The Zen Diet Revolution (12 page)

Try to eat within an hour of waking and make breakfast a protein-rich meal, with some wholegrain carbs and a large drink of hot water and lemon, green tea or decaf coffee. Try to avoid the classic ‘full English’ as it is way too high in fat – even though it is rich in protein. Eggs are phenomenally rich in the highest-quality protein, and having two eggs for breakfast can help reduce your calorie intake for the rest of the day.

Here are a few great, easy-to-make suggestions for getting you going in the morning:

•   Scrambled egg (high in protein) on wholegrain toast – add some smoked salmon for a big boost to protein levels

•   Porridge (protein/carbs) with mixed berries or honey and cinnamon

•   Super Protein Shake (
see
Recipes)

•   Egg-white omelette with salmon

•   Wholegrain cereal with semi-skimmed milk and mixed berries

•   Two boiled eggs with wholegrain toast

We all like the odd sweet treat, but you can actually go for a healthy, fairly low-calorie option and still get that satisfaction normally associated with a huge sugar hit. If you are used to sugary foodstuff, at first your palate will be really disappointed and it may all seem tasteless, but the less sugar you consume, the more you will appreciate the taste of low- or sugar-free foods.

I switched to sugar-free jam years ago, and if I have ‘normal’ jam now which is basically half sugar, half fruit, I find it almost overwhelmingly sweet.

We talked about the health implications in
Chapter 1
and also the options for using sweeteners, but one word about sweeteners – they are used massively in the food trade to replace sugar and often give us the impression we are being healthier, but there are questions about their health benefits. Some people consider them to be damaging to the health and many scares abound. The jury is still officially out on sweeteners such as aspartame and acesulphame K, but in my opinion it is better to opt for something closer to the structure of sugar such as stevia-based sweetener or xylitol or to avoid all sweeteners and sugars completely. There are lots of things you can add to food that offer sweetness naturally and in far lower quantities needed than piling sugar into them. Use honey, agave, stevia and fruit sugar sparingly and you can still have a great taste but without the calories or possible negative health consequences.

Here are a few ideas to try instead of reaching for the obvious chocolate bar.

•   
Eat dark chocolate
– chocolate containing 70 per cent cocoa solids or over is a much better choice than milk chocolate. Why? Because it contains far less sugar and calories and more health-promoting antioxidant ingredients. Also, because it is far richer tasting, you don’t need to eat as much to feel satisfied.

•   
Dried fruit
– can be high in calories if you eat a large amount, but a few pieces of dried apricot, peach or mango can be really filling and not only satisfy your sugar craving, but also add some beneficial fibre, antioxidants and minerals to your diet.

•   
No-sugar muffins
– you can make some incredibly tasty muffins and biscuits without adding sugar. Using wholewheat or spelt flour and adding dried fruit, banana or a sugar substitute such as stevia, agave syrup or xylitol, you can create something really yummy, high in fibre and low in calories. These are great for kids, too – it encourages them to have a healthy snack that doesn’t taste like mushed-up cardboard. (
See
the Recipe section for ideas that include these no-sugar muffins, spelt and honey cookies and flapjacks.)

If you must snack, keep only healthy snacks in sight. According to studies, office workers snacked less when packets or dishes of sweets were removed from their desks to the other side of the room or into another room.
The same trick can be reversed to positive effect; putting healthy snacks or meals in more prominent positions can increase consumption of these healthier food items by over 250 per cent in a year.

Your meals are extremely important. In fact, they’re the most important part of your diet. Exercise and cutting out snacks are lifestyle changes that will only go so far. The most powerful parts of anyone’s diets are the three basic meals they have during the day because the majority of your nutrition comes from your main meals.

We all have routines in our meals. We have certain ones that we eat at each and every meal. We have certain ones that we eat each and every week. We all have routines in everything in life – washing, cleaning, working and sleeping. We manage our life by routine. We develop them instinctively, even if we don’t notice it.

Scientists have studied people’s eating habits, and most have between five and ten meals that they eat or cook in rotation each and every week. Try for yourself … make a list of all the meals that you cook and eat every week and you’ll find that there’s a massive overlap. There are some usual suspects that appear most weeks.

