Medical Today

If you want to control your waistline and eat your way to better health, here are 10 things you need to do—starting today.

1 PRETEND YOU’RE A TAILOR.

Measure everything—your neck, chest, waist, arms, thighs, calves. Write it all down, and put it someplace where you’ll have to look at it every day. Record your weight, too, although that’s less important.

Your goal: Maintain or reduce the size of your waist while increasing the size of everything else. Repeat your measurements every 4 weeks.

2 TO CHANGE YOUR WEIGHT, FOLLOW THE 15/500 RULE.

Making radical changes to your diet—starving yourself to lose weight or stuffing yourself to gain—is futile. If you’re trying to lose weight, you’ll slow your metabolism to a crawl. If you’re trying to gain, the excess calories will include a lot of fat. Here’s a more sensible strategy.

To lose weight: Cut your daily food intake by a maximum of 15 percent or 500 calories, whichever is less.

To gain weight: Increase your daily intake—and we mean every day—by 15 percent or 500 calories, whichever is less.

3 YOU MUST EAT FAT.

Fat still occupies that tiny prison cell at the tip of the Food Guide Pyramid, but its health benefits are hugely underrated. A diet with 21 percent of its calories from monounsaturated fat reduces your risk of cardiovascular disease by 25 percent, according to a Penn State University study. And research has shown that men eating a diet with high fat have higher testosterone than those eating less fat. So chomp on those macadamia nuts and drench your salad with olive oil. Not only will you enjoy your food more, you’ll live longer and have more sex.

4 REMEMBER: MEAT IS MUSCLE.

The best muscle-building diet includes beef, pork, poultry, and fish, according to a study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. The reason is simple: Animal protein builds muscle better than soy or vegetable protein does. How much protein you need is always debated, but the most reliable research shows that you need 0.6 to 0.82 grams of protein per pound of body weight per day to build muscle during a strength-training program. If you weigh 200 pounds, that means taking in 120 to 164 grams of protein each day. Say you choose 150 grams as your daily goal. Split it up so you eat 25 grams in each of six small meals. Breakfast might be two eggs, milk, and oatmeal. Lunch could be tuna on whole wheat. Grilled-chicken salad would be a good dinner.

5 YOU NEED CARBOHYDRATES (BUT NOT THE FUN KIND).

Consumption of high fructose corn syrup and other sugary sweeteners has possibly done more to expand America’s waistlines than anything else. In fact, Americans consume twice as much sugar a day as they should. But the carbohydrates in fruits, vegetables, and whole grains are crucial to your health, give you energy, and help you build and repair muscle after workouts.

How much is enough: If your main goal is to be lean, try for about 30 to 50 percent carbohydrate in your diet.

6 EAT BEFORE YOU LIFT.

You increase muscle mass in two ways: by building up muscles and by preventing them from breaking down. If you eat some protein an hour or two before your workout, you’ll have more amino acids available to your muscles during exercise. This prevents the muscle tissue from breaking down as much as it otherwise would. You also need pre-exercise carbohydrates to ensure you’ll have enough energy during your workout. Without this type of fuel, your muscles could break down the amino acids in your muscles for energy.

The perfect preworkout meal: Make a small shake with juice or fruit, milk, yogurt, and/or a scoop of protein powder. Fat and fiber slow digestion, so limit them before a workout.

7 AND EAT AFTER YOU LIFT.

After a workout, you want to wolf down some muscle chow containing both carbohydrates and protein. This is the one time of day when you benefit from eating fast-acting, easily digestible carbohydrates, such as white bread, instant rice, and baked potatoes.

Here’s why: After exercise, your muscles are more sensitive to insulin. Insulin is the rapid-transit system for the protein and carbohydrates your muscles need for growth, repair, and fuel. And the faster you digest the carbohydrates you eat, the faster your body can put them to use.

The best postexercise meal: Try a shake made with a meal-replacement powder containing protein and a fast-moving carbohydrate like maltodextrin. Or try the shake described in tip 6; it works after exercise, too.

8 BE A NUTRITIONAL BOY SCOUT.

You’re going to get hungry every 2 to 3 hours, guaranteed. So be prepared. If you know you’re going to be away from decent food, take some healthy snacks with you. Nuts and dried fruit are clean and compact, and require no special preparation or refrigeration. If you need to pack something more meal-like, try a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich on whole grain bread. Drop apples in hand’s reach everywhere you go; if you make it through one a day, the pectin will keep you too full to crave anything really awful.

9 EAT BEFORE BED.

If you’re trying to build muscle while losing weight, you may need some food right before sleep to keep your body from breaking down muscle tissue as you snooze. Planning this snack will help you resist the temptation to inhale chocolate fudge cake at midnight. If you’re trying to gain weight, your bedtime snack will help you maximize muscle growth. In either case, limit this snack to about 500 calories. A half cup of ice cream with some nuts and fruit is a nice way to end the day. Don’t make this snack too high in protein, though; that can kick your brain into overdrive, creating intense dreams and waking you up.

10 TAKE NOTES.

We’ve hit you with a lot of math here—500 calories of this, 0.82 grams of that. All of which is meaningless unless you know how much you actually consume.

For 1 day, try this: Measure everything you eat. That’s right, pull out a measuring cup and see how much cereal you actually eat, count the slices or weigh the turkey breast you put on your sandwich, add up the bananas and dried apricots and Kit Kat bars.

Now write it all down, and calculate the total. We all know what we eat, but most of us have no idea how much.