The Zen Diet Revolution (17 page)

Synephrine is the active ingredient in the plant
Citrus aurantium
(also known as bitter orange). Chemically it is very similar to ephedrine (which is now banned), but it boosts the metabolism without dangerously elevating the heart rate or blood pressure. Synephrine works by stimulating the breakdown and release of fat, raising metabolic rate and reducing appetite.

To achieve benefits, take 200–600mg of standardized
C. aurantium
or 5–20mg of synephrine, two or three times per day before meals.

It is a fact that most gimmicky slimming tablets are constructed of the above ingredients. While thermogenics can be effective, they can also be stimulating, so don’t take them less than 2 hours before bed time.

During your Zen diet transformation, it’s vital that you keep motivated and that you can see yourself progressing. It is great to learn to enjoy gentle progress and to celebrate every little change you see. How you feel and how you look are the two most important pointers. I find that each time I find a genuine improvement to my diet, I notice a change in my energy levels and thought processes and even a change to my eyesight! However, fat loss is one of the most important and enjoyable side effects of a correct diet, so how do we keep track of that?

Should we use the weighing scales? But muscle weighs more than fat and your weight can change depending on how dehydrated you are at the time. How do we find out if we have lost fat?

Body fat calipers are the perfect tool for keeping track of your body fat. Calipers have been proven to be far more accurate than any of the body fat scales and as precise as underwater or hydrostatic weighing, which is expensive, inconvenient and often time-consuming. So body fat calipers are fantastic, low-cost, portable devices that you can use at your own convenience with no cost per use.

The calipers measure how much subcutaneous fat (fat under the skin) a person has by pinching a skin fold just above the hip. You then put the measurement into an
equation to show body density and body fat percentage; this gives you an estimation of your body fat.

One thing to note, however, is that no form of fat measurement is 100 per cent accurate. Whatever method you use, there is room for error; even hydrostatic weighing is only accurate to within 2–3 per cent. All things considered, you should be looking at the big picture. Don’t get too worked up by a small change in your reading. It is important to use the right equation for the calipers you purchase. Instructions are included in the pack and you should focus on using the same calipers and the same equation if possible. After all there are over 100 equations you could use.

One thing you may note is that the chart supplied asks you to line up your age with your fat measurement; this is because young people store about one half of their body fat under the skin. As we age, a greater proportion of our body fat is stored internally. This means that skin-fold measurements for a young and old person have different meanings; they might have the same measurement, but their body fat percentage would still be considerably different. Obviously, there are more differences than just age; gender, fitness level and race all play a role. Most equations take a few of these into consideration.

All this aside, using body fat calipers as a way to determine body fat percentage gives you amazing accuracy to within 4 per cent. That’s far better than any scales. If all this sounds a bit complicated, you can do what I do and not use any equation at all! I don’t even try and convert skin folds into a body fat percentage. Instead, I just note down
the skin-fold measurements and monitor their change over time – simple. As long as the skin fold is getting smaller, I know I am winning.

If you really do want to have a number for body fat percentage, then just use it as a benchmark for progress. But be careful if you start comparing it with your friend who was tested by a different person or on a different system.

This is another key technique for using body fat calipers! Always make sure that you measure from the same spot. No matter how detailed the diagrams are in the instruction manual, a few centimetres make a huge difference.

How can you overcome this problem? When you read your instructions, they will give you a location to take the reading. This is normally over one of the hip bones, but there are systems that work on other sites: for example, some systems use the abdomen skin fold site which is 1 inch to the right of the belly button. Whatever option they are choosing to use, make sure you measure it with a ruler, don’t guess. If they say the triceps site is midway between the tip of your shoulder and your elbow, use a ruler to measure exactly halfway; that way, you can see exactly how you are doing.

Trust me, testing your body fat with calipers may seem a bit complicated, but once you get the hang of it, it’s the most motivating thing to be able to see your body fat slowly drift away with every passing week. Watching such
progress in a material way is one of the keys to the kingdom. Without that, it is hard to keep a focus or indeed to enjoy the whole thing.

In the 1980s, it was quite popular to promote the idea that you could reduce a certain amount of fat from one area of the body specifically by focusing on exercising that area. Studies during the early 1990s disproved this theory by showing that body fat reduction appeared to come in a genetically pre-set order when individuals were given different forms of exercise.

