Fat-loss handbook: your complete fail-safe, week-by-week guide to dropping 20 pounds in eight weeks - New wardrobe not included - The Men's Fitness

Men's Fitness, Feb, 2002 by Jeff O'Connell

Don't beat yourself up if you backslide. There are times when your schedule and dinner engagements preclude healthy eating. So if you have steak and a baked potato one night, don't feel you've regressed into absolute degeneracy. Most experts would tell you to suck it up and resolve to resume your healthy lifestyle the next day.

Schedule exercise sessions as appointments. "That means they're as important as anything else in your life," Groppel says. Of course, appointments can be broken. But if you start breaking your exercise appointment, "it means you haven't gone deep enough within yourself spiritually; you haven't connected to your true value system." In other words, you haven't truly committed yourself.

--Frank Claps, C.S.C.S.

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Fast food. Sure, it's possible to eat reasonably healthy at a fast-food restaurant, but hardly anybody does--to the point that restaurant chains have stopped even offering their healthiest selections. (Remember McDonald's McLean Deluxe or Taco Bell's lower-fat menu? Both gone.) And even the food that seems as if it would be healthier often isn't. For instance, deep-fried chicken or fish is even fattier than most hamburgers. What can you do?

Instead of heading for the drive-thru, pack yourself a nice turkey sandwich on whole wheat with mustard, lettuce and tomato and a piece of fruit on the side. Or if you must eat at your local Burger Barn, order grilled chicken (hold the mayo), a salad with low-fat dressing, and juice or iced tea--and just say no to fries, shakes or supersized anything.

Portion madness. The size of the meals we eat, both at home and especially in restaurants, is going up, up, up. One reason, as Eric Schlosser points out in his best-selling book Fast Food Nation, is that the food itself is often one of the cheapest aspects of running an eatery, which means many restaurants are able to offer huge portions without raising their prices. As a result, we've lost track of how much we're really eating.

One way to control consumption is to monitor just what you're putting in your mouth: For a while at least, weigh everything you eat and record it in a fat- and calorie-counting guide. Chances are you're eating a lot more than you thought. Then, rid yourself of the idea that you have to finish everything on your plate--if you're full, stop eating. If you're dining in a restaurant with giant portions, just order an appetizer or split an entree with someone else.

Watching the scale. The first thing a lot of people do after starting a weight-loss program is jump on the scale every five minutes. Big mistake. Healthy weight loss is a gradual process; it happens slowly, and there will be times when you don't appear to be losing any weight at all (especially if you're working out to put on muscle at the same time, since muscle weighs more than the equivalent volume of fat). By checking yourself every day, you're sure to be disappointed, which means you're more likely to give up.

If you want to measure your fat loss, buy a body-fat monitor or get measured at your gym, but don't check it more often than once a week. Or if you want a surefire sign that you're making progress, just wait till your pants get too loose and you have to buy new ones.