Contents
Introduction xi
User’s Guide xv
Chapter 1: Eating 1
Cracking the Diet Code 2
Slim Calorie Habits 2
Eat Real 10
Maximize Your Nutrients 21
Manage Your Meals 24
Beverage Basics 29
Chapter 2: Moving 37
Cracking the Exercise Code 38
The Foundation 38
Maximize Your Muscle 54
Amp Up Your Cardio 65
Optimize Outdoor Spaces 67
Chapter 3: At Home 70
Grocery Shopping 71
Shopping Slim 71
Slimming Foods 73
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Don’t Be Tricked by Food Marketers 80
Food Labels 101 81
Get Cooking 86
Slim Cheffing 86
Stock Up Slimly 92
Get Your Burn On 95
Calorie Crushers 95
Clean Products 100
The Green Home 100
Be Naturally Beautiful 102
Top Picks 104
Drugs That Sabotage Your Slim 106
Chapter 4: On the Go 110
Party Time 111
Slim Celebrating 111
Restaurant Survival 113
Slim Dining 114
At Work 121
Eats at the Office 121
Getting Exercise in on the Job 125
Travel Secrets 128
Eats on the Road 128
Fitness on the Fly 130
Chapter 5: Staying Motivated 136
Motivate, Inspire, and Incentivize 137
Attitude Adjustment 137
Building Support 145
Eat Right, Move More 151
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Chapter 6: Evading Pitfalls 160
Handling Hunger 161
Crushing Cravings 170
Bypassing the Binge 171
Managing Stress 176
Chill Out 176
“It’s Not in My Budget” 186
Be Food Frugal 186
Be Fitness Frugal 192
Fitting Workouts in with Kids 193
With ’Em 193
Without ’Em 194
Tick-tock: Overcoming Time Constraints 196
Catch a Burn on the Run 196
Eat Healthy in a Hurry 197
Access Denied? 197
Fitness 198
Food 199
Busting Through Plateaus 200
Fine-Tune Your Progress 200
Chapter 7: Supercharge Your Slim 205
The Slim Life 206
Slim Savvy Secrets 206
Weird Food and Fitness Tips That Work 210
Slim Trickery 222
Cheat Your Way Slim 223
Fashion Statements 232
Dress Slim 232
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Chapter 8: The Final Countdown 237
Point Score Total 238
Total Tips Checked 240
Your Final Results 241
What Your Point Total Says 242
No Tip Left Behind 247
See Ya, Slim 247
Selected References 249
Acknowledgments 255
Index 257
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INTRODUCTION
I have to tell you—I honestly never saw myself writing a “diet” book
again. I thought I had said all there was to say about weight loss
and maintenance, diet and nutrition, and even exercise. But over
time I realized that maybe I and all the other “weight-loss gurus”
had said too much, making things overcomplicated, confusing, even
conflicting.
One expert tells you to count points, another tells you to count
minute blocks, and yet another tells you to count calories. It all
means the same thing on the scale, but hearing it three different
ways leaves you guessing which method actually gives you better
results, and which you should do. This can make a person feel overwhelmed and a little nuts. Or you have the people who over­inform
you, with information on biochemistry, kinesiology, and other
science-y stuff. Once again you feel overwhelmed, and you don’t
under­stand what to do with it anyway.
The worst offenders on this shelf are out to make a quick buck
with too-good-to-be-true advice. They may tell you things like “You
don’t really need to worry about calories to lose weight” or “You
don’t have to exercise to offload the fat—you can just sit still and
deep breathe it away.”
Bottom line, over the last several years, I’ve come to recognize
that the more simple and straightforward I can make the information, the easier it is for you to cut through all the crap, apply the
advice, and get the results you want.
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xii
introduction
So this is Slim for Life—a simpler, easier path.
It’s a set of straightforward methods, tips, tricks, and insider
secrets that pertain to diet, exercise regimen, and general lifestyle.
When you follow it, it will make any weight you’ve been holding on
to fall off quickly—and remain off!
The advice here is doable, sustainable, fast, and affordable. Life
is hard enough without dreading your workout, feeling punished
by your diet, or being overwhelmed by your lifestyle. Not with Slim
for Life.
I will dispel slim myths and lay waste to dangerous weightloss ideas that end up damaging your metabolism and setting
you even farther back behind the eight ball. That’s right, all that
crap you’ve been trying, testing out, and buying into—no more.
The Cookie Diet, Master Cleanse, Carb Cutting, Fat-Free, 17-Day
­Debacle—all over, done! This is not gimmick time. Instead, I offer
you what I’ve found works: hundreds of straightforward ideas that
are easily implemented and guaranteed to effect a dramatic body
transformation.
My last promise before we get started—permanence. I’ve taken
all I know about weight loss and distilled it into what’s in this book.
It offers only what works, and nothing you don’t need.
The even better news is you don’t have to follow all the strategies listed within these pages or follow them all the time. Slim for
Life allows you to pick and choose what works best for you and
what’s manageable for your life, all while giving you better results
than you imagined possible.
Slim for Life is divided into eight chapters that take into account
every possible area of your life where you might hit an obstacle or
have a question—Eating, Moving, At Home, On the Go—you name
it, it’s here. You’re covered, no matter where you are or what you’re
doing. In any possible scenario you can imagine, I have your back
and will provide you with the diet, fitness, and lifestyle advice you
need to come out on top.
