When I changed my lifestyle after having surgery for colon cancer, I found myself feeling better and trimmer than I ever had before. So I began to ask myself, why am I feeling so good? The answer was summed up by the acronym I devised called: the L.E.A.N. program: Lifestyle, Exercise, Attitude, Nutrition. Those are the four keys to optimal health and well-being. Too bad I, and most others, wait to discover this until after we experience a life-changing catastrophic event, such as a heart attack, a stroke, or, in my case, cancer. Ideally, people should get on the LEAN program before they get sick; and use this rejuvenating program to not only prevent illness, but to simply feel great!

This program uses the principle of synergy. When you get all four facets working together, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. In this case, 1+1+1+1 = 5, or maybe even 10! Synergy is a principle employed both in biochemistry and in human relations. Put a group of nutrients together in a well-balanced meal, and the body absorbs the nutrients better than it would if the same vitamins and minerals were isolated in a vitamin pill. Think-tanks put a group of people together in a room, each one with a different field of expertise, and they feed off one another, developing ideas together that none of them could have thought of alone. This is why the LEAN program works. When you put all the four components together, each individual one works better. diets fail because people tire of the program, get bored, or resent all the things they have to give up. The LEAN program works because the returns are so great that you don't feel that you're giving up anything. Once you're into the LEAN program it becomes self- motivating. You begin to feel so good that you want to do everything you can to perpetuate this feeling. The great news is that once you become lean, you have a greater chance of staying lean if you are paying attention to exercise, lifestyle, and attitude, as well as good nutrition. You will have reprogrammed your mind and body, and your internal monitors will steer you to what's good for you and away from what's bad. You'll not only eat right, but you will have a basic drive to continue eating right. You'll crave exercise, and you'll be satisfied with less food.

Being lean does not mean being skinny. It means having the right amount of body fat for your body type. This means around 15 percent body fat for most men and around 18 percent for women. Individuals who are more muscular, athletes in training, or genetically slim people may lower this by two or three percentage points and still be healthy. Being lean involves more than just carrying around less fat. It means keeping an eye on all these factors that influence health:

This means healthy living without smoking, excessive alcohol, or other unhealthy substances.

One of the healthiest ways to stay lean is to exercise. The more muscle you have, the more fat calories you can burn.

Trim the fat in your feelings by keeping your mind off counterproductive stuff.

Emphasize a low-fat diet.

There are more shoulds than should nots in the L.E.A.N. program, and the results last, unlike other diet and fitness programs that promise quick results but don't deliver in the long run. You'll feel fit, a three-letter word that economically describes what healthy living is all about. You not only fit better into your clothing, but also with your family, your job, and yourself. The LEAN program has enriched my life, as it will enrich yours. Let's get started.

The LEAN program calls for a close look at your lifestyle, including the work on your job, your relationships, the way you spend your leisure time, how much sleep you get, how you experience stress - even your spiritual life. Some of these things you may believe you can't change, but you can. We all know that smoking and excessive drinking are bad for health and we won't belabor the obvious by listing the hazards of each. (See smoking for why it's bad and how to quit). Cutting out these habits is an important part of a healthy lifestyle. A healthy lifestyle can also be defined in a positive sense, a life filled, as much as possible, with work, relationships, habits, and activities that contribute to your well-being.

Realize that no one is able to live a stress-free life all day every day. (That would be boring.) But you can make choices about how to cope with stress. Do the best you can. Pat yourself on the back for the positives, and don't dwell on the negatives.

If you have a job that drives you to junk food, makes it impossible for you to exercise, and grinds you down with daily stress, you need to make some changes. You may not be able to run off and join a vegetarian monastery, but what can you do to improve your life? Walk to work? Keep an apple in your briefcase? Do deep-breathing exercises for five minutes at your desk? Put a little more energy into relationships that build you up and shed those that are tearing you down? Does your marriage need some enriching? There are always things you can change to make your life better. The LEAN program encourages you to make these changes for the health of both your body and mind.

You may need to make some drastic lifestyle changes. Isn't your life worth changing jobs? The "L" in lifestyle could also stand for "love" and "laughter." If there are not enough of these two "L's" in your job, relationships, habits, or activities, some changes are needed. For some people, change is difficult, since the body and the mind often resist change, but remind yourself we're talking about change for the better, not for the worse.

We have yet to see a diet work in which exercise is not at least of equal importance with healthy eating. In the LEAN program, exercise is nutrition's close partner. If you wanna lose it, you gotta move it. Why not just stay on the couch and eat less? Restrictions on calories, the basis of most diets, are the main reason they don't work. Years of taking in more calories slows your metabolism, sort of like a mechanic turning down an engine's idle speed. When you turn down your idle speed, you burn less fuel, and therefore less fat. Burning calories off by exercise boosts your metabolism. Combine this with a diet that emphasizes nutrient-dense foods without empty calories, and you are much more likely to stay lean than you would if you only cut back on calories. The good news is that the people who need exercise the most (overweight, sedentary, poorly-nourished, etc) are the ones most helped by it. In a nutshell, exercise contributes to your health by:

• burning fat
• decreasing the risk of nearly all major diseases
• releasing feel-good hormones that contribute to your overall sense of well-being.

