder the next time. That will translate directly into more calories burned, as the muscle “repair” process is what burns so many calories.

• Increase “satiety.” Research conducted in Sweden at Lund University studied adding green tea to exactly the same breakfast. After consuming bread and sliced turkey (which is something I actually eat often for breakfast or lunch), one group drank water while the other drank green tea. The green tea group reported a significantly higher feeling of satiety and less desire to eat their favorite foods.
¹¹
That’s a big plus for green tea, which I drink all the time–as do my most successful Petites.

• Promote numerous health benefits, including anti-aging, because it contains antioxidants.

Antioxidants, by definition, are “molecules capable of inhibiting the oxidation of other molecules. Oxidation is a chemical reaction that produces free radicals. Free radicals can start chain reactions that damage cells.”
¹²
What that basically means is that antioxidants stop the damage that occurs to our cells. You may be shocked, but you increase the amount of this damage by doing a number of things:

1.
Eating processed carbs, fast food, and/or trans fats.

2.
Drinking damaging liquids–juice, soda, energy drinks, etc.

3.
Sleep deprivation–which annihilates many things, including your cells.

4.
Stress–a true killer.

5.
Pollution–air, water, you name it.

6.
Too much exposure to the sun.

7.
Excessive exercise. Surprised? Most people are, but, while some exercise is essential, too much exercise is deeply damaging to your cells and body in general. Your best buddy who is exercising for hours and hours each week is actually doing more damage than good to her body.

It’s that chain reaction that will diminish health and promote aging. So the goal is to stop, or at the very least slow, that process. Antioxidants do just that. Fruits, vegetables, and whole grains, as well as drinks like tea and coffee, contain many of these beneficial substances.

I pound hot and cold tea from morning until afternoon. I drink every possible type of tea and actually frequently play what I call the Tea Game. If I am giving a speech or at a meeting and notice that there are five different tea choices, I then go about drinking one cup of each type of tea, since they all have slightly different beneficial properties. I urge you to drink at least forty ounces of tea a day. That will probably be five glasses of iced tea or six glasses of hot tea.

Coffee

Coffee can be another beneficial liquid. Now, I don’t mind coffee. The only issue is how coffee is affecting your energy levels and your sleep. If you need a cup of coffee to get you going in the morning, not a problem. Just make sure that it is not a cup of coffee laden with calories. But if you are on the coffee highway all day, drinking cup after cup to stay alert and awake, your adrenals may be affected, as well as your sleep.

If you are having difficulty sleeping, then coffee may be the culprit. Even decaffeinated coffee still possesses enough caffeine to get in the way of a restful night’s sleep, so consider that if you are tossing and turning or popping up in the middle of the night. Start by cutting your coffee consumption in half and see if that helps. If it doesn’t, then eliminate it, even though you will probably suffer caffeine withdrawal for the first few days.

Also know that all coffee is not the same. Starbucks coffee can have almost twice the caffeine (which is why people are so addicted to it) than other brands of coffee you either purchase or make at home. I’m not a coffee drinker, but I do know that the Starbucks Black Tie gives me the jitters. I don’t get the same response from green tea, so clearly there is a difference in the caffeine levels.

Milk

Milk is another beverage that can play a supporting role in a successful weight-loss plan–if you are careful. I know I’ve slammed liquid calories, but I feel that low-fat milk is an exception, as it possesses two positive applications:

• As a post-exercise snack. According to
Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise
, drinking milk after exercising helped women drop three and a half pounds of fat in twelve weeks, compared to those who drank sports drinks and
gained
weight. Again, they gained weight with sports drinks, but lost weight with milk. Milk possesses whey protein, which is exactly what you want to consume after exercising on my program. On some days, you will see low-fat milk as one of your snacks post-exercise or just when you need to ward off hunger.

• For breakfast, coupled with high-fiber cereal. I know you are generally pressed for time at breakfast. A perfect, easy alternative (how hard is it to pour milk and cereal into a bowl?) is a good, high-fiber cereal with low-fat milk. Please note that I keep saying low-fat milk, as whole milk is loaded with the wrong fat and too many calories. Fat-free or skim milk does not tip satiety mechanisms. Some fat is
good
and low-fat milk is the perfect example. I generally recommend 2% milk.

Wine

It may surprise you that wine is also on the list of approved beverages. Okay, there is a lot of controversy surrounding alcohol. One camp says that moderate drinking, as in one glass a day, is fine. Another camp says that moderate drinking can sometimes lead to more frequent, damaging drinking, so don’t start in the first place. Then, other camps say “no” for religious, genetic, or health reasons, including an increased risk of certain cancers. I fall into the first camp and urge you to consider drinking a glass of wine from time to time, as we know wine has benefits such as:

• Improved heart health

• Increased good cholesterol

• Slowed cognitive decline

But did you know that one glass of wine can boost your metabolism? S. Goya Wannamethee, Ph.D. and epidemiologist at the Royal Free and University College Medical School in London, states that “alcohol may increase metabolic rate.”
¹³
It appears that alcohol encourages your body to burn extra calories for up to ninety minutes after you drink a glass. That’s why some studies find that regular wine drinkers have less abdominal fat, smaller waists, and a lower body mass index than those who don’t drink wine. Drinking wine with a meal may actually result in more calories being burned rather than stored as fat. That, clearly, is a plus for Petites, and many of my personal training clients in Chicago and New York do drink a glass of wine two to three times a week.

