100 Ways to Fight the Flab goes Closer

Closer magazine has this week featured a review of ‘100 Ways to Fight the Flab’ under the heading of ‘The world’s wackiest weight loss tips – that work!’ The article reads as follows:

You’ve starved yourself on the 5:2, survived on cabbage soup and detoxed on maple syrup, but a new (slightly bonkers) book may have the answer to the weight loss conundrum

There’s a whole host of different ways to shift pounds these days, and we’ve tried them all. But a new no-nonsense book, 100 Ways to Fight The Flab (Accent Press, £7.99), is packed with everything from commonsense strategies to downright bonkers-sounding tips to help you stay slim for good. Here are our favourites from author Jane Wenham-Jones, rated and slated by nutritionist Amanda Ursell (twitter @AmandaUrsell)…

1. STAY ON THE SHELF

Fill one fridge shelf with exactly 1,000 calories of food each day – no more, no less. Then eat it. Temptation is removed because it’s all planned and calculated. Make sure it’s beautifully balanced, is filled with foods you wantto eat and includes three meals and two snacks so you’re not left with two boiled eggs, a Mars bar and some spinach by dinner time.

AMANDA SAYS: 5/5

This is great…if you’re near the fridge all day! Successful dieting is about planning, so portioning out what you’ll eat is perfect. Depending how big you are and how much you need to lose 1000 calories may be too low, though, so be sensible.

2. USE PUPPY POWER

Lots of people who, by rights, should be far fatter manage to stay slim with toned legs and bums thanks to regular brisk walks with their pooches. If you find dogs too time-consuming, needy and fond of licking their testicles, borrow your friends’!

AMANDA SAYS: 4/5

Walking is fantastic – it’s free, everyone’s can do it, and you won’t risk injury – unlike high impact activities like running, but you don’t need a dog to do it.

3. EAT CHOCOLATE

Not the whole supermarket shelf, but a few squares of 70% – 85% cocoa dark chocolate is full of antioxidants, vitamins and minerals and letting a couple of squares melt on your tongue with a cup of black coffee takes the edge off your appetite. It’s low carb, low sugar and low calorie and it’s also a mood enhancer, so it fills you up and cheers you up.

AMANDA SAYS: 5/5

I’m 100% behind this. Dark chocolate contains a fatty acid that’s hard to digest, making your tummy feel full. Also, in a recent study where dieters ate the same number of calories but either had chocolate cake or a ‘healthy’ breakfast, the cake eaters lost more weight and kept it off because they didn’t feel deprived.

4. KEEP CLOSER IN THE FRIDGE

It sounds bonkers, but often we eat because we’re bored. Find your favourite mag in the fridge and you can flick through that instead of gobbling a chocolate mousse. Keep nail polish in there too – it stops it going goopy and gives you something else to do. Genius!

AMANDA SAYS: 5/5

It’s quirky, but I love it. Many of us eat not because our stomach is asking for food, but because our bored brain is – and this is an ingenious distraction!

5. FEEL THE CHILLI BURN!

Chillies – the hotter the better – raise your metabolism, so you can burn 15% more calories for the two hours after eating your fiery fat burning friend. Infuse olive oil with the seeds, and chuck chopped chilli in omelettes, sauces and your scrambled eggs at breakfast.

AMANDA SAYS: 3/5

Chillies will boost your metabolism, but that can lull you into a false sense of security. You can’t eat a big fatty dinner, cover it in tabasco and think you’ve undone the damage.

6. SING FOR YOUR DINNER!

Belting out your favourite Beyonce track can burn up to 150 calories an hour, as well as exercising muscles in your upper body and reducing stress levels. Plus it’s almost impossible to sing and eat at the same time.

AMANDA SAYS: 2.5/5

Another great distraction, but dancing to your favourite song would be better – you’d burn more calories and no-one would have to listen.

7. BUM SHUFFLE YOURSELF SLIM

There may not be any scientific evidence to back this up, but going up and down the stairs on your bottom certainly feels like it tones you up – it’s exhausting! Do it without your arms and it’s even more strenuous.

AMANDA SAYS: 3/5

You’d be better off running up and down the stairs four times in the time it takes to bum shuffle, but packing our day with ‘incidental movement’ is great – take the stairs, stand when you’re chatting on the phone and do heel lifts at your desk. It all adds up.

…and 8. GET HIGH!

Put all the yummy food in very high cupboards. It won’t be at eye-level to tempt you and when you remember it’s there all the stretching up will work wonders.

AMANDA SAYS: 4/5

Better still – don’t buy it in the first place. A chocolate bar in your trolley is as good as in your tummy – it’ll call your name from the cupboard and you’ll gobble it in a flash. Have treats, but when you’re out and about – you’re more likely to take your time or even share (sometimes).

***

Closer readers can order a copy of 100 Ways to Fight The Flab by Jane Wenham-Jones at the special 25% discount price of £5.99 instead of £7.99 (with free P+P within UK). Just visit www.accentpress.co.uk and enter the code CL25.

You can view the original article, see http://www.closeronline.co.uk/2014/06/the-world-s-wackiest-weight-loss-tips-that-work#.U6FmtL-dL0c.

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Flab-fighting tip No 15 – Get yourself on TV!

Television puts ten pounds on you. So get yourself on screen, see it all hang out, and I guarantee you won’t eat for a week 🙂

May I refer you to www.wannabeawritertvshow.com where you can get a chance to do just that….

