The Hungry and Lazy Guide to Diet and Exercise

By George del Prado

After struggling with his weight for 17 years, hungry and lazy man George del Prado was intimately familiar with the ups and downs of yo-yo dieting. His last time down, however, was his last time down. How did he finally get to his ideal weight and keep it off? By embracing the hunger and laziness in all of us.

George created a diet and exercise plan that focuses on both effectiveness and sustainability. Why take advice from people who have been healthy and fit all their lives when you can learn from someone who walked the same frustrating path as you, only to find the way out? With a personal, humorous, and conversational writing style, The Hungry and Lazy Guide offers motivation, common-sense advice, and finally, a fitness plan you can live with.

• Language: English
• Publisher: George del Prado
• Release date: Jan 11, 2015
• ISBN: 9781310001321

George del Prado

During his 4th year in college, George took a semester off to work as an intern in Charlotte, NC. While in North Carolina, he was introduced to the sinful deliciousness that is Southern cooking: hushpuppies, fried okra, fried chicken, sweet teas, all-you-can-eat barbecues (ribs every Tuesday), cornbread, and butter everywhere. He loved every minute of it, all the way up to the moment he got back home to California and saw the surprised looks on the faces of friends and family. "Whoa, you gained a lot of weight!" This is the exact moment in time George realized that his teenage days of eat-whatever-you-want-and-get-away-with-it were over. Thus began his 17-year journey through the land of yo-yo dieting. There were the three marathons he staggered through, the time he worked up to 200 push ups and 200 sit-ups in 15 minutes (he was trying to impress a girl), the 25 lbs. he lost for his wedding (different girl), and the time he lost 20 lbs. to avoid his family's judgmental looks at a cousin's wedding. Every single time he lost weight, like clockwork, he would eventually put it back on. Except this time. This time, he lost over 40 lbs. and he has kept it off for almost three years and counting. How did he do it? With a heavy dose of self-awareness and Google-driven research, George started putting together a list of healthy habits that he knew he could live with. Slowly but surely (and sustainably), he got down to his ideal weight. Everyone started asking him how he did it, so he wrote it all down and "The Hungry and Lazy Guide to Diet and Exercise" was born.

Book preview

The Hungry & Lazy Guide to Diet & Exercise

George del Prado

Published by George del Prado at Smashwords

Copyright © 2015 by George del Prado

Cover by Ricardo Pereira

Edited by Justin Scott, Andrew Woodring, and Gerene del Prado

Food pictures taken by John Thomas

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Introduction

Chapter 2: But First, Some Context

Chapter 3: Yeah, Science!

Chapter 4: What Are You Drinking?

Chapter 5: What Are You Snacking?

Chapter 6: What's For Breakfast?

Chapter 7: What's For Lunch and Dinner?

Chapter 8: The Zen of Lazy Exercising

Chapter 9: Get Up, Stand Up!

Chapter 10: These Feet Are Made For Walking

Chapter 11: Closing Arguments

To the funniest people I know,

Ruby, Mira, and James

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

How’d you do it? After gradually losing more than 40 lbs. over six months, people started asking me that over and over again – friends, family, random people at work I barely knew. How’d you do it? Everyone seemed interested, so I wrote it down and here it is.

First, allow me to show off the old Before and After pictures:

Before and After

In my Before picture, I was 35 years old and weighed about 215 lbs. That works if you’re a legendary NBA shooting guard (Michael Jordan is 6’6 and played at 216 lbs.), but I’m 5’8 and, um, not a legendary NBA shooting guard. The After picture is me at 39 and over 40 lbs. lighter. I’m still just an average looking guy, unfortunately, but people tell me I look 10 years younger at 39 than I did at 35. In many ways, I am 10 years younger now than I was back then. The good news is the Fountain of Youth is real! The bad news is it’s called Diet and Exercise (sad trombone).

Believe me, I get it. I struggled with my weight for 17 years. Like many people, I had a black belt in yo-yo dieting. I’d usually see a picture of myself and couldn’t help comparing it to what I looked like in high school (a long 50 lbs. ago). I would get that terrible, sinking feeling. Gah, am I really that fat? Motivation HITS (cue Rocky music montage)!

