Carrots are healthy because they are very low on calories. They keep your waistline slim and keep body fat at bay which protects to you against some serious diseases. At the same time carrots give you lots of the immune defense friendly beta carotene, plus food fibre which is good for your stomach and circulation.
Tip: Carrots are renowned for their ability to stabilize your blood sugar level. For this reason snacking on carrots is a good good way to prevent your blood sugar level rollercoasting during the day.
Energy per 100 grams: 36 kcal Protein: 0.7 grams Fat: 0.4 grams Carbohydrate: 8.8 grams
The Recipe of the Day:
This soup has enough in it to serve as a meal for 4. Nice with some whole grain bread.
Carrots and beer soup
Ingredients:
* 12 carrots
* 1 leek
* 1 large fennel
* 6 potatoes
* 3 chicken breasts
* 2 cans of beer
* 2 pints of chicken stock
* salt, fresh ground black pepper and olive oil
(Vegetarian variation: substitute chicken with mushroom and chicken stock with veggie stock)
Directions:
1. Chop up the veggies and the peeled potatoes not too fine. Chop the chicken into bite size bits.
2. Put a big pan on the hob, and heat the oil. Stir frythe chicken for about 4 minutes, then add the veggies, beer, stock and a lot of fresh ground pepper. Bring to the boil, and turn down heat. Cover and allow to cook for about 25 minutes. Take care the veggies don’t get over cooked.
3. Add salt and pepper if needed.
Exercise of the Day
Tones lower stomach muscles.
Lie on your back, flat on the floor, legs stretched out, toes pointing away from you, hands by your sides, palms facing down. Raise your heels 12 inches from the floor. Spread your feet as far apart as you can. Hold for a count of 5. Feet together again. Lower your feet to the floor. Rest. Then repeat 5 times.
Over the course of a few days, increase the number of repetitions.
When I stepped on the scales this morning I was expecting them to say 169 pounds. So you can imagine my delight when they actually said 168 pounds. That is 23 pounds down from the 191 pounds that I weighed when I started my weight loss campaign.
For the last few days I have been idle on the exercise front. After a very strenuous round of golf in a howling gale last Saturday, I have been recuperating and taking it easy.
It’s also worth noting that last night I had an extra portion of curry at suppertime. And, in the afternoon I ate two lovely dark chocolates.
The point I’m making here is not that you can eat like a pig and lose weight. No, you obviously can’t do that. But you can give yourself the odd treat and you can sometimes eat what your body tells you it wants, like an extra helping of curry.
Starting on Thursday this week I will be playing two rounds of golf every day through to Saturday. With foresight I have been stocking up on a little extra energy in preparation for this marathon. It won’t be easy to survive all that golf because the weather forecast is dire. Rain is forecast for all three days of the competition I am playing in.
The experiment to prove, with myself as guinea pig, that it is possible to lose weight without dieting or going to a gym and to do it in a way that will keep the weight off forever, is going very well.
It is now day 112 or 16 weeks since I started slimming down. The average weekly weight loss is 1.44 pounds.
I feel a lot healthier and more energetic and I really enjoy the loose feeling of my trousers round my waist. When I achieve my revised target weight of 161 pounds I expect to have a 34-inch waist again. That will trigger a major shopping expedition that I am greatly looking forward to.
If you’re thinking that this is a slow old process, you may be right, but what does that matter. The name of the game is to achieve the target weight I set when I signed The Slim Pledge and stay there forever. So does it matter how long it takes to achieve target?
Besides it is probably not healthy to lose weight much faster than I am doing.
The secret is to eat healthy, fresh foods with lots of fruit and vegetables, cut down on the alcohol, sweets and chocolates and do your exercises.
The real secret is that it’s all about loving your body. Or should I say loving yourself and wanting to stick around with your body for as long as possible.
Recently I have taken to talking to my body a lot. It is a sensuous, loving experience. I will write a separate article about this soon.