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introduction
xiii
I’ve also covered every possible self-sabotaging act or slim pitfall, from lack of support and poor self-esteem to time constraints,
access issues, and financial limitations. If or when any of these
issues arise, you now have a number of solutions at your fingertips
with which to circumvent them all.
But it’s not just about avoiding sabotage. I’ll show you how to
optimize your fat-burning potential and supercharge your slim with
strategic advice on everything from supplementation, food combining, and meal timing to body temperature manipulation, craving
crushers, slim savvy fashion tips, and much, much more.
Now that you know what you’re in for, let’s get down to business
and deliver the changes to your body, health, and life that you’ve
desired for so long and truly deserve.
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USER’S GUIDE
As you’re about to discover, there’s a lot of information in this book,
but none of it is meant to overwhelm you. To make sure this doesn’t
happen, I’ve created this User’s Guide to illustrate how to maximize
your results and personalize your plan so that you not only get the
body you’ve always wanted, you also have no trouble keeping it.
As I mentioned, you don’t have to follow all the recommendations in this book. Nor do you have to follow them all the time. Some
are essential, and some are, well, more optional. The quantity and
the quality of the tips you choose to implement will determine the
quality of your results and the rate at which you achieve them.
What’s the magic combination? Which tips take precedence and
what percentage of them must you follow to get life-­changing,
body-transforming results? The simplest answer: the ones you
­follow regularly. I’ve also built in a “hierarchy of slim,” which speci­
fically tells you which pieces will give you the most bang for your
weight-loss buck. It’s in the form of a point system that values each
piece of advice as a 3, 2, or 1: 3 is the most powerful and important, 2 is solid and useful but not utterly essential, and 1 is a helpful
add-on that offers advice on how to implement your slim lifestyle.
All will help you get your slim on—so if you like one more than the
other, have at it. That’s the whole point of this book: structuring
what works for you and your life.
At the end of each chapter is a checklist where you’ll check off
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user’s guide
the ideas you can realistically see yourself incorporating into your
life—permanently. Then in Chapter 8, our final chapter and wrapup, I will assess your total slim score aggregate from all the preceding chapters and tell you exactly what it means to you and for your
results. Once you’ve totaled up your points, I’ll make recommendations for you based on the category range you fall in. If necessary,
we’ll up the ante by fine-tuning your tip selection (both quality and
quantity) to make sure you succeed.
Choose the strategies you like most, while utilizing your knowledge of which tips take weight-loss precedence, and you’ll have all
you need to help you select, organize, optimize, and implement a
personalized action plan that will deliver fast results and last forever.
Be aware, while there are universal laws of slim that apply to us
all equally (they tend to be biochemically focused information about
food and fitness), many strategies in Slim for Life will affect some of
us more powerfully than others. (These are often more behaviorally focused suggestions on topics like building support and gearing
your environment for success.)
Here’s my suggestion: as you read through each chapter, note
the number next to each tip. The tips that I’ve given a 3 rating (the
power tips) are all top priority. Do anything and everything you can
to follow them and check them off in the checklist at the end of
each chapter. For the tips that I’ve given a 1 or 2 rating to, picture
yourself implementing them as you read the chapter. Ask yourself,
“Are they realistic to my lifestyle? Do they seem doable to me?”
Obviously the ones that do, you should check off as well. The ideas
you aren’t sure about, I want you to put to the test. Try a couple
each week. See how they work for you. Were they difficult to implement? Were they effective? This is literally how you determine what
works and what doesn’t for you, so you can permanently change
your behaviors for the better.
Put the tips to which you have an immediate “no way in hell”
reaction out of your mind for now. Chances are, if your aversion to
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them is that strong, and they feel impossible or ridiculous to you,
it doesn’t matter how effective they might be—you won’t employ
them. Guess what? There’s a good chance you won’t have to. It’s
likely you’ll rack up enough slim changes that the tips you can’t
manage will be irrelevant. When we get to Chapter 8 and you add
up your slim score and are looking for more radical results, then
we’ll revisit your rejected tips with a more open mind. Worry about
that when we get there.
Now, fair warning, there’s some information here that you won’t
be rewarded points for. Here’s why: even though they’re great tips
and I want you to employ them, they don’t directly impact your
actual weight loss. Instead they facilitate it. So, for example, tips
for saving money on healthy eating and exercising and dressing in
­slimming ways will not be awarded a point rating as they’re optional
and have no direct impact on the scale. They will, however, smooth
the way to slim and make your life better overall, so I highly recommend you implement them. Getting and living slim is really about
the whole picture after all, right?
By the way, there will be a few tips in here that don’t reinvent
the wheel—you’ve likely heard them before. I debated whether to
include the ones that are more commonly known, as I always strive
to give you the most current and cutting-edge information, but I
ended up arriving at the conclusion that I must. Here’s why: first,
all of you have varying levels of knowledge on the subject matter
of slim. On the off chance that you’re new to the topics of diet and
fitness entirely, I didn’t want to rob you of Slim 101. Second, I worried
that if you didn’t see the basic or old-hat information listed in these
chapters, you might think it wasn’t important—but it is. In addition
to teaching you new state-of-the-art slim strategies, I’m also going
to improve upon any existing knowledge you may have of the more
common weight-loss methods by explaining to you why the advice
is important and how to better implement it into your life.
Now, let’s roll.
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