You may have a slightly wider repertoire or may have a few days where you try something new every week, but more often than not you’re cooking something that you’ve prepared many times before. You will find that
how often you eat out or get a takeaway is also part of your routine.

Analysing your routine, you’ll find that some of the dishes include extremely high-calorie foods. Meals like fish and chips have up to 1,000 calories. Some kebabs have over 2,000 calories, which is your whole daily calorie requirement in one meal.

Now, imagine what an amazing change it would be by simply changing one of these high-calorie meals for something healthy and around 600 calories – meals which are far more filling than the aforementioned fish and chips or kebabs, and which have only 500–600 calories. That’s why we’re introducing you to
kaizen
recipes which have a lot of bulk and a lot of flavour, but are low in calories.

The good news is that all you need to do is to try them. If you find a meal that you like, simply introduce it into your diet. That way, you’ve made a
kaizen
change. Every time you have that meal, it’s replacing one that would be high in calories. The meals are high in nutrition and amazingly filling, but low in fat and calories. In fact, I designed these meals for myself when I was practising
kaizen
for my diet.

You may have noticed that much of the Zen Diet is focused on what you drink. This is because in the modern Western diet a lot of our calories are from sugary drinks and alcohol. The problem is that these calories come in a super-easyto-digest form, so the body converts them directly to fat!

When fruit squash and fizzy pop were first invented they were treats. Most people only had them on special occasions. Nowadays, they are everywhere in restaurants, supermarkets, petrol stations and served as the default beverage in fast-food stores. Figures from the American National Center for Health Statistics report that 50 per cent of the American population over the age of 2 consumes sugary drinks every single day. This includes sodas, fruit squash, sweetened waters, and energy, sports and fruit beverages. The report states that drinking sugary drinks is linked to ‘poor diet quality, weight gain, obesity and, in adults, type 2 diabetes’.

Still fancy a free refill?

Most people get about 252 to 273 calories every day from various drinks! Imagine how these extra calories add up and how many pounds of fat these drinks could add every year! Often we don’t think of the calories in the drinks we have. It is a subtle vice that provides only empty calories, and it takes the place of more nutritious options.

In this section, I am going to suggest some alternative forms of drink that feed the health, not the belly fat! But remember: if in doubt, stick to calorie-free drinks like water, sparkling water, teas and herbal infusions.

With this aloe vera juice recipe you can make your own drink. It is simple, cheap and requires only aloe vera leaves from your own garden. Making home-made aloe vera juice
is much healthier because you get the pure potential right from the plant. Commercial aloe vera products have some chemical additives to keep them stable and prolong their shelf life; therefore, they cannot be considered 100 per cent natural.

It is always better to consume the natural product if possible. So having your own aloe vera plant, you can make your own products. Home-made aloe vera juice should not be kept longer than a week in the refrigerator; don’t make more than you will consume in two days.

For a normal dosage of 300 grams of pure aloe vera juice you will need approximately 400 grams of leaves from a mature plant:

•   Cut the ends off the leaf and the edges.

•   Split the leaf in two halves and scrape the clear gel out of the peelings. Be careful not to contaminate your gel with the latex of the leaf – this is the bitter yellow juice coming out of the peelings.

•   Put the aloe vera gel in a blender, add the juice of 3 to 5 oranges or any other kind of citrus fruit and blend it for about 2 minutes.

•   After blending, put it in the refrigerator to let it settle for at least 2 hours.

•   After this period of time it is ready to be consumed. You can dilute this nutrient-rich drink with water or any kind of natural fruit juice to enhance the taste.

Lemon balm is a fragrant, flavoursome herb. Simply pour hot water on the leaves to make a delicious herb tea with an intense lemon taste. So strong is the flavour of lemon balm that it is still used commercially to flavour sweets and ice cream. It is easy to grow: just plant some and it will grow in huge clumps all over the garden – remember to drink lots of it as a tea or your garden may become overrun!

In addition to being a wonderful, calorie-free and inexpensive drink there are health benefits. One study demonstrated that lemon balm helped reduce the fat levels in mice. It also has antibiotic  and antiviral  properties and a mild, calming effect due to rosmarinic acid contained in the leaf.
⁷
Far better than paying for lemon squash!