However, more recently studies into blood flow to fat tissue have modified our opinion again on spot reduction. It is now conclusively proven that if you exercise your legs, you will indeed draw slightly more energy from fat reserves on your thighs, but the majority of your fat will be burned from your major fat stores – the level of fat drawn on the specific body areas is actually extremely small. Spot reduction does have one important purpose – motivation! It’s an extremely motivating thought to know that when exercising a body part, you are, in fact, encouraging fat to be burned around the exercised area.

Keep yourself motivated by imagining the fat burning from the areas you’re exercising. Imagine the fat being drawn out into the blood stream and burnt as energy.

By introducing the positive changes brought in the Zen Diet, you will start to see a change in the amount of body fat you are storing. Observing this is one of the most motivating things in the entire world. But how much fat are you likely to lose and from where will it go first? The Zen Diet is designed to create small but permanent changes to your habits which will result in a deficiency of about 100 calories a day. This, in turn, will result in losing a pound of body fat with very little loss of muscle each and every week. The areas that tend to lose fat first vary from person to person, and, as a general rule, you will be able to see it come off first where it went on last.

Men and women vary in their fat-loss patterns. Men, for example, tend to have a ‘quick on, quick off ’ rule with fat. Women tend to have a hard slog shifting belly fat, and it is only when it has come off from their buttocks and hips that it starts to disappear from their mid-section.

A Zen master in Japan once said to me, ‘The start of discipline is with rest and recovery.’ This is something that he had learnt the truth of over the years. You must make sure that as you introduce increased physical activity into your life that you have adequate rest and relaxation. The three pillars of your exercise routine are – exercise, nutrition and
rest. Make sure that your sleep and your downtime is sacred and that you give yourself adequate recovery.

Without rest the body will not respond very well to exercise and you will be at risk of injury. A tired mind will find it very hard to keep to any discipline. Earlier on in the chapter we talked about the negative habit of eating as a form of reward. Rest on the other hand is a beautiful positive reward for exercise and something that you should cultivate.

It is important to be aware of what is achievable for an average person with an average lifestyle. If you are looking for washboard abs, you may be surprised at what form of sacrifices and unhealthy things you need to do to achieve this. The people you see in photographs are often models who are willing to go through all sorts of unhealthy practices to get themselves into that condition. Male models, for example, often don’t drink any water in the whole day prior to their photo shoot so that their abdominals show. I know of female models and professional wrestlers who only eat two low-carbohydrate meals a day in order to achieve their physique. These extremely unhealthy practices generate equally unhealthy expectations in what forms of changes we can make in our body. The Zen Diet is about making a healthy positive change to yourself. To achieve physical form that you see on many professional actresses and models you need to skim off so much body fat that it only
consists of 10 per cent of your body’s total mass, which is about the same as a marathon runner. And as you can see from the photographs in many glossy magazines, these women with extremely low body fat have mysteriously managed to maintain one of the largest fat masses on their body – namely their breasts. In these cases this is always achieved by two silicone supplements!

Train to be a slim, beautiful and healthy you and let go of the foolish images projected to you in the media. We all have our own bodies and our own talents. We can’t all aspire to extremely genetically predisposed individual standards.

Find a place of natural beauty away from where you will be disturbed. It could be a beautiful lake or other natural place: perhaps in some woods where you can sit and watch the wildlife. Take a few moments to let your breathing naturally slow down and relax the whole of your body. Look at the beauty around you and see how gentle everything is. Notice how the areas of life in balance are the most beautiful, whereas areas of destruction, when things are out of balance, become eyesores.

Contemplate on the beauty of nature and how it is linked to balance. Notice how nothing is extreme – everything is in its own natural perfect order. Look at the animals in the fields or the birds flying above you; observe their natural beauty. See how in animals of the same species there is some significant variation in each animal, but note how all seems to have equal beauty and grace.

Now bring these principles back to yourself. Close your eyes and visualize yourself in your ideal form; imagine how the balance brought into your life by your exercise regime is going to bring you to your natural healthy physique. Really visualize this perfect you. And when you feel ready, take a moment to step into the picture in your mind’s eye and become that image. Know that you take this image with you in your daily life. Carry it in your mind; in your body is a program or template as to where your path is going to take you.

