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CARDIO-DIABESITY DIET

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The Health and Fitness Express contains the random and organised thoughts of John Miller

I recommend and use the Hourglass Diet. It's got good food at the top (vegetables and fruit mixed with adequate protein and fat) and junk down the bottom There's a middle zone of the unrefined cereals - good for you, but a bit higher in energy density than the vegetables and fruit.

If you want to know more about the Hourglass Diet click here.

The Hourglass Diet is more a way of eating than a diet per se, and though they say you shouldn't go on a diet, I often suggest to people that they get themselves started on the Hourglass Diet by first spending a week on the Cardiodiabesity Diet.

It has been around for donkey's years and is well known as the Cardiac Unit Diet because it was supposedly authored by cardiologists at the Sacred Heart Memorial Hospital in Montreal; but it's also been sent around the internet under the names of the Spokane Heart Diet, the Cleveland Clinic Diet, Sacred Heart Memorial Hospital Diet and the Miami Heart Institute Diet).

Anyway, for this newsletter I've renamed it the Cardiodiabesity Diet. I've just finished reading an article by Michael Smith, former Editor of the Melbourne Age in which he coined the word. It's a good word to describe the malaise of our age.

The Cardiodiabesity Diet will get you focused, disciplined and ready to start eating a good balanced diet - eating from the top of the Hourglass. It will assist you to lose your attachment to the two white powders - flour and sugar.

You will burn more calories than you take in. You can check whether in fact you are burning fat or not by using ketone sticks which are available from most good health food stores.

The diet works. I give it a nudge myself when I notice that things have got out of hand.

And now for the instructions from the Cardiac Unit.

No alcohol on this diet

Because everyone's digestive system is different this diet will affect everyone differently. If after being on this diet for several days you find your bowel movements are not as lose as normal, add some psyllium husk to your diet.

The basic fat burning soup can be eaten at any time you feel hungry and as much as you wish. The more you eat the more you'll lose.

It is a nutritional diet.

Remember: no bread, alcohol, soft drinks of any kind and no fried food or oil.

Drink plenty of water - six to eight glasses a day - along with tea, coffee, skim milk, unsweetened fruit juices, cranberry juice.

Remember, all diets are fad diets.

SOUP INGREDIENTS

3 tomatoes

2 large cans of crushed tomatoes

1-2 cans of Campbell's Beef Consomme, plus 2 cups of water

1 packet continental vegetable dry soup powder

1 bunch spring onions

1 bunch celery

2 cans green French beans

3 carrots

2 chicken stock cubes

1 beef stock cube.

If you can't be bothered making this soup, buy vegetable soup that contains less than 40 calories/100gms. It won't be the same as the Cardiac Unit soup, but it will be better than no soup at all.

Keep your soup larder well stocked up at work and at home.

Method

Chop all vegetables into small pieces, add pepper and stir well. Boil rapidly for ten minutes and then simmer until vegetables are tender. Add water as necessary or to make soup thinner.

This soup can be eaten any time if you are hungry. Eat as much as you want, whenever you want. The more you eat the more you will lose weight. Fill up a Thermos if you are going out during the day.

The soup is an essential ingredient of the diet. By keeping your stomach ticking over during the day, you'll stave off attacks of the munchies, plus you won't send your metabolic clock into shut down mode, that is, the point at which the body starts to conserve fat, thinking there is a famine coming on.

Day 1

Any fruit except bananas. Rockmelon and watermelon are lower in calories than most fruits. Eat only soup (as much as you want) and fruit today.

Day 2

All vegetables. eat as much as you like of fresh vegetables, raw vegetables or canned vegetables. Try to eat leafy vegetables. Stay away from dry beans, peas, corn. Eat vegetables along with soup. At dinner time reward yourself with a jacket potato and butter. Do not eat fruit today.

Day 3

Eat all the soup and vegetables you want today. Do not have a jacket potato today.

If you have eaten as above for three days and not cheated you should have lost between two and a half to five and a half kilograms. Most of this will be water and bowel contents.

Day 4

Bananas and skim milk. Eat at least three large bananas and drink as much skim milk as you can today. Eat as much soup as you want. Bananas are high in calories and carbohydrates, as is the milk but you need the potassium and carbohydrates today.

Day 5

Beef and tomatoes. You may have half a kilogram of beef or chicken if you prefer (no skin), and as many as six tomatoes. Eat soup at least once during the day.

Day 6

Beef and vegetables. Eat to your heart's content of beef and vegetables today. you may have two steaks (grilled) if you like with green leafy vegetables. No potatoes. Eat soup at least once during the day.

Day 7

Brown rice and vegetables, fruit juice. Be sure to eat well and eat as much soup as you can.

By the end of the seventh day, if you have not cheated on the diet you may have lost 3 or more kilograms. (Inactive people will lose less due to inactivity.) If you lose more than 5 kilograms, stay off the diet for two days then start again.

Days 7 - 10, eat from the top of the Hourglass.

Well there you have it. Give it a burl. See what happens.

In the meantime stay tuned; highly tuned and remember that nothing sucks seeds like a budgie without teeth.

John Miller