Tun!

New running shoes, gym sign-up, this time for real!

Tun, tun, tun!

Weights, treadmill, push-ups, sit-ups!

Tun, tun, tun!

Training journal, calorie journal, protein-vegetables good, carbs-fat-sugar bad!

Tun, tun, tuuuuunnn!

Looking good, 10 lbs., 15 lbs., 20 lbs. gone!

But right when I started feeling good about how I look, like the first tiny cracks in a doomed levee, complacency sets in...very...slowly. Maybe it’s raining outside or I catch a cold – perfectly good reasons to skip that run. Maybe it’s a friend’s birthday or bachelor party – I can’t be antisocial, I must eat, drink, and be merry! Besides, I’m looking good, I deserve it. Excuses slowly get worse and worse and before I know it, I’m skipping gym because I already started watching Crocodile Dundee in L.A. and I’m making a run for the border because of the evil genius that is Doritos Locos Tacos.

The slippery slope only gets more slippery the further down you go, so eventually, inevitably, the same 20 lbs. (often more) creep back on. End result? I’m like Kanye with the paparazzi whenever somebody busts out a camera. NO, DON’T TAKE MY PICTURE!! Who needs the aggravation, right?

This happened. Every. Time. Every time! Except this time. Oh, no, not this time, this time was different. This time I admitted to myself that I like exercising about as much as I like dieting, which is to say not at all. Having established that, I went about figuring out how to live a healthier life while staying true to my lazy, hunger pang-avoiding self. Remember that an exercise and diet plan is only as good as it is sustainable. That's actually a major theme of this book, so let me call it out so it really sinks in:

An exercise and diet plan is only

as good as it is sustainable.

Through a decent amount of research and self-reflection, I came up with a diet and exercise plan that has really worked for me, both in terms of effectiveness and sustainability. (I’ve kept the 40 lbs. off for almost three years now, which I consider to be the real miracle.) I’m convinced diet and exercise plans don’t get much more sustainable than mine, so keep reading if you’ve had trouble maintaining a sensible one.

No Hunger Games

People go through life doing whatever it is that they do without ever stopping to think about it; but they really should. So let’s stop and think about it. Specifically, let’s stop and think about everything you eat and drink over a given month, both in terms of what and how much you consume. Everybody pretty much eats the same things over and over again, so you probably rotate, say, 30-40 different meals over the 90 that you eat in that month. As for the roughly 30-60 snacks/desserts that you eat in that month, I’m guessing, for the most part, you rotate the same 10-15. This is what I call your culinary rotation.

I bet the vast majority of what and how much you eat in your rotation you learned from your parents and the rest you randomly picked up as you grew into adulthood. This has been your normal, but how well is your normal really working out? Based on the obesity rates in the United States today, the American normal is most definitely not working out. According to a 2013 Gallup poll, 27% of Americans are considered obese and 35% more are overweight based on the Body Mass Index (BMI) scale. I’m not a big fan of BMI's one-size-fits-all approach, but it’s a decent approximation of how unhealthy the American normal has made us. This book presents a new, much healthier normal designed with sustainability in mind.

Now imagine everything there is to eat and drink in the history of mankind. Realize that your rotation of 30-40 different meals and 10-15 snacks are a tiny fraction of what mankind has come up with over time. Trust me, there’s food outside your rotation that can healthily replace some of your worst food choices without you minding all that much. I bet you’ll even grow to prefer them (I did). Again, sustainability is key here, so my goal is to get you to a healthy weight without the hunger games. This book is about dieting smart, not hard.

For example, I’ll show you how to make a sweet, all-natural, easy-to-make, hunger-suppressing, kid-approved, super-food juice blend that’s even more nutritious than a spinach salad. If replacing really-not-that-good-for-you fruit juices and really-bad-for-you soda with this superfood juice blend is the one thing you get out of this book, it would already be a big success. It would make a big difference in the quality of calories you’re putting in your body. It’s not hard to make and I’ll go over what you need.

I go on to discuss other great-tasting alternatives to your regular diet choices that will have you shedding weight without the unsustainable hunger. Let’s begin your search for food that is healthy, satisfying, and worthy of your culinary