THE AMAZING SUPERFOOD FOR FAST-TRACK WEIGHT LOSS
TAMMI FLYNN, MS, RD with Jeanne Drury
This book is dedicated to my sisters, Tia and Teri, as
well as to those of you who are seeking balance and control over
food and exercise issues. Finding the path of health that allows you to
enjoy the process of eating healthily and exercising will provide you
with a sense of well-being and peace—in
mind, body, and spirit.
All the best,
Tammi
Just knowing what to do is not enough. You need confidence, motivation, and a plan to make permanent changes.
—Anonymous
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Getting Started
Introduction
PART I The 3-Apple-a-Day GI Diet
Chapter 1 The Creation of the 3-Apple-a-Day GI Diet
Chapter 2 Overweight versus Overfat
Chapter 3 Genetics and Obesity
PART II Mental Preparation
Chapter 4 You Have the Power!
Chapter 5 The Importance of Setting Goals
PART III Good Nutrition
Chapter 6 The Truth about Nutrition, Diet, and Fat Loss
Chapter 7 Carbohydrates—Good Food for Your Brain
Chapter 8 Protein—The Body’s Building Blocks
Chapter 9 Fats—Healthy versus Unhealthy
Chapter 10 Cholesterol and Triglycerides
Chapter 11 Energy, Water, and Alcohol
Chapter 12 The Metabolic Cost of Food and Meal Frequency
Chapter 13 Dining Out, Portion Control, Convenience, and Supplements
PART IV Exercise: A Key to Staying Young
Chapter 14 Physical Activity versus Exercise for Permanent Fat Loss
Chapter 15 A 12-Week Beginner’s Exercise Program
PART V Success Stories
PART VI Putting It All Together
Quick Start
The Pre-Plan Buildup
PART VII Meal Plans and Recipes
Eating and Cooking with the 3-Apple-a-Day GI Diet
Meal Plans
Recipes
Apple Varieties
Appendix
Your Before-and-After Photos
Bibliography
Recipe Index
Index
Acknowledgements
Copyright
About the Publisher
How much do you want to know?
1. Ready to start the plan today? Go to Quick Start.
2. Want to learn just the basics? Read only the Key Points at the end of parts I–V (Key Points from Part I, Key Points from Part II, Key Points from Part III, and Key Points from Part IV).
3. Want to know the science behind the plan? Read this book from cover to cover.
Ideas to jump-start your motivation
• Take pictures of yourself in a swimsuit (two-piece), front and back, and decide if you want to make a change.
• Train for a marathon.
• Take your doctor’s advice to shape up.
• Train to climb Mt Everest.
• Create a get-fit contest in your office.
• Train like an athlete.
• Enrol your family in a “Fit Family Group” and get healthy together.
• Buy an expensive swimsuit in a smaller size and plan a trip to Hawaii.
• Go to your twentieth high-school reunion and check out an old flame or, better yet, the prom queen who snubbed you because you used to be fat!
The 3-Apple-a-Day GI Diet is not about eating apples because they are healthy, even though it’s a proven fact that they are. It’s about shedding unhealthy fat layers, building strength, keeping lean muscle, and transforming yourself—body and mind—into a fit, self-confident, full-of-life person.
The plan came about by accident as part of the “Get-Lean” Diet I designed for a fitness contest at our gym. In an effort to include more fibre in the diet, in the form of fruits and vegetables, I added an apple before each meal. The results were absolutely astonishing! Who would have guessed that 346 people would lose 6,000 pounds of fat in 12 weeks? Since then, the “accident” has been repeated countless times all over America—with the same amazing fat-loss and body-sculpting results. Read some of the personal success stories in Part V.
If you’re tired of diets, pills, and gimmicks and tired of being a human rubbish bin for all kinds of “convenience” foods (which are insidiously turning us into the fattest, unhealthiest people on earth) start the 3-Apple-a-Day GI Diet today for good health, good nutrition, and permanent fat loss.
One more thing—be prepared to look and feel fabulous!
How and why it works
The 3-Apple-a-Day GI Diet offers a variety of meals and over 100 recipes custom designed to feed your muscle, not your fat. Each meal is calculated to provide your body with a balance of lean (low-fat) proteins, low-GI (based on the Glycaemic Index), high-fibre carbohydrates, and essential fats. This balance will keep your blood sugar and insulin levels stable, which is necessary for your body to get into a “fat-burning” mode. This balance also helps control your appetite, so you are less tempted by unhealthy foods. The recommended intake of calories, protein, carbohydrates, and fat is based on your current weight so you can maintain lean muscle tissue while shedding the fat.
