In an earlier post I promised to look into the problem of student fitness. Students have the unique problem of limited budget, time and will to eat healthy / exercise regularly.

After researching* the topic and combining it with past experience I have put together the suggestions outlined in the rest of this post.

I will personally follow this advice from the 14th of February 2011 and will record progress fortnightly. I intend to maintain the same structure until the 14th of May 2011 when I will review progress and make alterations as necessary until I have a life change. If you decide to follow my advice please use common sense and if in doubt, consult with your GP before starting a new training regime.

Exercise

Regular exercise will improve your health but it will not help you loose weight on its own. Combining increased physical activity with an improved diet may speed up fat loss provided you don’t over compensate for the exercise by increasing food intake. I recommend at least 30 minutes exercise a day and made some suggestions about how to do this in my earlier post.

Diet

Simple carbohydrates are addictive, they target the reward centre of the brain in a similar way to Cocaine and Nicotine. There is no such thing as an essential carbohydrate. In fact, you can extract all the essential fats, vitamins and minerals your body needs from a completely meat based diet (although I don’t recommend this!). Student diets tend to be heavily focused on pasta and rice because they are cheap and “fill you up”; this would explain why freshers pile on weight during their first year (I have put on over 5kg since my course began).

Completely cut out fattening simple carbohydrates (flour, sugar, bread, pasta, rice, soft drinks and cereals), starchy potatoes and high fructose foods (fruit juices, smoothies, apples and grapes) until a minimum healthy weight is achieved. They can be slowly re-introduced so long as the re-introduction does not lead to an increase in body fat. These foods spike your insulin production and cause your body to store fat unnecessarily (which requires you to eat yet more carbohydrates to provide energy for the body to burn).

Compensate by eating an increased amount of meat, eggs and low GI whole foods especially leafy green vegetables. There is no limit on the amount of meat or saturated fat you can eat eliminating hunger. Celery and protein are ideal snacks.

Be wary of foods advertised as ‘low fat’ especially yoghurts, they often compensate the fat reduction by adding high fructose corn syrup which will spike your insulin production and cause weight gain.

Sleep

Sleep wasn’t discussed in the research nor is it linked to weight gain or loss (at the time of writing). However, to give my routine a boost I am going to start waking up at 0600 on weekdays and 0700 at weekends to see if it makes an improvement.

Final thoughts

These suggestions above may appear radical and you may feel that your quality of life will be detrimentally affected by a change of this scale. Even if you are happy with your total body fat, the weight of evidence linking overweight to chronic diseases such as Altzheimers, Cancer and Diabetes is difficult to ignore. You should be leaner and will never be hungry if you make the changes above.

I would appreciate reader comments and suggestions, I have heard that you should eat a larger number of small meals over the course of the day. I am gently preparing my body for the new routine with a hearty breakfast of scrambled eggs, tomato, mushroom and bacon!