The Dukan Diet (23 page)

When I say “walk,” I don’t mean power walking or strolling. I mean brisk walking. Imagine you have to get to the post office before going
to work and you have no time to lose. Nothing more, nothing less. You can also enhance your walking by choosing the best time of day and by adding some specific extras.

Walking immediately after a meal increases calorie combustion by 30 percent. If within 30 minutes of finishing a meal you get up and walk, not only will you burn up what is required for the walking, but at the same time you will raise the thermal effect of digestion, and also your body heat, which effectively lowers the meal’s caloric value. So here you have a way, albeit small, of repairing possible misdemeanors while dieting.

Here I don’t mean walking backward, but rather making full use of the moment when one leg is behind, to increase calorie combustion and tone “forgotten” muscles.

Seasoned walkers look straight ahead as they walk, instinctively searching in front of them for a foothold. This is called the forward movement time. The front foot is in the air, and the thigh is following while the other leg passively goes into a backward position. The forward movement time sets the quadriceps to work. The abdominal muscles are also made to work, as is the hamstring connected to the tibia, which with each step lifts up before the foot to stop it from scuffing the ground.

To walk better, you also need to work the muscles controlling the back leg. For example, once the left foot has finished taking the forward step, it returns to the vertical position and passively starts to take up the position of back leg. Here you can take control and turn this into an active time. Instead of letting your foot go back like a pendulum, keep it on the ground. When you do this, you will automatically contract the left buttock muscle and hamstring. Doing this burns twice the calories and makes the back of your body work as hard as the front.

Beneficial at any age, standing up straight, or “walking tall,” is a marvelous way of getting more out of your walking. We are not talking just about an exercise here but about how you go about your whole life.

What exactly do we mean by standing up straight? Quite simply, aligning your head with your chest, elongating your neck, and drawing your shoulders backward and down.

For young people, adopting this posture gives them natural elegance, grace, and style. This is an additional benefit on top of the extra calories consumed by standing up straight, because this position gets an impressive number of different muscles working.

For men and women over age 50, standing up straight and walking with their head held high makes them look younger. How is this so? As a simple experiment, look around you. After wrinkles, graying hair, and a sagging jawline, one of the first signs of aging is stooping forward with a scrunched-up neck. To my mind, stooping ages you far more than being overweight. So lose weight by following the diet and walking tall!

Many dieters with a sedentary lifestyle don’t know where to begin in choosing an exercise program, so I have chosen four exercises that address two concerns: weight loss in the most muscular areas and intensity of calorie combustion. This is also in response to requests from patients whose weight loss has resulted in flabbiness and excess skin in the four most vulnerable areas: the stomach, the arms, the buttocks, and the thighs.

After you lose over 15 pounds, a race develops between the disappearing fat and the skin. In fact, fat disappears quicker than the skin is able to
“snap back,” and this disparity is even more notable in areas where the skin is very fine and most put to use.

Women complain most commonly about surplus skin and loss of elasticity in four areas. I will first list these problem areas and then go on to prescribe one specific exercise for each area.

An important note:
If you are extremely overweight, doing Exercises #1 and #2 in bed will not offer you enough support. However, both of these exercises can also be performed on the floor, with or without an exercise mat.

This exercise is my Swiss army knife. I devised it for myself and have been using it for twenty years, and for almost three years I have been prescribing it to my patients.

Apart from walking, if there is only one exercise you ever stick to, I would ask you to choose this one. Why? Because it is simple and can be incorporated effortlessly into your daily routine. You do it in bed, once when you wake up, and again before you go to sleep. It is exceptionally effective and enables you to work a large range of muscle groups—stomach, thighs, and arms.

Position a pillow and a cushion on your bed to make a comfortable inclined plane of about 45°. Lie down with your back on this inclined plane—head down, buttocks raised. Bend your knees and with your arms outstretched, hold your knees, either clasping them from above or on the inside or on the outside—whichever is more comfortable for you. In this half-supine position, raise your chest vertically using only your stomach muscles and
without
any help from your arms. Then lower yourself onto your cushion and pillow support. Try to do this 15 times without using your arms.

Once you have managed this 15 times, start again from scratch, lifting yourself up with your arm muscles now instead of your stomach muscles. Raise your chest to a vertical position, pulling only with your
biceps—the large muscles of the front of your upper arms—which are much weaker than your stomach muscles. Try to do this 15 times, which makes 30 times in total for your morning session.