Exercise will help you lose fat and become lean. But there are even more important reasons to exercise. You exercise not only for health, but for life. Here are the main health benefits of exercise:

Buried somewhere in the brain, physiologists believe, is a sort of appestat that regulates how often and how much you eat. This appestat control is the fat point (also known as the setpoint), the fat level your body has gotten used to. Your body believes that it needs to maintain this fat level to protect you against the day when food may not be so plentiful. It believes this fat level is important to your well- being and it will strive to maintain this level of body fat. So, your body resists any attempt to lose fat or to lower the fat point, which is one of the reasons why people who lose weight tend to regain it. If you suddenly start to eat less, your body thinks "Oh, my goodness, there's a famine. Hoard the fat." Your metabolic rate slows (like a hibernating bear's), and your appetite increases. You may struggle to stay on your diet, but your fatpoint insists that you store fat rather than burn it. Losing weight becomes very difficult. If, however, you follow your appetite and eat more, you may push your fatpoint even higher.

What you have to do is trick the fatpoint by gradually lowering your daily calories. The fatpoint gradually lowers and the appestat becomes more comfortable with the idea of burning fat stores, because there seem to be adequate amounts of food available. When your body gets accustomed to lower calorie eating, it becomes more efficient, using more energy instead of storing it.

L.E.A.N LESSONS The key to getting and staying lean is to set your fatpoint to fat-burn rather than fat-store. How? By eating right and exercising more.

Exercise plays an important role in resetting your appestat. If you've been dieting and losing weight steadily, but then you reach a plateau, your body has probably decided this is a good fat balance for you. Stepping up the amount of exercise you do will push your body back into fat- burning mode and you'll continue to lose.

Moderate exercise that burns just 200 calories a day, such as a brisk 30-minute walk, can lower the risk of adult-onset (type 2) diabetes. Exercise boosts the efficiency of insulin, helping it remove sugar from the blood before it can be stored as fat. (Insulin could be called the "unfair" hormone. It sees to it that excess sugar is stored as fat, yet it blocks the conversion of fat back to glucose.) Increased insulin efficiency has also been linked to lower blood pressure, higher levels of the good (or HDL) cholesterol, and a lower incidence of cardiovascular disease.

Regular, moderate exercise increases the white cell count, improving the body's ability to fight off infection. Exercise also increases the number of "killer cells," those special cells that are mobilized to fight serious diseases, and it increases the body's production of the antibody immunoglobulin A. Another way exercise boosts immunity is by reducing stress, since stress itself can depress the body's immune system.

When combined with a lowfat diet, exercise can reduce levels of LDL (bad) cholesterol twice as effectively as diet alone. Exercise also increases levels of HDL (good) cholesterol. Exercise is one of the few things that accomplishes both these goals.

One of the great perks of the LEAN program is that it should improve your sex life. A study showed that a group placed on a program of improved diet, stress management, and exercise had heightened sexual arousal and pleasure.

People who begin an exercise program often discover, "I have so much more energy." At the muscular level, exercise improves the efficiency with which the muscles can use oxygen. Exercise also helps the body deliver more oxygen to vital organs, such as the lungs, brain, heart, and muscles. In a nutshell, exercise helps transport the oxygen through the body and into the cells more efficiently.

Exercise builds muscle, and when you exercise you build the heart muscle. A stronger heart is able to pump more blood per stroke, and thus it requires fewer beats to pump the same amount of blood. In a study of 13,000 men and women divided into categories of fitness ranging from sedentary to well-conditioned, those who walked 30 minutes a day, three to four times a week, were half as likely to have a heart attack or develop cancer. In people with high blood pressure, regular exercise has been shown to lower both systolic and diastolic blood pressure by an average of ten points. Exercise also reduces the tendency for the blood-clotting cells, called platelets, to stick together, and thus prevents blood clots that reduce the blood supply to the tissues of the heart, brain, and other vital organs, causing strokes or heart attacks.

Nearly all the physiological changes that are associated with aging are improved with exercise, including decreased muscle mass, increased body fat, reduced muscle strength and flexibility, decreased bone mass, decreased metabolic rate (which promote fat storing), decreased cardiovascular fitness, sleep difficulties, reduced sexual performance, diminished oxygen utilization by muscle, and reduced mental acuity. Exercise acts like a tonic, improving many of the symptoms of aging.

A Harvard Health study of 17,000 male Harvard alumni, ages 35 to 74 showed that men who exercised regularly lived longer. The death rates declined as the number of calories burned in exercise increased, up to a weekly calorie expenditure of 2,000 calories (which would be an average of 40 minutes of moderate exercise per day). New studies have shown that reducing calories can also increase a person's lifespan, so the combination of a low- calorie diet with exercise to burn off calories brings double benefits. Between 20 and 80 years of age the average male may lose a quarter of his total muscle mass, which leads us to conclude that the amount of exercise you do should increase with age rather than decrease. The LEAN program is likely to help you die young - but at an old age.