Well, I made it, today is day 100 of my permanent weight loss campaign.
Remember, I am not on any special fad diet or doing any gym work.
19 pounds have melted away.
It’s the result of clear goal visualization, feeling right about what I am doing, eating lovely fresh food and doing my isometric exercises.
What could be easier?
My belief, you could say, my passionate belief, is that the most important factor in losing weight, and in keeping it off is the way that you feel about what you’re doing.
If you feel that it’s a struggle to lose weight, then it will be a struggle. If you feel that it is the right thing for you to do at this time, then it will be the right thing to do, and you will succeed.
It’s a matter of aligning your feelings about what you’re doing with your target.
This is how it works. It’s a 5 step process. Ask yourself these questions:
1. What don’t I want? You might answer: “I don’t want to be overweight.”
2. What do I want? “I want to be slim (put an exact weight on that).”
3. Clear away your negative thoughts about yourself and losing weight. This is one of the more difficult elements. You may feel that you can’t possibly live without certain foods, but you can. I didn’t think I could enjoy food without alcohol, but I have found out that I can. I will be talking a lot more about clearing away negative thoughts in my forthcoming book “Love Your Body Slim”.
4. Feel right about what you’re doing. You have to have strong emotional feelings about what you want. Seeing your new, slim body and really loving what you see is what it’s all about.
5. Get out of your own way and just let it happen.
Hypnosis has played a significant part. The video I posted on YouTube, Hypnotize Yourself To Lose Weight in 4 Minutes has already been played nearly 500 times. Hypnosis helps me relax and stay out of my own way.
For me it all started to go right when I signed The Slim Pledge.
The biggest single mistake in losing weight is to presume that willpower is important.
When I told my doctor about my success in losing weight he immediately said: “That’s impressive - how have you managed to do that?”
It is interesting that people don’t really listen to my answer. Or, at least, they don’t really hear what I say. I know this because when I have finished speaking, they often say something along the lines of: “You must have a lot of willpower.”
So let me make it quite clear – I do not believe that willpower works for weight loss, or for many other things for that matter.
It is my experience that imagination and autosuggestion are far more important than willpower. I have found this to be true both for myself and for my clients in many different fields of personal performance.
Why Willpower Sucks
The word willpower suggests the use of power or force. What people mean by willpower is, “forcing yourself to do something against your will.”
It seems to me using force against yourself is contrary to nature. Why would you want to do something against your will? This cannot be a good way to achieve any objective.
It is a law of nature that force creates opposite force or resistance. The more you try to force yourself to do something the more you will resist you own efforts to force yourself.
Dictatorships who seek to force people to obey their will inevitably cause resistance groups to spring up against them. Bullies who try to force others to obey them are hated with a passion by those they bully who resist them in every way they can. If you try to force a lock you are in danger of breaking the key. Try to force a car to go faster than it wants to go and you blow the engine.
Force is not nature’s way. So to try to force yourself to lose weight by using the force of willpower is not natural and therefore likely to fail.
If Willpower Won’t Work, What Will?
Many of my clients have achieved success using what the French psychologist Emile Coue called optimistic autosuggestion.
This requires that you condition your mind by using positive suggestions. You do this by repeating words or images to embed them into your subconscious mind.
Coue’s famous phrase, “every day, in every way, I am getting better and better,” is a prime example of the type of self-conditioning that can help greatly with weight loss.
This article is titled, “every day I get slimmer and slimmer” and I do. The evidence is in the diary I publish on my web site.
Most people go wrong right at the start of their weight loss campaign when they have some doubts about their ability to succeed. Such doubt is fatal.
You must believe that you can get slimmer and, let’s face it, millions of people have, and keep telling yourself that you can.
Is it really as simple as giving yourself positive instructions?
If you fill your mind with the thought that you CAN lose weight, you will get slimmer.
So what do you do when temptation strikes? Say you suddenly find a bar of chocolate in our hand.