We could do with the hits…

 

 

Flab-fighting tip No 14 – Eat yoghurt and banana

 

This idea came from my friend Irene who swears by this unlikely-sounding regime which has one simple rule – you can eat as much as you like of absolutely anything as long as it is plain yoghurt or banana. You are supposed to do it for three days. Since banana is a diuretic and yoghurt an evacuant (let’s not go there) it does work, but I don’t suggest you do it for that long. By dawn of the second day you will be out of your head with the tedium of it and hallucinating about toast and marmite or anything that isn’t bloody yogurt or banana.

It does, however work, as a quick fix to get into a tight dress. (On the other hand, you could just wear a bigger one.) (Or a decorated tent.)

Flab-fighting top No 11 – Have lots of great sex!

Have lots of great sex

(NB if you’re married, best not to let your spouse find out.)

A good shag burns up to 400 calories and increases the endorphins in your body leaving you feeling naturally high without resorting to chocolate.

Points in favour: you spend all your eating time bonking, and when you do come up for air, you don’t want to look unalluring by ramming food down your throat.

Points against: if you’re single, you might fall in love, decide to get married and that will be your sex life gone for ever.

Footnote 1

I am including a nice picture of a sunset because when I tried google images for a suitable illustration I got more than I’d bargained for. It is a Sunday after all…

Sunset taken leaving St Maarten when I was a speaker on P&0’s cruise ship, Arcadia. An experience to test one’s flab-fighting to the limit. Never seen so much food in my life…

Flab-Fighting tip no 10 – take supplements

If you’re on a diet and can’t keep to it, make sure you’re getting the right vitamins and minerals. Sometimes cravings are your body’s way of saying what it needs. If you’re mainlining chocolate brazil nuts for example, perhaps you need selenium.

If you’re just sucking the chocolate off, you might want iron. If you’ve eaten three doughnuts, four cookies and an apple pie and it’s only 11 a.m., you want to get a grip before you’re the size of Dorset.

Flab-fighting tip No 9 – Go on Twitter

Yes — you thought the reason you had an arse the size of Northampton was because you sat on it all day tweeting banalities about how many muffins you’ve eaten, but in fact research has proved that using Twitter can actually help you LOSE weight.

.

A study carried out by the University of Carolina found that those who posted updates about their diet on twitter and got support from fellow fatties, lost more of their body weight than those who didn’t. (This is my brief Sunday Summary — for the full scientific low-down click here)

So if you feel like sharing with the world, what you had for breakfast, you are not being dull and tedious after all, but Fighting the Flab! Pleased? Don’t mention it. xx

Think Thin

There is a lot to be said for the power of positive thinking. Have you noticed how skinny people are always twitching about and never sit still? Tell yourself you are a thin person too and start fidgeting now. Walk rapidly instead of waddling along like a fatty, throw the kids’ crusts to the birds instead of hoovering them up (thinnies disdain leftovers) stand tall, think slimline and practise an irritating laugh and trilling: Sometimes you know, I forget to eat altogether….

Flab-fighting tip No 3 – Get a dog. (Or borrow one…)

Get a dog

I have noticed that a lot of people who should, by rights, be fatter than they are, have a mutt that they walk come rain and shine. I am more of a cat person. I find dogs too time-consuming, too needy, too fond of licking their testicles and then wanting to do the same to my face. I am also squeamish about picking up warm poo. But there is no doubt at all, that taking regular brisk walks is an excellent way of keeping the weight under control and one’s thighs and bum toned. If you too, are too self-engrossed to actually own a canine, then can I suggest you….

Kenzo

…borrow a dog

This is a good compromise. I have always enjoyed taking out Kenzo, a black Labrador belonging to my friend Lyn-Marie. Kenzo and I have an arrangement. He does a poo in the garden before we leave and I take him to all the muddy places where he’s not usually allowed. I also have an arrangement with Lyn-Marie. Should Kenzo ever let me down, I will phone her on her mobile and she will send one of the children to clear up.

Top Tip:  Walking, let us remember, can burn 100 calories per mile if you do it briskly. I don’t know how much extra you use up by wielding a pooper-scooper, but just make sure you do. I don’t want to tread in it later…

HOT TIP No. 1: A Chilli a Day Keeps a Lard Arse at Bay

 

So eat a chilli. The hotter the better. Chillies raise the metabolism and the fierier they are, the greater the effect. I ate my last fresh one last night and it’s too cold to go shopping today so here, by way of illustration,  are some I bottled in olive oil the last time I was being a domestic goddess – HA!

Experts estimate that one can expect a 15% increase in calories burned for about two hours after eating a hot chilli sauce. Buy packets of fresh chillies from the supermarket and then keep and dry the seeds. Growing them yourself is easy, cheap and satisfying (sorry to sound like an excerpt from Cooking on a Shoestring in a Bedsit for One) and the plants look pretty on the kitchen window sill. I used to grow new ones each season until a nice girl called Hannah Harman, who works for

Food Network UK –

I met her at the launch of this fab book –

told me that you could cut back the plants when they’d finished fruiting, give ’em a feed, and they’d sprout again. Here are mine beginning to do just that…

Try them – the chillis – finely chopped in omelettes and scrambled egg, over meat or fish, in sauces and – for the brave – straight down with a couple of crisps. Actually, you will find the more you eat, the more your tolerance will grow (I don’t wish to be indelicate here, but it is best to build up slowly!). They are strangely addictive after a while. Now I twitch if I haven’t had a hot hit in a day or two.

ANOTHER HOT TIP  next Sunday at 6pm (UK time). In the meantime, please try this week’s and let me know how you got on. Comments gratefully received – Before and After pictures especially welcome… 🙂

Should you be thoroughly over-excited now, you can buy the entire book on Amazon UK or Amazon US.

And if you do, don’t forget there’s a COMPETITION to enter with the most fabulous prize you can possibly imagine… (no, it is not a packet of chillis)

Happy Eating and have a good week…