Exercise builds muscle, and muscle is the biggest fat-burner in the body. Muscle burns calories, not only during exercise, but while you are resting. It's automatic. The more muscle mass you have, the more calories (and therefore fat) you burn, even during your sleep. This is why one goal of the LEAN program is to replace fat with muscle. Consider these fat stats: With moderate exercise (you don't have to be an Olympic weight-lifter), you can increase your muscle mass enough to automatically burn over a hundred extra calories a day, which translates into an automatic fat loss (or lack of fat gain) of a pound a month. So once you become lean, you increase your chances of staying lean. The best exercise for building muscles is resistance training in which the muscles work against gravity, such as weight-training with free weights or a resistance machine. Even senior citizens can build more muscle with resistance training. So you could say, "lift weights to lose weight." Exercise enough to build the muscle and maintain the muscle, and it keeps right on burning the fat to keep you lean. Exercise speeds metabolism. You not only burn fat while you're exercising, your metabolic rate remains elevated for six to twelve hours after you exercise. You're still getting the fat-burning benefit of your morning workout in the early afternoon.

Astronauts working in zero gravity in space lose bone mass. Weight-bearing exercise here on earth makes bones stronger. Weight-bearing exercise is a good way to prevent osteoporosis, or softening of the bone. One reason why exercise helps build bone is that exercising bodies tends to excrete less calcium through the kidneys than sedentary bodies do.

LEAN TIP GAIN MUSCLE - LOSE FAT The best nutritional deal in the body is the more muscle you put on, the more fat you're likely to take off. The reason is that muscle tissue, even just resting there, burns more calories than fat tissue, which essentially burns very little. Every pound of extra muscle you put on automatically burns 50-100 extra calories a day. So, just by adding an extra pound of muscle to your body you could automatically fatburn as much as ten pounds of fat a year. The cellular basis for the term "beef up" is that exercise causes an increase in fat- burning enzymes in the muscles, so that "beefing up" really means increasing the body's ability to fat burn. As you can see, one of the main goals of the LEAN program is to change body fat into muscle.

Exercise releases endorphins, the body's own internal opiates, or mood-elevating, pain-relieving hormones. It's on the days when you least feel like exercising that you'll notice the endorphin effect the most. It relieves tension and soothes out stress. Endorphins even curb food cravings. The neurochemicals that are released during exercise not only calm an anxious person, they can also pull you out of a depression. Studies shows that depressive symptoms decrease in women who engage in regular exercise, such as walking briskly, jogging, lifting weights or dancing, three to four times a week for eight to ten weeks. Psychiatrists often prescribe exercise to combat depression. It's cheap and the side effects are all good ones.

Because exercise increases blood flow to the brain, it's as good for the head as it is for the body. Exercise can help you concentrate and also helps your brain relax when it's time for sleep.

Exercise improves digestion and speeds the passage of food through the intestines. Constipated persons often notice a return to regular bowel movements during the LEAN program. So, exercise regularly to stay regular.

Exercise not only reduces the risk of colon cancer, a study of 13,000 men and women followed for fifteen years by aerobics expert Dr. Kenneth Cooper showed that the incidence of all forms of cancer was reduced. The fitter the subjects were, the less their risk of cancer.

Exercise and a low-fat diet are partners in health. Dieting without exercise leads to little or no permanent fat loss, and possibly a fat gain. Exercise without good nutrition equals little or no fat loss. Dieting plus exercise equals lots of fat loss. You don't burn off much fat while you're doing the exercise. While you exercise, you burn mostly carbohydrates. The fat-burning occurs during the twelve hours after exercise when your metabolic rate is elevated. This is why morning exercise is likely to yield a greater fat loss than exercise in the evening or before bed. Sleep depresses your metabolic rate. So, the best time for exercise is first thing in the morning. Late afternoon, before dinner, is also a good time to exercise; you'll eat less at dinner and burn calories all evening long. This metabolism speeding is especially important for the 40 somethings and older, since metabolism begins to slow down once you hit middle age, and exercise speeds up this natural slowdown.

LEAN LESSONS: THE HAZARDS OF BEING A COUCH POTATO Just sitting on the couch will get you in trouble. Sitters are fat storers, and they're less healthy than people who move. When a couch potato sits there, eyes fixed on the TV, his breathing becomes more shallow. In time this reduces the vital capacity of the lungs, which means there is less oxygen available to the intestines, muscles, heart, and brain. The heart, like all the other muscles of the body becomes weaker, so the heart works harder to pump less blood, further depriving the other parts of the body of oxygen. Inactivity raises the level of all the bad fats in the blood and lowers the level of good cholesterol. Even the muscles of the intestines slow down, increasing constipation, contributing to fatigue. The combination of a tired heart, tired brain, and tired gut motivate the couch potato to spend even more time on the couch. The sad result is that the couch potato is more likely than his longer-living lean friends to wind up in the permanent state of inactivity. Picture the difference. It's Monday night and Mr. Couch Potato is watching football. He lies on the sofa with a beer, potato chips, and onion dip. Mr. Lean Machine is outside on the lawn tossing a football with his kids after a brisk walk around the neighborhood. He comes in, grabs some fruit for a snack, and watches the second half of the game while doing an upper body workout with his weights. Obviously, Mr. Lean Machine is likely to be rewarded with a longer life and more Monday night football games than Mr. Couch Potato.