The 3-Apple-a-Day GI Diet with its moderately high protein level is similar to some of the popular high-protein diets—at first glance. Protein provides calories that do not raise blood sugar, stabilizes blood sugar levels when eaten with carbohydrates, and provides necessary building blocks for maintaining muscle tissue.
Why this diet is different
This plan differs from those popular high-protein diets in two major ways:
1. The focus of the 3-Apple-a-Day GI Diet is not on weight loss alone but primarily fat loss and muscle retention. Many popular diets are based strictly on weight loss, regardless of whether the weight loss is from muscle tissue or fat. When muscle tissue is lost, our metabolism decreases, making it difficult to maintain permanent weight loss.
2. Other high-protein diets are very low in carbohydrates and high in fat, which induces ketosis (a high accumulation of ketones; see Chapter 7 for more on ketosis). People do lose weight quickly with these plans, but, again, they may lose valuable muscle tissue, making it more difficult to keep the weight off. With low carbohydrate consumption comes some unpleasant side-effects, too, such as constipation (due to lack of fibre or bulking carbohydrates), low energy or fatigue during exercise, not to mention mental confusion and moodiness. As if we weren’t moody enough already!
In my professional experience, consuming a diet too low in carbohydrates and/or eating in such a way as to induce ketosis is not an optimum way to retain muscle tissue and achieve permanent fat loss. The key to healthy carbohydrate intake is to consume enough for normal bodily functions (bowel elimination, fuel for the brain and red blood cells), but not in excess.
In the following chapters, you’ll find out how, by consuming the right combinations of proteins, carbohydrates, fats, and fibre, you can be successful at permanent fat loss. You’ll also find out why thousands of successful “losers” call the 3-Apple-a-Day GI Diet the “terminator” of all diets!
The beginning
It all started when the American Cancer Society’s daily recommendation of five to nine daily servings of fruits and vegetables (in general, a serving is 4 ounces raw or 2 ounces cooked) was proving difficult for one of my personal training clients. She was adamant about getting in her daily requirements but was struggling because she was extremely busy and travelled often. I asked her what her favorite fruit was, and she said apples.
Perfect, I thought. Apples are full of important nutrients, have lots of fibre, taste delicious, and, most important for her, travel well. I suggested she eat an apple before each major meal (breakfast, lunch, and dinner) to see if that would solve her problem.
Amazing results in just seven days
Just one week later, she came back to have her body composition retested saying that since she’d been eating three apples a day, she felt her body had actually changed. She was excited because she hadn’t noted any changes for several months.
So we measured, and sure enough, she had lost 1 per cent body fat in one week! Now, a 1 per cent body fat loss (1.5 pounds of fat) in one week is difficult to accomplish in a fit person—and she was already lean at 16 per cent body fat.
“Wow,” I said. “Have you been running more?”
She said the only thing she had done differently was to add apples to her meal plan (which actually increased her caloric intake!).
At this point, I was cautiously optimistic. I decided to try this idea on others to see if the results could be duplicated. When Gold’s Gym of Wenatchee held its 12-week Get-in-Shape Contest in January 2001, I added apples to the diet (which was then called the “Get Lean” Diet).
The Get-in-Shape Contest
The annual 12-week contest, which I created in 1997, was (and is) a body transformation contest designed to lower body fat while retaining muscle tissue. Although judging is based primarily on visual change from before-and-after pictures, body composition changes are also recorded. As part of the contest, we provided the diet; exercise recommendations; tips on calculating calories, protein, carbohydrates, fat, and water; and other information pertaining to the program.
Apples and the “Get Lean” Diet
The original “Get Lean” Diet was always a balance of low-GI (see Chapter 7 on glycaemic response) carbohydrates, lean proteins, fruits and vegetables, and essential fats—with a calorie distribution of 40 per cent carbohydrates, 40 per cent protein, and 20 per cent fat. On this balanced 12-week fitness contest diet, women averaged a body fat loss of 5 to 7 per cent, and men averaged 7 to 10 per cent loss.
In 2001, when apples were added to the “Get Lean” Diet, Gold’s 12-week Get-in-Shape Contest participants experienced record fat losses! Women averaged body fat losses of 7 to 10 per cent, and men averaged losses of 10 to 12 per cent. Not only that, two women broke the “most fat loss” record with 21 per cent body fat loss each! One of those women, who later became a Gold’s Gym National winner, lost a whopping 53 pounds of body fat and gained 10 pounds of muscle!