Green tea is reputed to speed up the metabolism and has other potential health benefits. According to the
American Journal of Nutrition
, drinking three to six cups of green tea a day is purported to speed up the metabolism to burn cellular energy by up to 40 per cent more, whilst also increasing the rate of fat burning. The magic bullet in green tea is a number of compounds called catechins, the most active of which is epigallocatechin or EGCG. These catechins are believed to have beneficial effects not only on fat burning but also on reducing inflammation in the body, helping prevent cardiovascular disease, cancer and other illnesses.
Green tea is also high in bioflavonoids and antioxidants which add to the weight-loss and health benefits. Antioxidants are thought to have an effect on leptin, the protein responsible for regulating the amount of fat laid down in the body. Green tea can be drunk hot or cold and comes in various forms: teabags, a concentrated powder and also capsules.

Simply drinking a 200ml glass or two of water 5–10 minutes before a meal can significantly reduce the amount you eat, effectively by just filling you up. Some studies have shown that people lost a remarkable 2 kg or more over 12 weeks by drinking water before meals as opposed to those purely on a low-calorie diet (and drinking no extra water).

Another remarkably simple way to make a change is to add a squeeze of fresh lemon juice to your food or in a glass of hot or cold water. Lemon is brimming with health-giving properties and contains vitamin C, acids and pectin. All these have been shown to help with losing weight. Vitamin C helps burn fat more efficiently, with studies showing a 30 per cent increase in fat burning during exercise for those with higher levels of vitamin C in their bodies.
⁸
Lemon juice is known as a tonic for the liver, which plays a pivotal role in the natural detoxing of the body; it can also aid
the liver by producing more bile which is a crucial part of the digestive process.

Milk is a great supplement to a healthy diet, but can also add a significant amount of calories – if you love a glass of cold milk, keep it skimmed and at a sensible 250mls which gives you 80 calories and a whopping third of your daily calcium intake.

Not all fruit juice is as healthy as manufacturers would have us believe; many of the so-called healthy ‘juice drinks’ are loaded with sugar, and some haven’t even been near a piece of fruit, being synthetically produced using flavourings. Even fruit juice, fresh or from concentrate, is still packed with fruit sugar and should really be viewed as a ‘serving’ of food rather than as a drink. A 200ml glass of fresh juice can hold up to 100 calories. As part of your normal healthy diet, either have a small glass between meals, water it down 50/50 or make a super-juice blend to have as part of your meal.

T
HIS IS AN UNDERRATED BUT
vitally important part of any ‘diet’; there are so many things other than food that can sabotage your good intentions and even stop the benefits of your efforts. The Zen Diet is a holistic approach and offers advice on simple but important areas of your lifestyle that could make a huge difference to your wellbeing. All techniques and examples are proven to help with many aspects of general lifestyle and healthy living, the majority being backed up with scientific research.

Rest is as important as sleep. Most athletes know the importance of rest and recovery between activities, to maintain
their physical equilibrium. What most people don’t realize is that we need rest and recovery to maintain our mental equilibrium too. The sheer amount of information flooding into our unconscious every day causes our minds to be constantly on the alert, which also means that we can become mentally drained very quickly. The trick is to employ the method of ‘mindfulness’ once again – to rest fully you need to calm the mind, to stop the endless chatter and become absorbed in the moment. Remember when you were a child and could stare at the clouds for hours or watch a bug in the grass? Well, you need to relearn that very state and allow yourself a regular break from a hectic world.

Creating good sleep ‘hygiene’ is as important as having good physical hygiene. Sleep is often one of the most neglected areas of people’s lives and yet is probably one of the main pillars of our health. Studies and surveys conducted by the National Sleep Foundation (NSF) over the last decade showed that ‘at least 40 million Americans suffer from over 70 different sleep disorders and 60 percent of adults report having sleep problems a few nights a week or more’. Obviously, a few nights of disturbed sleep are not going to be a problem, but when it is a recurring event, or you are consistently skimping on your sleep due to work, study or partying, then the long-term effects can begin to take root. Science has shown us that chronic sleep deprivation, the
building up of a sleep debt, can cause some serious metabolic changes, one of which is weight gain. This is believed to be due to the way carbohydrates are metabolized, which, in turn, affects the hormones that are in control of our eating patterns, appetite and weight.