Is there such a thing as mind over fat? Yes. You've heard the phrase "set your mind to it." The attitude part of the LEAN program is about using your mind to help you get a lean body. You can't just think fat away, but there are fascinating ways your mind can affect your body - for better or for worse.

HOW STRESS CAN MAKE YOU FAT
Stress gets in the way of good health. Your body can't reap all the benefits of nutrition and exercise if it's overstressed. And stress can get in the way of eating right and getting enough exercise. Stress hormones stimulate the neurotransmitters that increase your cravings for sugar- rich foods, stimulate your appetite, and foster overeating. Chronic, unresolved stress throws off the biochemical equilibrium of your body, making it difficult for your body to feel good and for you to recognize what makes you feel good.

LEAN LESSON: MENTAL EXERCISE Exercise is not only good for the body, it's great for the brain. The brain is an oxygen hog, which is why it takes 25 percent of the blood that the heart pumps (more in children). Exercise delivers more oxygen to the brain and helps all tissue, especially brain tissue, use oxygen more efficiently, which translates into better thinking. Pumping more blood to the brain stimulates the release of a group of neurochemicals, collectively called brain growth factors, which increase the production of neurotransmitters and make more receptor sites for these brain messengers to land on. Exercise is not only nature's smart drug, it's also nature's Prozac. By stimulating the release of endorphins, exercise beefs up the body's own "feel good" hormones. Endorphins are most stimulated by exercise and laughter. And the good-feeling effects of these hormones last about as long as a pill, four to six hours after exercise, and without the unpleasant medical side effects. Therapists have long prescribed exercise to pull people out of the pits of depression. So, exercise not only burns fat, it burns stress, too.

Stressbuster Rule #1: You can't control situations, but you can control your reactions to them. This is the basis of all successful stress-management programs. In real life you can't isolate yourself from stress-producing situations. Stress happens. Traffic lights turn red. Children get sick. And sometimes worse things happen. You lose your job, for example. You can, however, control your reaction. The stress may be involuntary, but your reaction, believe it or not, is voluntary. Here's an example.

Turn an accident into an opportunity. Like most parents, when your teens begin to drive, you have mixed feelings. On the one hand, you're glad to be out of the carpool scene and feeling like a family chauffeur. On the other hand, you're worried for the child's safety. When our son, Peter, first began to drive, he accidentally stepped on the gas instead of the brake while backing out of the garage, erasing one side of the car and damaging one wall of the garage. This was a stressor to me, and I overreacted. I yelled and complained. My worry and my griping about the inconvenience and the cost of repairs elevated my pulse and blood pressure, and certainly didn't do my body any good. Two years later, our daughter, Hayden, the next addition to the list of family members with keys to the car, did the same thing, but to the other side of the car and a different wall in the garage. But by this time I had learned the importance of practicing that rule-I can't control situations that have already happened, but I can control my reaction. Besides, I was getting good mileage out of my auto insurance. So, instead of reacting in anger, I told Hayden, "I'm so glad that you didn't get hurt. Having your first accident in the garage is probably the best place. Now you'll be more careful. A car is easy to fix, your body isn't. Of course, you know you're more important than the car..." I actually felt peaceful, as did Hayden. I realized that the internal turmoil caused by an overreaction to stress would have been costly to my body - and to my daughter.

Stressbuster #2: Focus on solutions, not problems. This is a variation of the above rule. You can't change the problem by getting yourself all worked up with the usual "what ifs," but you can look for solutions. This is especially important in family dynamics. When children have problems, your first reaction may be to point out how their own faults created the situation. Soon everyone is feeling negative and hopeless. If you focus instead on solutions (and preventing the problem from happening again), you can pull up everybody's mood from negative to positive and teach your children a valuable lesson in life: stress happens, but you quickly fix it before it takes its toll on your mind and body. The child says, "Dad, I messed up..." and the parent responds, ""Okay, let's fix it." By offering a mature response, wise parents can lower the stress level of an entire family. It's a good approach to your own problems, too.

Practice what we call in our family the Caribbean attitude ("No problem, mon!"). Our family hobby is sailing and we often charter a boat in the Caribbean for our family vacation. Part of the "fun" of boating is that something usually goes wrong and needs fixing. One day our engine went out and we limped under sail into a marina on a remote island hoping to find a mechanic to fix our engine. I, as the ship's captain, was beginning to worry that this accident would ruin our whole family vacation, but we were greeted by a friendly mechanic who said, " "No problem, mon!" Everyone relaxed, me most of all. We enjoyed the time we spent on that island and learned some lessons about Caribbean life while the locals fixed our boat.