The following year, one male contestant lost 84 pounds of fat and acquired 19 pounds of lean muscle. Another man lost 85 pounds of fat and gained 26 pounds of lean, calorie-burning muscle (see the success stories in Part V).
Remember, these changes were made in just 12 weeks!
What a bunch of (happy) losers!
We were on a roll and truly excited about what we had accomplished. In the 2002 contest, 346 people lost 6,126 pounds of fat. In 2003, 351 people lost 6,453 pounds of fat! In both of those years five of the ten Gold’s National contest winners hailed from Gold’s Gym of little old Wenatchee, Washington!
What’s the one thing Wenatchee winners all had in common? You guessed it … apples!
But was it really the apples?
After the first year of adding apples, even with all our contest successes, I still had reservations about whether apples were actually what helped these contestants lose more body fat than in years past. But adding apples was the only change we had made in the program.
Actually, I had eaten apples for many years when I was dieting for bodybuilding contests, but I never connected eating apples with losing body fat. In fact, I kind of felt like I was cheating when I ate them during my contest dieting phase—because they tasted so good!
It wasn’t until I had read some of the contestants’ amazing and inspiring personal stories—writing a personal story was a requirement for completion of the contest—that I was finally convinced. There just were too many testimonials naming apples as a major contributor to contestants’ success to be a mere coincidence.
The $500,000 Gold’s Gym Challenge
I became a true believer, and I was not alone. The entire staff at Gold’s Gym in Wenatchee was so strongly convinced that apples were a key to people’s weight-loss efforts that we approached the Washington Apple Commission and Gold’s Gym Corporate about sponsoring a national contest.
Of course, the folks at corporate headquarters were sceptical at first. But with real numbers, testimonials, and real contestants, they signed on to the idea, and the $500,000 Gold’s Gym Challenge was born. At the same time, Gold’s Gym Corporate adopted the Washington apple as “the Official Diet Pill of Gold’s Gym”.
How and why do apples work in fat loss?
I was never hungry. In fact, I had to retrain myself to eat enough. Never tiring of the three apples per day, I had no cravings for sweets. I believe the sweet Fuji apples helped in this area. I looked forward to having my apple as a snack every night! I had more energy and was amazed at how steadily I lost weight. I plan to continue using the 3-Apple-a-Day GI Diet to maintain my weight.
—Sandi Anderson, age 53, lost 31 pounds of fat and
gained 2 pounds of muscle in 12 weeks
When the Gold’s Gym Challenge began, I started getting a lot of questions about apples, mostly about how they work in fat loss and what research I had to back up the claims of significant fat loss from our contestants.
At first, I was unaware of any research studies that linked apples with weight loss—let alone fat loss! I chose apples originally because of their convenience, their sweet, crunchy texture, and their high fibre content (4 to 5 grams per apple). I had found a few studies linking increased fibre intake to weight loss, because increased fibre intake was associated with decreasing hunger and food intake, but none naming apples as the fibre source.
Recently, a Brazilian study of overweight women compared diets that contained three apples per day, three pears per day, or oat cookies, to determine their respective effects on body weight. The results showed that the women who ate either three apples or three pears per day lost significantly more weight than did the oat cookie group. This study is similar to what we found in our Gold’s Gym contest.
Apples are one of the only fruits that have high amounts of both soluble and insoluble fibre. The soluble fibre, pectin, helps steady your blood sugar. Researcher Kay-Tee Khaw at Cambridge University says, “Pectin turns into a sticky gel as you digest it, keeping your stomach from absorbing the sugar too quickly.” According to a study published in the Journal of the American College of Nutrition, pectin eliminates the urge to eat for up to four hours.
Apples, too, are low on the Glycaemic Index (see Chapter 7), at a rating of 38 (compared with sugar at 70 or maltose at 105). Low-GI foods don’t spike your blood sugar level, making them an ideal appetizer prior to a main meal or a perfect snack between meals.
In a more general sense, a 12-year Harvard study of 74,000 women, funded by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, concluded that those who consumed more fruits and vegetables were 26 per cent less likely to become obese than women who ate fewer fruits and vegetables over the same time period.
Also, many studies have shown that apples can help in other aspects of health, such as preventing heart disease, stroke, and cancer and improving lung function and dental health.
