How not to get fat – Ian Marber

Eat every 2½ hours during the day, combine carbohydrates with protein and make it a way of life.

Oh if only it were so easy, but actually it probably is. Ian Marber is a well know nutrition therapist, broadcaster and author of several health/nutrition books. His message in his new book, How Not to Get Fat – Your Daily Diet, is deliberately simple –

• Never get so hungry that you’ll eat everything in the fridge.
• Combine carbohydrates and protein to slow down the conversion of glucose to energy in the body.

With the prevalence of sweets, chocolates, cakes, biscuits, sugary drinks and much more in our shops and supermarkets it’s easy to fulfil every hunger pang with a sugary snack. This boosts energy and makes you feel better, but not for long as it’s quickly followed by a slump in energy. Insulin is produced in the pancreas to convert glucose to energy, and with so much sugar in the diet, it is working overtime – resulting in more and more cases of diabetes when insulin becomes depleted. Excess glucose in the bloodstream is stored in fat cells, and contributes to people becoming overweight and obese.

‘Carbohydrates are converted to glucose rapidly,’ Ian explains. ‘Complex carbohydrates (wholegrain bread, brown rice and pasta) take longer to break down. Add protein to these and you slow down the process even more. Protein lowers the impact of what you eat on your blood glucose levels.’
He doesn’t compromise – in large letters he writes in the book, ‘It is imperative that we eat protein with complex carbohydrates. Always without fail. Every single time.’

Ian told Healthy Soul, ‘This is not a diet – it’s a way of eating for life. If you stick to this way of eating forever, there’s no need to count calories, or GI (glycaemic index) points.’

Eat regularly

‘If you eat every 2½ hours you don’t get overly hungry which usually means that you eat all the wrong things, forget that you’re supposed to be on a diet and continue until you feel better.’ Three main meals a day is a given, but interspersed with a (healthy) mid-morning snack and a mid-afternoon snack. Healthy snacks include:

  • fruit salad topped with mixed seeds
  • two slices of ham, wrapped in lettuce on two oatcakes
  • two rye crackers with cottage cheese and cucumber
  • low fat houmous with sliced carrots

No faddy diet

According to a news report on January 13th this year, this is the date when people give up their new year diets. The aim of Ian’s ‘how not to get fat’ message is to create a consistent way of eating that becomes a way of life. It is not a faddy diet that you give up after a few weeks.
‘The fewer rules there are,’ Ian explains, ‘The easier it is to follow. If you give someone lots of rules they only follow the diet at the beginning. The aim of this way of eating is that you do it forever.’

Recipes to suit everyone

How Not To Get Fat combines a host of great recipes with nutritional advice about how to shed pounds in a sustainable way. It suits vegetarians and carnivores equally with plenty of lentils, beansprouts, soya and Quorn recipes plus interesting ways of eating oily and white fish, pork, veal, poultry, duck lamb, goat and venison. The recipe pages contain detailed information about how the foods, how to choose them, how to cook them. For example, Ian explains which is the best salmon and trout to buy and why, how farmed salmon doesn’t contain as many nutrients as wild or organic salmon and why.

With Ian’s advice and recipes there’s no need to feel that you’re giving up something to lose weight. You can have a varied, interesting diet with a broad spread of foods, which enables you not only to lose pounds but to keep them off long term.

Buy How Not to Get Fat from the Amazon carousel on the home page.

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