Stressbuster #3: Focus on biggies, downplay smallies. Some stressors don't merit more than a minute of worry. Unfortunately, most of us learn that lesson too late. For our own survival as parents of eight, we've had to concentrate on the biggies and forget the smallies in disciplining our children. Otherwise, the constant annoyances (smallies) of childish behaviors would have driven us bananas long ago. For us, biggies are about respect for one another, values, responsibility, and serious threats to life and limb. Smallies are life's little annoyances that really don't hurt anyone. Yet, the importance of concentrating on the biggies and letting go of the smallies didn't really come home to me until my recovery from cancer. The stress of cancer gave me a more mature outlook on life. After my recovery, one day I came into the office and our office manager greeted me with the news of "a serious problem. The computer crashed." I thought to myself, "That's a smallie. Cancer is a biggie." So I responded, "Well, who do we get to fix it?"

Stressbuster #4: Learn to relax. Chronic, unresolved stress basically exhausts your brain's neurotransmitters so that you don't feel good and can't think clearly. Relaxation allows these neurotransmitters to recuperate from the exhaustion created by stress. An important part of the L.E.A.N. program is not only to learn to relax in response to stressful situations using the stressbusters discussed above, but also to set aside a few minutes each day for relaxation.

In the L.E.A.N. program, we focus on five important kinds of relaxation:

• Daily meditation. Morning meditation is a must, an evening meditation is a second must. The importance of daily meditation was summed up by Ghandi, who stated, "Meditation is the key to the morning and the latch of the evening." The time spent in meditation allows you to become more aware of your thoughts and how your body and mind are supposed to feel. This is called being mindful. You learn to become more sensitive to your internal workings, which makes you more able to make necessary corrections in your course.

• Relaxation exercises. On the surface, it may seem that the terms "exercise" and "relaxation" don't go together, yet this association is biochemically correct. Working at relaxation and acquiring disciplined, relaxation techniques stimulates your brain to produce calming neurochemicals, such as endorphins, and encourages the body to shut off production of hormones which upset its functioning. Meditation clears the mind, and the body, of internal stressors and allows the helpful neurochemicals to have their say.

• Imagery. Imagery fills your mind with pleasant thoughts, replays of pleasant scenes and thoughts of happy relationships, before negative thoughts, or unpleasant replays, overtake you. Imagery is an effective way to counteract external and internal stressors.

• Music. Listening to music relaxes the mind, and the body, by stimulating those "feel good" thoughts and hormones. This is known as the Mozart effect.

• Relax before you respond. A similar technique to the stressbuster discussed above, this allows you to quickly fill your mind with positive thoughts before negative ones get a foothold.

Stressbuster #5: Focus on what you have, not on what you don't have. An important lesson in life - and in staying lean - is that you can control what goes on in your mind. This is an asset that is very important to your well-being. What happens to your body, what happens to your finances, and what happens to your relationships, are things that are often beyond your control. But, like the food you put in your body, the thoughts and the scenes that fill your mind are, for the most part, completely within your control. Filling your mind with rich thoughts is often more satisfying than having external wealth, as exemplified by Thoreau, "A man is richest in proportion to the things he can do without." A positive mental attitude has always been important in stress management. A truly lean person becomes an optimist ("The bottle is half full") rather than a pessimist ("The bottle is half empty.") When you focus on what you have rather than on what you don't have, you'll enjoy what you have to a greater degree and waste less energy on unfulfilled wishes.

Stressbuster #6: Eat a stress-relieving diet. See Mood Foods.

The final feature of the LEAN program is nutrition, which carries equal weight with exercise in the process of becoming lean. No, this does not mean going on a diet, at least in the way most people regard this four-letter word. Just the word "diet" can be a turn-off. "Die" is 75 percent of the word. "Diet" sounds too restrictive. Most of us enjoy eating. We look forward to our evening "meal," and even more to "dinner" or "a banquet." We don't eat to live, we live to eat. So, instead of a diet, let's call it a change in eating style, meaning that you are focusing more on eating well rather than on eating less. For some overfat and under-lean individuals, this will probably also mean eating less, and I know this is not easy. I belong in the category of people who like to eat. Martha, on the other hand, is more likely to eat primarily for health than enjoyment. To stay lean you have to do one of two things: eat more and burn more fat; or eat less and exercise less. You can't have it both ways. I have chosen to eat more and exercise more; Martha has chosen to eat less and exercise less. She often chides me during my exercise binges, "Why don't you just eat less?" "Because that's no fun" is my answer. So, it's not only your body type that determines how many calories you need, it's also what type of attitude you have about food. (See related topic Eating Right for Your Type). So, the key is to eat right for your body type. Here's how.

1. Figure out how many calories you need. Determine how many calories you need for optimal health. Because of the concept of biochemical individuality, the custom of calorie-counting for weight control is a concept that is becoming less nutritionally correct, but it's a place to start. Calories are simply a measure of how much potential energy a particular food can deliver to your body. It used to be thought that the "calories in" / "calories used" equation was all you needed to know to take off body fat. Yet, new nutritional insights show that it's not only the caloric value of the food, but also the type of food and the type of metabolism that is important in fat gain or loss, not just the calorie content of the food. Since 3,500 calories equals one pound of fat, if you eat 3,500 calories more than you burn, you put on a pound of fat. If you eat 3,500 calories less than you burn, you burn off a pound. But the real situation is more complicated than this. The body is programmed to burn carbs but store fat, and different metabolisms react differently to different kinds of food. Still, figuring how many calories you need each day will give you a rough guide to what you should eat.