The question for you is whether you enjoy drinking a glass of wine. I’m not a Petite, but I do. That, however, is a personal choice. While I have included wine in some of the eating-out options in my plan, you clearly don’t have to drink it. I encourage you to increase the portions of the approved food slightly to equal the approximately 100 calories you save by not drinking the wine. Notice I didn’t say
drink
something instead. “Unapproved” liquid calories are still just that–unapproved.

One final note on wine. Please, always be a “two-fisted” drinker. By that I mean, drink two ounces of water for every ounce of wine. When the human body breaks down alcohol, it uses water. By starting out well hydrated, you get up looking and feeling fine. That “groggy” feeling after you consume alcohol is often dehydration. By drinking two ounces of water for every ounce of wine, you will:

• Feel better.

• Look better, as you will avoid dehydration and the water “bloat” that comes with it. Hit the water and you will really see the difference in how you look in the morning.

• Drink less. Honestly, especially as a Petite, your small stature will fill up faster and that’s good.

These two ounces of water equal ten ounces, since you should only be drinking five ounces of wine. That is in addition to the water I recommended earlier in the chapter.

Petites, please realize that what you consume in liquids is as important as what you consume in solids. Go back to your balance of energy equation and understand that your “calories in” come from both of them. Just one 8-ounce glass of juice each day adds up to 96 calories a day, 35,040 calories a year, and ten extra pounds. OUCH! Substituting “liquid bearing calories” with water and tea will not only save you calories, it will lean you out and give you the visual that will keep you coming back for more. Here is your new mantra–the right liquids enable you to “blast the fat” and “beat the bloat.”

M
y exercise program is going to make you “tighter and lighter.” And that’s why, for the first time in your life, you are going to experience not only weight loss; you are also going to experience your first “recomposition.”

Let me clarify. I have had countless Petites tell me, sometimes in tears:

• I really didn’t tone up. I didn’t look even remotely like the pictures I was promised.

• I looked pretty much the same, only a touch smaller. I’ve always been shaped like a pear. Then after losing a little weight, I basically just looked like a slightly smaller pear. And after all that time I spent on the treadmill!

• I still have jiggling skin. I don’t want to wear sleeveless tops, even though I was promised that I could. I hate my thighs, so continue to avoid shorts. I don’t really feel that much better about myself.

• I actually preferred how I looked heavier. I seemed more “out of proportion” as I lost weight, mostly from the top down. The weight I had to lose was in my lower half. Now I have smaller breasts and the same size legs. After just slight weight loss, my lower half looked even bigger. What’s the point in losing weight if that’s my end result?

Ladies, I couldn’t agree with you more. Why follow a plan and end up unhappy? Clearly, you did not witness a “recomposition” of your body, probably because you made one of two errors in the past: either you didn’t exercise, or you performed cardiovascular exercise.

I know I made this point earlier, but it warrants repeating. If you diet without exercise, you destroy your metabolism because you are losing almost as much muscle as fat–not that ugly, bulging muscle you see in all the wrong magazines, but rather the beautiful, long, elegant muscle that you see on certain women and wonder what their secret is. I have the secret. Just wait a moment longer.

The other mistake you may have made is to perform cardiovascular exercise. As the author of the
New York Times
bestseller
The Cardio-Free Diet
, I am here to tell you definitively that classic cardiovascular exercise is a complete and utter waste of time if your goal is weight loss and a “recomposition.” I don’t want to go into the complete argument, but suffice it to say that cardio kills, which was the original title to the book. (I wish we had kept it, as it truly represents my opinion.) Cardiovascular exercise can have deeply damaging effects.

First, it can destroy your joints. Just look at all the runners limping around and complaining about their backs, knees, etc. According to the
New York Times
, the #2 reason why baby boomers (approximately 78 million Americans) go to the doctor is for an exercise-related injury.
¹
Consider these horrible statistics regarding marathoners:

• 25 percent of all people who begin to train for a marathon have to drop out due to injury.

• 19 percent of all those who run a marathon (I truly feel sorry for them for completing this deeply damaging event) suffer an injury.

If you work the math–which by now you know I love–you will see that, if 100 people attempt to run a marathon, twenty-five will quit because of injury and 19 percent of the remaining seventy-five (approximately fourteen) will also be injured. That means that, out of the original 100 people, thirty-nine will be injured–a 39 percent injury rate. And trust me, from my experience in this industry, I know that the number is even higher than that. That doesn’t even take into account the damage that occurs over time, as the vast majority of marathon runners require hip or knee replacements at some point due to wear and tear on those joints. Clearly, this is not a smart option if your goal is to exercise for life in order to stay lean for life.