Following on from Karin’s sterling work on getting rid of mummy tummys, I thought it was high time to address the paunch that most 30 something men seem to develop. The gov guidelines say that a chaps recommended calorific intake should be around 2,500 calories a day because they reckon that’s what blokes tend to expend.
In simplistic terms the way to lose weight is to intake less calories than you expend. It does get more complicated than that but lets face it, there’s a lot of things more interesting than reading about weight loss.
The simplest way to do it is through changing your drinking habits. I’m personally not a heavy drinker any more but even if you only have 4 or 5 pints of Stella on a Friday night, that will be half your recommended calories in one go (before the chips/kebab/burger beckon after the pub). Rather astonishingly, I worked out you could have an additional two and a half pints of Guinness or two pints of Carling to reach the same calorie intake as 5 pints of Stella. If you switch to drinking shorts, you can, if you wish, drink yourself unconscious with a clear conscience (if that’s possible).
Here are the calories of a few beers (in pints) and shorts, to give you an idea of how much they can vary.
Stella Artois 256
Guinness 170
Double Gin 112
Double Vodka 110
Becks 204
Carling 187
Fosters 193
Carlsberg 182
Guinness 210
Boddingtons 170
Vodka 55
Vodka Redbull 112
Obviously the general common sense stuff like getting more exercise and eating less crap (especially pizzas) will also help but if you want to do sustainable gradual weight loss (which is the best way to do it), then the booze is probably the best way to start.
A packet of spicy tomato wheat crunchies has 123 calories, which means I could theoretically eat 20 packets a day if I had nothing else. The salt would probably kill me if the smell when I went to the loo didn’t but I tend to work out everything in multiples of wheat crunchies now days. It helps me suss what’s too bad for me.
Finally, don’t forget that getting a six pack is entirely different from losing a beer belly, buy a copy of Men’s Health if you want to get muscled.
Good luck 🙂