   You need calories for three bodily processes:

   • Basic metabolic needs. These are the calories needed to keep your body going. How many you need is determined by your basal metabolic rate (BMR), as well as your size and your body composition. To figure your basic caloric needs, follow these formulas. As a rule of thumb:
     • For women, add a zero to your weight in pounds. For example, for a 120 pound woman, her basic caloric needs would be 1,200 plus 120 for a total of 1,320 calories a day.

     • For men, multiply your weight by twelve. For example, for a 160 pound man, his basic caloric needs would be 160 x 12 for a total of 1,920 calories a day.

     • Because body types contribute to BMR, if you are genetically lean, or ectomorph, add five percent to your daily caloric needs. If you are a round, plump endomorph (an apple), subtract ten percent.

     • Exercise factor. If you're a very active person, plus you exercise around 1/2 hour a day, add another 300-500 calories to your basic caloric needs. So, the calorie needs of an average, active woman would be around 1,700-1,900 calories a day; for the average, active man around 2,200-2,500 calories a day, depending on the person's age.

     • The growth factor. The basal metabolic rate (BMR) naturally decreases around two percent for each decade above 20. As a rough guide, you could subtract 40 calories per decade from your BMR, so a man of 60 would need 160 calories less than a man of 20. Women need extra calories during pregnancy and lactation. Caloric needs also increase when you are recovering from an illness, or during competitive sports.

     • Growing children, especially during infancy and adolescence, need 25 percent more calories for growth. So an adolescent girl may need as much as 2,300 calories a day, and an average adolescent male may need as much as 3,000 calories a day, depending on how active they are.

   In the early weeks of the LEAN program, it would help to consult a calorie-counting book and meticulously add up the calories in everything you eat to get an accurate idea of how many calories you consume each day and how close this comes to your basic needs. As you store your knowledge of food calories, you won't need to do this anymore. You'll know that 8 ounces of plain yogurt contains 80 calories. As you keep track of your calories, you'll learn how many average calories per day you need to keep yourself as lean as you want to be. When you begin your caloric cut down, do it gradually. Begin by cutting 20 percent of calories off your usual intake and see what kind of results you get.

2. Eat nutrient-dense foods, those that pack the most nutrition into the least amount of calories. The opposite of nutrient-dense foods are calorie- dense foods, those that pack a lot of calories into a small amount of food and leave you craving more. Examples are fast foods, junkfoods, and high-fat and high-sugar foods. Nutrient-dense foods are more likely to satisfy you, leaving you feeling full while contributing to your body's overall nutritional needs. An interesting study showed that when people were allowed to eat all they wanted, but only of nutrient-dense foods, they consumed fewer calories than when they were allowed to eat highly-refined and processed foods. Examples of nutrient-dense foods are:

   cantaloupe papaya fresh fruits instead of juice whole-grain cereals wild rice brown rice instead of white rice nonfat or low-fat milk nonfat cottage cheese

   turkey and chicken, white meat egg whites salmon tuna shrimp sweet potatoes all vegetables and legumes avocados soy foods

   NUTRITIP Lean Cuisine You are likely to feel more full after eating a fiber-filled plant food than after a meal featuring meat. Fiber gives you a feeling of fullness sooner for fewer calories, a good nutritional strategy for staying lean. So, if you are trying to lose weight or lower the amount of fat in your diet, first fill up on high-fiber, low-fat salad-bar fixings. You'll eat less of the main course and dessert.

3. Fill up with fiber. Fiber is calorie-free and filling. When you eat foods high in fiber, you feel full without consuming a lot of calories. Fiber also slows the absorption of nutrients into the bloodstream, which in turn lessens insulin bursts and thus slows fat storage. Soluble fibers, such as psyllium, pectin, citrus fruits, legumes, and oatbran are the best weight loss boosters. One study showed that an extra five grams of fiber a day (equivalent to one serving of fiber-rich cereal) resulted in a daily decrease in calorie consumption And, when you eat fiber along with fat, you're liable to eat less of fatty foods. Pies are my downfall. For an extra piece of pie, I'll willingly spend an extra 30 minutes on the family treadmill. Yet, I notice that I tend to eat less pie and feel just as satisfied when we make homemade pie crust with whole wheat flour or fiber-filled cereal. Breakfast is an important fiber-rich meal. One study showed that persons who ate a high fiber breakfast cereal ate an average 150 calories less per day than those who ate a low fiber cereal.

   NUTRITIP VEGGIE UP Eat lots of vegetables, since ounce for ounce they contain fewer calories and more fiber than most other foods. They tend to fill you up without putting on the fat.

