Get your beach body ready before it’s too late
James Duigan’s book, “Clean and Lean: Flat Tummy Fast!” aims to get you toned and washboarded in just 14 days, and before you gasp, yes, it’s possible.
“There are three crucial elements to change: nutrition, movement and mindset,” says the co-owner of Bodyism.
Nutrition and mindset: eat ‘clean’
“All transformation happens in the mind. The rest is details,” says Duigan. He believes that a body can only be lean if it’s “clean.”
“So many people have a toxic relationship with food that stops them from being clean.” The body stores toxins in its fat cells, so if your diet is toxic, you will eventually lose fat, but slowly. The toxins will have nowhere to go but right back in your system, making you feel tired and low in energy.
Ironically, some diets make us more toxic, and as a result, weight loss becomes a struggle. Duigan swears by “clean,” toxin free foods that are natural and unprocessed to lose the weight and keep it off.
“Sugar is the number one culprit for getting out of shape,” he says. It converts to fat quicker than fat itself, as sugary foods raise insulin levels, triggering fat storage. He also points out that sugar speeds up the breakdown of collagen, a protein found in the connective tissue of the skin that helps keeps it plump and firm.
Duigan describes sugar as being both physically and emotionally addictive. Physically, we get an instant energy buzz from eating it (it has the same effect on the brain as morphine) and emotionally, we associate eating it with some sort of “reward.” Duigan wants you to live by a new mantra: “Sugar is a fattening toxin that causes wrinkles, makes you feel tired and malnourished and adds a layer of flesh to your tummy.”
How to eat “clean”
Choose foods that:
- Have no fake flavoring
- Contain no preservatives
- Have no more then 5 or 6 ingredients
- Are close to their natural state: An apple looks the same as it does hanging off a tree, but French fries look nothing like a potato.
- Contain no ingredients you can’t pronounce or recognize
- Don’t make you feel gassy, bloated or full
- Don’t list sugar as the main ingredient or in the top three
Cut out the C.R.A.P.
Caffeine: OK in small doses. For coffee,
more than two cups a day is excessive and for green tea, have no more
than six cups a day.
Refined sugars: These are no-nos: fruit juice, white bread, cakes and anything ending in ‘ose’ (fructose, glucose, sucrose)
Alcohol: It’s full of sugar and stimulates the production of the hormone oestrogen, which promotes fat storage.
Processed foods: They have been stripped of their natural goodness and pumped up with additives.
For more information, visit www.bodyism.com.