Chapter 1 – Mental Changes

1
  University College London Phillippa Lally,
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/hbrc/diet/lallyp.html
accessed 1/1/12

2
  
http://zenhabits.net/

Chapter 2 – Dietary Changes

1
  
Readers Digest
, October 2011, p115

2
  ibid

3
  
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/releases/41026.php
accessed 23/09/11

4
  ibid

5
  Ludy, MJ, Mattes, RD,
Physiology & Behavior
, Vol 102 (3–4), pp251–8, March 2011. Epub 18 Nov 2010. ‘The effects of hedonically acceptable red pepper doses on thermogenesis and appetite.’ Abstract available on
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21093467

6
  ibid

7
  Yoon, M, and Kim, MY,
Pharmaceutical Biology
, Vol 49 (6), pp614–19, ‘The anti-angiogenic herbal composition Ob-X from Morus alba,
Melissa officinalis, and Artemisia capillaris regulates obesity in genetically obese ob/ob mice’. Abstract available on
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21554004

8
  Johnson, Carol S,
Journal of the American College of Nutrition
, Vol 24 (3), pp158–65, ‘Strategies for Healthy Weight Loss: From Vitamin C to the Glycemic Response’. Abstract available on
http://www.jacn.org/content/24/3/158.full
(accessed 7/03/2012)

Chapter 3 – Changes to Lifestyle

1
  Elder, C R, Gullion, C M, Funk, K L, DeBar, L L, Lindberg N M & Stevens, V J,
International Journal of Obesity
, ‘Impact of sleep, screen time, depression and stress on weight change in the intensive weight loss phase of the LIFE study’, Vol 36, pp86–92, Jan 2012 Summary available on
http://www.nature.com/ijo/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/ijo201160a.html
(accessed 9/1/12)

2
  Mann, Denise, article on WebMD website entitled ‘Can Better Sleep Mean Catching Fewer Colds?’ Available on
http://www.webmd.com/sleep-disorders/excessive-sleepiness-10/immune-system-lack-of-sleep
(accessed 7/3/12)

3
  Bankston, Amanda, writing for the Minneapolis
Star Tribune
, article entitled ‘Office-dwellers stand up to ‘sitting disease”, January 2012. Available on
http://www.knoxnews.com/news/2012/feb/09/off-the-couch-active-options-feb-10/?print=1
(accessed 8/3/12)

I
N THIS SECTION WE GIVE
some suggested
kaizen
schedules that allow you to make changes in a synergistic order. That is to say, the changes work together and each one builds on the other so that they are stronger than the sum of their parts. We have made sure that each change improves on the next and builds into a fat-burning force. Remember that the changes you are making are ones you want to continue for a lifetime. When we start a new diet, we tend to be very motivated and want to introduce many changes at once. So you may find yourself wanting to rush ahead and introduce many changes immediately because you are motivated towards change. But keep your powder dry! We want to make sure that these changes are permanent, so take a week to make sure that they become part of your being.

This is the basic routine of habit transformation. It is set up with some powerful changes at the start, which will quickly start the fat-burning process. This will build motivation and get things moving. Remember: your fat-burning response is trainable and does get better as time goes on. With each week that goes by, everything starts to progress. Every week your body starts to burn more fat and change shape. You will be amazed to see what progress you can make with just ten small changes.

Many people who have bought this book have done so because they are looking for a method that solves the problem at source and offers a more balanced, life-changing approach to weight loss. This schedule is for those people.

This is a very strict routine that gets the fat burning at high speed. It’s really only for those who have great skill in changing their habits or are very motivated to make a change. Remember that the routine means these changes are for life.

You may of course wish to put together your own course/s to follow from the advice you have gained from the book, and so we have included a blank table below for your own use, to photocopy and use as much as you wish. You are the best person to plan your change as you are aware of your lifestyle and of the areas that you can change with most effect. Remember to plan a reward for each change you introduce and to keep motivated. Don’t stop making changes after ten weeks, but carry on fine-tuning your diet until you are totally happy with your weight and health.