Hot New Fitness Guru Reveals Two-meal-a-day Beach Diet

As thoughts turn to the holiday season, you’ll be looking at your summer wardrobe. You may have already pulled out the strappy sandals, but is last year’s swimwear still languishing in a bottom drawer? To help you fit into your bikini, now’s the perfect time to switch from comforting winter eating and drinking habits to a healthier, fresher, lighter diet. My work as a personal trainer to top models and TV stars has taught me that the key is a two-pronged approach which combines good dietary advice with quick fix, simple exercise routines to tighten, strengthen and tone.

Clients report great results from my body sculpting and training plan — typically losing up to a stone in a month. This diet is everything you need to achieve the shape and self-assurance you never thought possible — you’ll be feeling beach confident in no time. Forget calorie counting or endless days of juices and fasting, there’s a new diet buzzword emerging from the celebrity gyms: TRE or ‘Time Restricted Eating’.

This is one of the best researched and easily maintained methods for you to incorporate short periods of fasting into your everyday life, and it’s the best way to burn fat and lose excess weight fast. All you do is drop one meal at either end of your day — decide whether you are going to skip breakfast or dinner, then stick to it.

This sets up the TRE process by putting you on a ‘2 Meal Day’ where you can enjoy a large and nourishing breakfast and lunch, or a deliciously nutritious lunch and dinner. It works because either option effectively extends your fasting window when you sleep to a powerful and effective 16 to 18 hours. Most people find breakfast easiest to drop, but if you find it difficult to eat later in the evening, skip dinner instead. Whichever you chose, you must stick to it.

Research indicates that cutting back to two meals is enough for remarkable results — as long as your two meals are healthy. And extending your overnight fast really is easy and, perhaps surprisingly, it leaves you feeling less hungry than before and bursting with energy. 1 Choose whether to eat breakfast and your main meal in the middle of the day, or enjoy the main meal as a late ‘brunch’ and have dinner.

Eat at normal times. 2 Find a pattern that suits you and stick to two meals every day. While you have specific fat-loss goals there will be no days off. 3 Exercise four days each week, interspersed with rest days when you focus on stretching and mobility. 4 Eat low carb meals on rest days and healthy carbohydrates in one of your two meals on exercise days. 7 You can substitute your snack for a dessert on exercise days twice a week.

When you put your body in a temporary fasted state, it naturally releases a cocktail of energy-boosting hormones to ensure you are super-efficient at catching your next meal. Once you’re used to it you should find that even on an empty stomach, energy and mental alertness increase, coordination and body movements improve and you stop feeling hungry.

Digestion takes up considerable energy, so fasting can create a ‘buzz’ that spurs you to unforeseen levels of activity. Buckwheat noodles have a surprisingly high protein content and are a good quality carbohydrate source. Despite the name it’s not a form of wheat. Cook the noodles according to the packet instructions, rinse with cold water, set aside. Whizz all the dressing ingredients together in a food processor.

It only takes a couple of days to become physically and mentally accustomed to skipping that third meal, and it’s the best way to encourage your body to become a fat burning machine, rather than a sluggish sugar-guzzler. We are natural fat burners, but because fat is essential for our survival, our bodies have evolved to hang on to it if they can, and burn the sugars from food. For those who pick and nibble, the body becomes accustomed to a sugary fuel source and fat reserves remain untouched.

The way our bodies work hasn’t really changed since we were hunter-gatherers. On the rare occasion there would be a food surplus, we’d cling on to fat reserves for harsher times. These days, we can have a constant supply of food, but our bodies haven’t adjusted and just store even more fat.

However, TRE effectively tricks your body into thinking there isn’t any food available, so you start burning stored body fat for energy. Pierce the aubergine a couple of times with a knife, place in a roasting tin then roast for 45 minutes until softened. Leave to cool. Once cooled, scoop the insides from the aubergine into a food processor.

Blend with the garlic, chilli, oil, lemon juice, parsley and a pinch of salt and black pepper. Taste and adjust seasoning, oil and lemon as needed. Place in a dish and sprinkle with the paprika. Serve with flatbreads and celery. When it comes to looking good and feeling fabulous, food is only part of the story.