The Lunch Box Diet: Eat all day, lose weight, feel great. Lose up to a stone in 4 weeks.. Simon Lovell
heard for years about stress affecting our hearts. But it affects more, so much more. It affects nearly every part of our physical selves.
When we have very stressful lives, there are many physical symptoms. Joints ache, muscles feel weak, our hormones are out of whack, our immune systems are weakened, and these physical problems just add to the psychological pressure we’re under. And guess what? As if the plate of brownies you consumed the other night after losing that promotion to your idiot colleague wasn’t enough, the physical way in which your body responded to all that stress you’ve been under might have added a few extra pounds as well.
We produce the hormone cortisol when we are under stress and the kicker is that Cortisol can cause you to produce more abdominal fat. Abdominal fat is undesirable aesthetically, and it also contains the most dangerous type of body fat. This is called ‘visceral fat’, and it has been linked to increased rates of cardiovascular disease and type II diabetes as well as breast cancer in women.
So, should you just give up and let yourself go? I mean, after all, it’s not as if we can stop stressful things from happening, right? What do we do? First of all, you stop putting undue stress on yourself. Maybe it’s inadvisable to tell the boss what you really think about his or her latest idiotic idea, but you can reduce personal stress by choosing not to follow ridiculously restrictive diets. Stop starving yourself or following plans that are clearly unhealthy. Stop denying yourself the foods you love. Stop eating flavourless foods because you’ve been told you’ll lose weight if you follow a particular meal plan. It makes me so angry that people are adding to their life stresses because of their constant quest to be thin and perfect. It really doesn’t need to be that way.
Free Yourself from Stress
Reducing Stress
Learn to let go of anger. Anger can help us if it produces the drive we need to overcome problems in our lives. However, when anger becomes resentment it only holds us back. Sometimes, we just have to let it go. Trust me, it takes a lot more energy to hold on to anger than it does to be happy. It’s a choice you can make.
I know you want to lose weight, but healthy weight loss doesn’t have to be stressful. My clients are busy people who find that working out relieves stress from the daily grind. The last thing I want to do is add more stress to their lives. The Lunch Box Diet is convenient and versatile. People enjoy making and eating their own creations and coming up with new secret recipes. Colleagues, clients and friends are always trying to get a peek in my box, and I love to share ideas. If people didn’t share then we would never learn.
Here’s another piece of advice: ‘Surround yourself with people you aspire to be like and you will end up being like them. Surround yourself with stressed people and you’ll end up being stressed yourself.’ The same can be said if you surround yourself with people who eat bad, junky foods. Have a think about who you are and how much of that is influenced by the people you surround yourself with. You may want to make a few changes in your life to help you on a more positive path, and this in turn will assist with your weight loss.
I’ve found that my clients like losing weight without the stress of traditional dieting. That’s why I allow occasional indulgences while helping you to retrain your taste buds to enjoy healthy foods.
You’ll find that when you eat a diet full of highly nutritious foods, you will be more energetic, stronger and healthier overall. When you are less susceptible to illness and feeling your best, stress is much easier to handle. In addition, you’ll discover that there’s no better stress-buster than a good session in the gym or other energetic pursuits. You don’t have to exercise on the Lunch Box Diet but you’ll probably be more inclined to get up and be active after only a short while on this diet.
Ultimately, my goal is to help you lose weight, learn to eat healthily for life, get you working out and do it all without stress. Leave those fad starvation diets behind and let’s delve into a little science.
We tend to beat ourselves up for being overweight. We feel as though it’s all about what we did or didn’t do. Guess what? It’s not all up to you. You weren’t necessarily the one who failed. There’s a better than zero chance that the diet failed you!
There are reasons why diets fail us. To understand this, you need to know a few basic nutritional principles. Don’t worry, I’ll make it fun! Keep reading.
The first is a simple maths equation.
weight maintenance: what goes in = what goes out
What goes in is obviously the food you consume measured in calories, which is the measurement term used for energy. Your energy intake must be equivalent to what your body burns in order to simply maintain your weight. What doesn’t get burned is stored as fat.
Burn, Baby, Burn
Reducing Stress
Stop driving yourself crazy with guilt. Guilt is a wasted emotion. There are days when you get it all done and days when you don’t. Accomplish the big things, the imperative things, but if you let a few little things slide to free up time for more important things like exercise or family time, that’s okay!
We burn energy day and night to perform the basic necessities of life: breathing, digestion, brain function and so forth. The amount of energy burned for these basic functions varies according to a person’s size, age and sex. The larger the person, the harder the body has to work, so the more energy is burned. As we get older, we burn less energy – which may very well be why some of you bought this book in the first place. For the first time in your life, you might be experiencing weight gain.
Most of us do more during the day than simply breathing and digesting food (I hope!). How much more varies. Some of us have physically active jobs. Others spend the day sitting behind a desk. But we all have choices about what we do with our free time. For some, relaxing means lying on the sofa and for others it means going on a bracing hike.
I don’t want you to count every calorie, nor to become a slave to the ‘calories burned’ function on your treadmill. However, you must adjust your eating to accommodate your activity level. It’s just common sense.
Setting a Budget
Energy intake can be seen as a budget. When you wake up, you get a basic allowance according to your energy needs for the day that you can spend without paying the price of weight gain. All day long you spend this energy budget whenever you eat. If you take some form of exercise, you earn more energy so your budget for food is larger. You can eat more without gaining weight than others who are less active. We’ll talk more about food budget and food choices when we get into the Lunch Box Diet itself, so grab a highlighter and mark up the page here.
For now, let’s go back to our equation. I’m assuming you care less about weight maintenance and a lot more about weight loss. So, in looking at our equation, you can easily see that in order to lose weight, you need to do one of two things – or both.
Reduce what goes in (lower energy intake)
Increase what goes out (burn more energy)
Eat less and burn more energy (preferred)
Seems simple, right? For the most part, it is. But how much should you cut out of your diet in order to lose weight at an optimum rate? Again I don’t want you to count but for the sake of understanding, I’ll tell you a bit more. One pound of body weight is more or less equivalent to 3,500 calories. Rather convenient considering there are seven days in a week. You can quickly see that if you reduce your energy intake by 500 calories a day or burn an additional 500 calories (about a 40-minute jog/run on the treadmill), you should theoretically lose about a pound a week.