4. Little bites add up. Small changes in your eating patterns result in big changes in your waistline - for better or worse. Take a close look at the food you're eating and trim away those unneeded calorie-dense, nutrient-poor foods that stand between you and a trim body. You'll be surprised how little you have to change to get slim. For example, five to ten potato chips a day is an extra 50-100 calories, which amounts to five to ten pounds of extra fat in a year. Lose the chips and you'll lose the pounds. Or, try substituting a lower calorie food for a higher calorie one. Try these tiny calorie cuts:
   • Canned fruits packed in water instead of those packed in syrup
   • Tuna packed in water instead of oil
   • Lowfat or nonfat yogurt instead of whole fat
   • Lowfat or skim milk instead of whole milk

5. Trim fat in foods. Fatty foods are more fattening than foods that are high in proteins and carbs. Cutting back on fat will help you get lean. Yet because most of us have a preference for foods with fat in them, lower the fat in your diet gradually. Drastic changes are harder to maintain. Try these lowfat versions of everyday foods: lowfat or nonfat dairy products (milk, yogurt, and cottage cheese), yogurt instead of sour cream on baked potatoes. Removing the skin off of chicken before eating it can cut the amount of fat by at least half. You may wonder how much fat should be in your daily diet? An already lean person, especially a person who has been lucky enough to be born and remain lean, can safely consume around 25, or even 30, percent of their daily calories as fat and stay lean. For most of us rounder mortals, 20 percent of calories from fat is a goal to aim for to get and stay lean. This amounts to 45 to 60 grams of fat per day, depending on your calorie needs. And, don't forget, it's not only important to have a lowfat diet, take a close look at the type of fat you're eating as well.

   Remember to read labels and pay attention to the fat information given. To keep yourself lean, eat mostly foods that contain less than 20 percent of the calories in the food as fat. Here's a quick way to calculate if the fat calories are greater or less than 20 percent of the total. The label on the food lists both the total calories and the calories from fat. Divide the calories by the calories from fat, and if the answer is less than five leave the food on the shelf. For example, if a food contains 120 calories with 40 calories from fat, divide 120 by 40 and the answer is 3, so you may not want to eat this food that contains 33 percent of its calories from fat. Stick to reading the "Nutrition Facts" for your information about fat and ignore the come-ons on the front of the package. Even though "reduced fat" under the new label laws means that the food contains 25 percent less fat than the original product, if the original product was half fat, the new product is still 35 percent fat. Labels with the words "light" and "lite" have to be one-third less fat than the original, but again, if you start with a high-fat food, the lite version could still be high in fat.

   NUTRITIP: BEWARE OF MOVIE POPCORN The popcorn in movie theaters may be called "buttered," but really it's soaked in the worst oils - saturated and hydrogenated - with only a bit of butter flavoring. Bowing to public and parental pressure, some theaters are offering air- popped popcorn and popcorn popped in unsaturated oils, such as canola. If you're a popcorn lover, ask about the oil used at your local movie theater. Let them know you're concerned and, who knows, you may motivate the theater to change the fat in its popcorn.

6. Eat fats that keep you slim. All fats are not created equal, and one of the dangers of crash diets is that you not only cut out the bad fats, but you cut out the good ones, too. Your body needs fats. You can't live without them, especially those that are high in essential fatty acids, which are-essential for life and health. Essential fatty acids, such as those found in fish and flax oils, are more likely to stimulate the body to burn fat rather than store fat. By being sure your diet has enough of the right fats your body is less likely to crave other fats trying to make up for deficiencies.

   RIGHT FATS - FAT BURNERS	WRONG FATS - FAT STORERS
   Essential fatty acids Fish Flax oil Unsaturated fats	Hydrogenated fats Saturated fats

   Be especially sure that growing children have a diet high in the right fats.

7. Drink up. The higher the water content of a food, the more filling it is, and water itself has no calories. Fiber-rich foods need to be eaten with a lot of water. Drinking at least eight 8-ounce glasses of water a day, perhaps slightly flavored with a little lemon or fruit juice, is a lean person's best choice in the beverage department.

   NUTRITIP: NEVER DINE AFTER NINE If you're accustomed to big dinners, eat them early in the evening to give your body a chance to burn off some of your indulgence before you retire.

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   FAT LOSS: HOW FAST? HOW SAFE?

   Be patient about fat loss. Achieving a lasting leaner you is well worth the wait. Because your goal is to change fat into muscle, in the LEAN program we prefer the term weight change to weight loss. As a general guide, it is impossible to lose weight faster than three pounds a week without seriously endangering your health, and even this requires you to burn 1,500 calories more a day than you eat. Cases where teenage wrestlers have gone on crash diets so they can compete in a lower weight class has resulted in death.

   Begin with a fat loss of 1/2 pound a week for several weeks. This is a comfortable loss that won't force your fatpoint to compensate by slowing your metabolism. Then, progress to a fat loss of one pound a week, which can be accomplished with an average daily calorie deficit of 500 calories. This means you eat 300-500 calories less than usual and exercise 30 minutes a day. For most healthy individuals, the maximum fat loss we would recommend would be two pounds per week. Your personal comfort level for fat loss will probably fall somewhere between one and two pounds a week.