You ask yourself this question: “will this chocolate bar make me slimmer?” When you answer, “no,” you will understand that the right course of action is to put the chocolate bar down and move on.
The important point is not what anyone else says or does but what you think. The moment you doubt you will fail. The more you keep telling yourself you can succeed the more successful you will be.
Beyond Positive Thinking
What I am suggesting here is beyond mere positive thinking, it is continuous positive programming. What is so powerful about this concept is that the longer you go on planting positive suggestions in your mind the more of a habit it becomes; and we all know how hard it is to break habits.
As part of my own slimming programme I have trained myself to eat only low fat yoghurt for dessert. I happen to like yoghurt and it comes in a variety of flavours, so it’s no great hardship to eat it everyday. I have been doing this now for over two months. The other day at a party I approached a dessert table groaning with a wide variety of delicious desserts. There were strawberries, chocolate gateaux, meringues, a pavlova, sticky toffee pudding, treacle tart and goodness knows what else. Without thinking I found myself filling my plate with fresh fruit salad and yoghurt. The programming had worked.
It is no coincidence that Coue used hypnosis on his patients. It helped them embed positive suggestions into their subconscious minds more quickly and deeply. I have certainly found self-hypnosis a great help. That is why I include elements of hypnosis and autosuggestion in all the slimming videos I broadcast around the Internet.
To work with Susanne and I personally to become a master of using self-hypnosis and positive autosuggestion visit Elite Slimmers.
My weight this morning was 177 pounds. When this weight loss campaign commenced 74 days ago my weight was 191 pounds.
In 10 weeks and 4 days I have lost 14 pounds! That is one stone! Hurray!
Best of all is that I have not used any type of diet. And I have not exercised excessively.
To be honest with you I have never even read a diet book. I have bought two but never read either of them.
The weight has dropped off slowly but regularly every week, despite the fact that I have led a near-normal life.
This week has been typical of my weight loss campaign. Monday morning I weighed in at 178 pounds. That evening we went out with some friends for to an Indian restaurant for a curry. Tuesday morning my weight had gone up 2 pounds to 180 pounds. Bah!
This is how my weight first thing in the morning each day fluctuated during the week:
Monday 178 pounds – curry supper and 2 large beers
Tuesday 180 pounds – normal eating
Wednesday 179 pounds – normal eating + 2 beers in pub
Thursday 180 pounds – normal eating
Friday 179 pounds – normal eating + glass of white wine at supper
Saturday 178 pounds – normal eating
Sunday 177 pounds
What I have found is that if you keep on eating healthy foods and doing the exercises I recommend the weight slowly drops off.
I am a big believer in slow, steady weight loss. That way your body has time to adjust and get used to what you are doing.
Do note that I am not living like a hermit. I am having beer and wine occasionally. And I do eat one good meal every day.
For instance yesterday’s menus looked like this:
Breakfast: bowl of muesli with dried fruits, nuts and semi-skimmed milk.
Mid-morning snack: one carrot
Lunch: tuna salad and an apple
Tea: crisp-bread with quince jelly, 8 almonds and 2 dates.
Supper: 2 chicken legs, potatoes poached in semi-skimmed milk, spinach and asparagus. For dessert I had a bowl of yoghurt.
I drink about 4 mugs of green tea every day and have a glass of water with my lunch and supper.
People ask where I get my motivation. The answer is that I am winning!
Every morning when I emerge from my bedroom I look down the corridor and see my image in the full-length mirror on the wall and I am slowly getting slimmer. I then step onto the weighing scales and the weight is going down. What better motivation could there be?
OK, Tuesday morning was a nasty shock this week, but it only renewed my determination.
It’s a great feeling when you notice your trouser belt is loose, even though it’s on the same buckle hole as yesterday.
We have now launched our Elite Slimmers society. So, if you’re serious about wanting to lose weight and keep it off, now’s your chance. We have limited the membership so that we can give good attention to all our Members. This link will take you to Elite Slimmers.