According to the results of a two-phase study undertaken by researchers from the Kaiser Permanente Center for Health Research in Portland, USA, people who slept for less than six hours or more than eight hours a night were less likely to achieve their weight-loss targets than those who experienced between six and eight hours’ sleep. It also concluded that high levels of stress had a significant effect on weight loss. The study was specifically looking at the association between stress and sleep and the effect it had on successful weight loss, showing that stressed people with a chronic sleep deficit were 50 per cent less successful in achieving their weight loss. This supported earlier studies that had linked poor sleep to obesity.

Sleep problems alone cannot be seen as a definitive cause of weight problems, but there certainly seems to be evidence that metabolic changes occur when the body is deprived of good-quality rest and relaxation. So much occurs when we are asleep that it is crucial to maintain a good pattern of rest and relaxation. The final conclusion of the US study showed that ‘chronic stress [exacerbated by lack of sleep] may trigger hormonal reactions that result in an intake of energy-dense foods, so that eating becomes a “coping behaviour” and palatable food becomes “addictive”’.
¹

Have you ever pulled an all-nighter? How did you feel the next day? I bet groggy, irritable, forgetful or clumsy came into it! Even after just one night without sleep, concentration becomes far more difficult, your attention span shortens considerably, and with continued sleep deprivation the part of the brain that controls our language, memory, planning and sense of time becomes severely affected and practically shuts down. Rational judgements become harder to make, and the response to critical situations is severely impaired. Although most of us aren’t going to beat the world record for staying awake (currently 11 days!), we are often chronically deprived of sleep or sleep-lagged due to our hectic lifestyles. This, over a period of months or years, can add up to a recipe for ill health.

Deficient or impaired sleep can significantly affect not only your mental health but also your immune function – according to Dr Diwakar Balachandran, the director of the Sleep Center at the University of Texas, sleep deprivation causes levels of our T-Cells (responsible for good immunity) to go down and for inflammatory cytokines to increase, thus putting us at greater risk of catching colds or flu.
²

It may look as if not much is going on; we just lie down and go to sleep, right? Well, yes, but beneath that calm façade there is a huge amount happening in our body and mind.

Our natural sleep pattern has a recurring cycle of around 90–110 minutes, split into two categories known as REM (rapid eye movement) sleep and non-REM. Non- REM has a further four phases:

Stage 1
Light sleep – we are drifting off, but can be woken easily.

Stage 2
True sleep – after 10 minutes of light sleep we slip into the next phase, which lasts around 20 minutes; our heart rate and breathing has slowed – this is the largest part of our sleep pattern.

Stage 3
Deep sleep – we begin to produce ‘delta’ or slow brain waves; our breathing and heart are also at their slowest.

Stage 4
Deep sleep – we are at our deepest, breathing is rhythmic, and our muscles relaxed. If we are awoken during deep sleep, we often feel disorientated and confused.

REM sleep begins after approximately 70–90 minutes after going to sleep, and we have 3–5 REM periods of sleep a night. This is when the brain is at its most active and dreaming occurs. Our bodies become almost paralysed, and eye movement can be observed; breathing rates rise, as does our blood pressure. After we have a REM cycle, the whole process begins again.

However, while all this is going on, our body is incredibly busy with other metabolic processes. We all have something that is called a ‘circadian rhythm’, better
known as ‘body clock’. Find your daily rhythm here with this fun test:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/humanbody/sleep/crt/

We often feel that sleep should come easy and that it is a natural thing to do, but for many people it is the exact opposite. The problems can be varied:

•   
Environmental
– perhaps you live on a noisy street, have noisy neighbours or young children that wake you in the night; or maybe the house is too warm, too cold or too cluttered.

•   
Physical
– perhaps you suffer from chronic pain, have acid reflux or indigestion, or another illness or disability, that affects your sleep patterns.

•   
Psychological
– if you suffer from anxiety or depression, this can seriously disrupt sleep.

•   
Social pressure
– some people feel they will be considered ‘boring’ if they go to bed before midnight or that there is something they will ‘miss’ on TV.

There are many things you can do to improve your sleep and rest habits. Try a few of the suggestions listed on the following pages.

As mentioned previously, our bodies work to a certain schedule called the circadian rhythm; this internal body clock is in charge of regulating all the necessary processes in our bodies, including digestion, hormone production and cell renewal, which are triggered by the complicated action of chemical messages and nerve systems.