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   5 REASONS WHY CRASH DIETS RARELY WORK
   1. Metabolically unsound. The market is obese with calorie-restriction weight loss diets, the great majority of which reduce more dollars than fat from the obese person. Crash diets try to fool the body, but the body doesn't buy it. Rapid weight loss diets invariably fail because they are metabolically unsound, often unsafe, and just plain don't work for these reasons: they don't reset the fatpoint. When a person suddenly goes on a crash diet and restricts their calories, the body, fearing it's starving, rebels to protect its set fatpoint by lowering the body's metabolism to click into the fat storage rather than fat-burning mode. The body, in its wisdom, interprets the sudden caloric restriction as threatening its nourishment and therefore protects itself by changing its metabolism to resist the sudden change of diet.

      One way it does this is by increasing the production of the enzyme, lipoprotein lipase (LPL), which promotes the storage and transfer of blood fats into body fats. In essence, your body is working against you. When you suddenly reduce the amount of calories going into it, the body responds by taking those fewer calories and turning them into fat. Then when you start eating "normally" again, the body has already set itself to a lower level of calorie burning, so you gain weight back faster than you took it off. As we will later see, the key is to gradually trick the fatpoint, so that your body metabolically cooperates rather than fights fat loss.

   2. Water weight loss. Crash diets (those that don't work, don't last, and are often downright unhealthy) often give you a rapid weight loss in what you see on the scale. For these diets, weight loss does not equate with fat loss, since you are often losing water weight (which you quickly gain back) or muscle weight. Both of these types of weight loss are potentially harmful to your well-being. The reasons for this false weight loss is that during the first week or two on a crash diet the body will first lose protein and water, since the wisdom of the body tells it to hold onto the fat as its last reserve. This loss of protein and water is the reason most people feel lousy during the first week or two on a crash diet.

   3. Fat deficiency. Another reason why crash diets can be bad for your health is they cut out not only the bad fats, but the good fats, causing the dieter to have a deficiency in essential fatty acids, which can compromise a person's health. The key to fat control is not only eating less fats, but eating the right fats. In fact, essential fatty acids may also be essential to maintaining proper fat-burning metabolism. Not only are crash diets unhealthy, many crash dieters eat more and regain more fat once they discard the diet - a quirk of nature known as the fast followed by the feast. The body was used to the fat it had and wants it back.

   4. Fat-storing carbs. Another reason why crash diets fail is they don't respect the interplay between insulin, carbohydrates, and fat storage. When you restrict your calories, your blood sugar may drop, causing you to get hungry and binge on carbohydrates, which triggers your insulin, the hormone which also promotes fat storage. In essence, getting hungry can promote fat storage rather than fat-burning in some people.

   5. Downsizing. Ever wonder why it's so hard to stick to a diet? The reason is your body naturally resists change, even when it's for the better. It's like a company that is overloaded with too many employees, inefficient, mismanaged, and downright unhealthy. The shareholders of the company, let's call it Obese, Inc., vote for a buyout, so new management takes over. The overweight company has developed a complex network of extra staff to support one another, and because there are more people, more managers are needed, the payroll is high, and office space is at a premium. The new management wants to trim this redundant support system, but the workers fight to keep their jobs. The company resists downsizing.

      The body acts in a similar way. In order to lug around twenty pounds of extra fat, the body develops a support network. The heart has to pump more blood, there are extra nerves, the hip bones widen to support the extra poundage around the middle, and extra calories are taken in to support this extra stuff. But the body is used to this extra stuff and looks for strategies that help it hang on to all of its "employees."

      Back to Obese Inc. In the early stages of trimming, company personnel are uncomfortable. There are pink slips, layoffs, early retirements, demotions. Yet, management realizes that this initial discomfort is important in order to turn the company around. After a few months the company is running more efficiently, employees are happier, the stockholders are satisfied, wages are higher, and bonuses abound. The company is now trim, efficient, and making a profit. Now the support system fights to keep the company trim, easier to do now that those who had caused the company to become obese in the first place have been weeded out.

      The same metabolic kinds of change occur in the body. The body initially fights the effects of eating less by resetting its metabolic setpoint lower, so it burns fewer calories. The body is uncomfortable. It may occasionally feel hungry. But after a couple months of resisting the change, the body realizes that it is now feeling better, leaner, trimmer, and is working more efficiently, with more energy. It has a new setpoint, a new way of working, and now it will fight to stay this way. Foods that it used to crave it shuns. Habits it used to enjoy it perceives now as threatening. And it keeps working harder to retain its new self.

      Wise management changes a company gradually, so there's less resistance. This is the best way to approach the L.E.A.N. program, too. It works better when you make wise changes slowly rather than trying to change your lifestyle, exercise habits, attitude and nutrition all at once.

      NUTRITIP: THE YO-YO DIET Periodic crash diets in which you lose a lot of weight, gain it back, and then try to lose it again may confuse your body to the extent that it becomes more and more difficult to take pounds off and easier and easier to put them back on. You end up weighing more instead of less. Add exercise to your diet plan and you greatly increase your chances of the pounds staying off.