The phenomenal increase in fat loss that thousands of Gold’s Gym clients experienced when they added apples to their diet plans, along with their personal testimonials naming apples as a key component to their success, is a more compelling reason for controlled studies to be done at the scientific level.
Right now, we’ll settle for what works!
Good news for people with Type 2 diabetes
The 3-Apple-a-Day GI Diet is also used by Gold’s Gym of Wenatchee in other challenges. One of those, the Type 2 Diabetes Challenge, is a six-month program based on a point system. As with the Get-in-Shape Contest, using the same diet and measuring body fat only, the contestants were required to keep food, beverage, medicine, and exercise journals; to test their blood sugar twice a day and blood pressure once a week; and to have pre- and post-challenge lipid (blood fats) profiles, including cholesterol and triglycerides (see Chapter 10), and an A1C test (a measure used to determine long-term blood sugar control). The participants did not have any kidney dysfunction before starting or after finishing the challenge.
The results from the Type 2 Diabetes Challenge showed that the group that ate at least three apples per day lost an average of 19 pounds of body fat. The group that ate only one to two apples per day lost 11 pounds of body fat. The other group, which ate one or no apple per day, lost only 3 pounds of body fat. Overall, the average A1C reading was reduced from 7.5 at the starting point to under 5 (normal range) at the finish.
Similar results were obtained with our six-month Wellness Challenge. The parameters were similar as far as keeping food, beverage, medicine, and exercise journals plus pre- and post-challenge lipid and glucose panels. Again, we saw a correlation between eating three apples a day and the greatest fat loss and a lowering of total cholesterol (mainly LDLs).
Worried about cholesterol? More good news
Most people who had high blood lipids before following the 3-Apple-a-Day GI Diet experienced dramatic changes in their blood work afterward. Exercise and eating the foods on the plan not only lowered their total cholesterol, LDLs, triglycerides, and blood pressure, but increased their HDLs (good cholesterol).
Here’s a great example. Byron, a 40-year-old male, started with an unhealthy cholesterol level of 211 and triglycerides level of 637. In week 11 of the program, his cholesterol fell to an amazing 97 (the low end of the range) and triglycerides to 51 (normal range)! On top of that, his HDLs improved from a low of 25 to a normal level of 35. With astonishment, his doctor asked if he felt OK and suggested they double-check to make sure the readings were accurate. Byron said he hadn’t felt this good since high school. And yes, the reading was accurate!
Others around the country also noted improvements in their blood work. Richard from Utah lost 36 pounds and lowered his cholesterol from 218 to 152. More important, his LDLs went from 128 to 86 and his triglycerides from 270 to 61. His HDLs increased from 36 to 49.
Scott from Maine lost 83 pounds and lowered his cholesterol from 243 to 125. His LDLs dropped from 133 to 58, and his triglycerides fell from 220 to 55.
Pete from Florida lost 53 pounds, lowered his cholesterol from 278 to 176, decreased his LDLs from 180 to 116, and his triglycerides from 309 to 58. His HDLs improved from 36 to 48. Pete’s doctor told him he was a heartbeat away from a heart attack before he started the 3-Apple-a-Day GI Diet. When his final blood work was done, the doctor couldn’t believe the improvements Pete had made in just 12 weeks!
Who can use this plan?
The 3-Apple-a-Day GI Diet is useful for most people. My clients consist of women and men of all ages—ranging from 18 to 80—many of whom have adopted the plan for their entire family. Others, who have heart disease, high blood pressure, thyroid dysfunction, and Type 2 diabetes, are interested in improving their health and reducing their medications.
As mentioned earlier, people with Type 2 diabetes have been very successful using this plan. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), there are 17 million Americans with Type 2 diabetes, currently termed the “obese disease”. This number has tripled since 1960 and is anticipated to triple again by 2050. By that time, one in three children born in 2000 will have diabetes if people don’t start adopting a healthier lifestyle—meaning healthier eating and more exercise. What’s even more frightening is that the CDC estimates 70 million Americans are currently overweight, including one out of four children! And the numbers are rising in the UK, too, as more and more adults and children are becoming overweight or obese.
What exactly do we mean by “overweight”? That’s a tricky question. I’ll discuss it in the next chapter. The answer may surprise you, and it is one of the things that sets the 3-Apple-a-Day GI Diet apart from any diet you’ve tried before.
Always check with your doctor before starting a food program, especially if you have had previous health risks.