During the day and at night our body is constantly working to produce hormones that can wake us up or help us sleep. Melatonin is one of the main hormones that triggers the cycle for sleep and is created deep within the brain in the pineal gland. It is crucial for regulating our body clock and creating our sleep patterns. We can confuse our body clock and disrupt our melatonin production by actions such as travel through different time zones causing jet lag or by playing havoc with our nightly sleep patterns.

In our 21st-century life we have more things than ever to disrupt our evenings – TV, computers, mobile phones and continual electric light. Our grandparents or great-grandparents would not have had these obstacles to sleep, and often they still have better sleep habits than younger generations. Go back 100 years and they had none of these things; if you lived in the country, you would probably go to bed by 9 pm and be up when the sun rose. Your life would have been lit by the sun or by soft light from candles, oil or gas lamps.

Today we have light at the flick of a switch, which,
although useful, has caused havoc with our nightly sleep cycles. Melatonin production ceases when the brain perceives there to be enough light; so instead of the gradual going down of the sun to dictate the evening unwinding, we have glaring light that tricks our brain into thinking it is still day, and so melatonin production decreases. Studies have shown that this has a profound effect on our bodies and sleep cycles and has caused the multitude of sleep problems we now have. When mice were subjected to sleeping under light, they gained 50 per cent more weight than those kept in darkness. Even something as simple as watching TV, checking your emails or text messages last thing or having a light on in the bedroom at night can wreck your sleep – all these things give out light. Even a crack of light through the curtains is enough to disrupt that precious melatonin production, and through continual disruption with these seemingly innocuous habits, we create sleep problems. Here are some simple ways to prevent melatonin disruption:

•   Stop working and turn off the TV, computer (iPad, etc) and mobile phone at least one hour before you intend to sleep.

•   Lower the lights during the evening – use softer sidelighting.

•   Try not to check the time with a light if you wake up.

•   Don’t have a TV on standby or a lighted clock in the bedroom.

•   Try to avoid turning the light on to go to the bathroom or have a soft night-light in the hall.

•   Don’t sleep with a light on.

When we were little children, the chances are we had a specific bedtime and wake-up time. As we got older, things changed: due to social commitments, work, lack of routine and peer pressure, our bedtimes probably became more erratic, and waking up depended on whether we had school or work, or if it was the weekend. But research has shown that monkeying with your sleeping and waking times can create havoc with your body and mind, causing a state similar to jet lag.

Due to our bodies’ inbuilt rhythms and regular release of chemicals from the brain, to make the best of our sleep patterns and to keep ourselves healthy, one of the most important things we can do is to work out our natural sleep–wake cycle. Try to naturally identify when you start to get sleepy in the evening and then, rather than pushing through it, get ready for bed. Within a few weeks of keeping to this bedtime, you should start to see a regular waking pattern with or without an alarm clock; if you can do it without an alarm, all the better.

Avoid the temptation to sleep in at weekends as you will disrupt your natural body clock and feel groggy. There will of course be times when you need to be up later at night, but
it is consistency that is the key; just go back to your usual bedtime the next day. Having a regular sleep cycle will not only benefit your mind and body, but you will often find that you are more productive with your time.

To create the perfect environment for sleep, you need to make some simple adjustments:

•   Make sure that your bedroom is neither too warm nor too cold. Body temperature is crucial to deep, healthy sleep, and it is better to be cooler than too hot in bed. Use cotton bed linen and a duvet that is adaptable for summer and winter. Try not to have the central heating on all night – it is drying to the airways and can interrupt your sleep. If your room is chilly, keep the heating on the lowest setting.

•   Use blackout curtain liners or a blind to keep light out.

•   If sound is a problem, try thick curtains, double/triple glazing or, if you are able, relocate your bedroom to a quieter part of the house.

•   Choose a good bed, mattress and pillows – you spend a huge amount of time asleep during your life; buy the best you can afford. Some people are often happy to buy a large and expensive TV, but sleep on a dreadful bed; get your priorities right if you are one of them – your health is more important than HD TV.

•   On the subject of TVs – ban them from the bedroom. The last thing you need before sleep is a mental injection of action films, doom-laden news or just plain rubbish. If you want entertainment in the bedroom, read a slowpaced book or make love.