In the evening, when you lie down to sleep, follow the same sequence, bringing the day’s total to 60 times so that from day 1 you are building up firmness in your abdominal wall and biceps. This exercise also works your thigh muscles and takes only a minute or so both morning and evening.

Every day try to add 1 more repetition to both the stomach and arm muscles exercises, both morning and evening—that is, a total of 31 in the morning + 31 in the evening on the second day; 32 + 32 on the third day; until you can manage 100 in the morning and another 100 in the evening. By the time you get to this point, these 200 exercises will only take you 3 minutes, which is hardly any time at all.

Thanks to this incredibly effective and efficient exercise, your once flabby stomach will become toned and flat again.

I do this exercise every day immediately after the Dukan Diet Special. It is extremely effective: the buttocks, the back of the arms, and the backs of the thighs warm up very quickly, very powerfully, and I feel them getting toned. Moreover, to my mind this exercise is fun, for, as you will see, it has a “trampoline” element.

Start by removing the pillow and cushion. Lie flat on your back with your arms outstretched on the bed. With feet hip-distance apart, place your feet about 2 feet from your buttocks. Your knees are bent, and your thighs are long. In this position, pushing down both on your outstretched arms and also on your feet and the muscles in the back of the thighs, make a bridge shape by raising your buttocks toward the ceiling until your chest and legs are aligned on a perfectly sloping straight line. Once you are aligned, lower yourself quickly, bounce off the mattress and go up again until you form a straight line again. The trampoline
effect makes the exercise easier and helps you keep going until you feel warmth and tone creeping into the back of your arms, the backs of your thighs, and your buttocks.

Again, start off doing this exercise 30 times and then another 30 times later when you go to bed. Doing this exercise 60 times a day will not take more than 1½ minutes as you do one repetition after the other. If you cannot manage 30 times, this means your pelvis and backside are very heavy, and that your muscle base in particular is weak or atrophied. If this is so, do not worry. Do a little less, knowing that these muscles quickly adapt and that before long you will manage it. However, try to do a minimum of 10 lifts in the morning and then 10 again in the evening, because your difficulties prove that you really need to do this exercise.

As with the previous exercise, try and add another repetition each day so that eventually you do 100 in the morning and 100 at night. By then your chest and pelvis will look slimmer from the weight loss, and toned and muscular from combining these two exceptional exercises.

This exercise has a double benefit: It uses up the most calories as it works the body’s biggest muscle, the quadriceps, which as its name suggests is made up of four muscle sheaths. It also tackles one of the areas most affected by cellulite. It aims to burn up calories and at the same time fill the empty space where the fat used to be with firm thigh muscle.

Stand, in front of a mirror if possible, placing your feet slightly apart so that you are firm and steady, and support yourself by placing both hands on a table or sink. Slowly crouch down, bending your knees until your buttocks touch your heels. Then straighten up and return to your starting position.

Although difficult, this exercise produces great results. How well it goes depends on your weight, where this weight is concentrated, and how fit you are. If you are very heavy—over 200 pounds—you will have trouble doing it once. If this is so, try the exercise without going the
whole way. Do what you can. As the days and weeks pass, and through practice, the time will come when you can complete your first whole exercise. Soon afterward, you will do a second, and then you will be away and achieving the ideal number for someone who is overweight, a sequence of 15, which means you are not far off your True Weight.

If from the very first day you can manage this exercise at least once, you can get up to 15 repetitions in 2 weeks by adding another 1 more each day as long as you feel able, and by not allowing yourself to go into reverse unless it is to let your muscles recover a little by going back to what you did the day before. As soon as you have finished your first sequence of 15, aim for 30, but take your time. Adding another repetition every week suits me fine.

Once you have got to 30, you will have firm, nicely curved thighs, and eight little monster muscles, four per quadriceps, which will spend their time burning up calories day and night. This is because the good news about your muscles is that they continue to burn calories after you have finished exercising. Although at a lower rate than during exercise, calorie combustion carries on continually day and night for 72 hours. This is why it is important to keep going and link the exercises to one another. Ideally you should be active every single day.

Women’s arms provide a good indication of their weight problem history. Most women with cellulite on their thighs also have heavy arms. When these women lose weight, they lose it more easily from their arms than from their thighs, and very often the result is flabby skin. There are not many solutions for this common problem. Creams do not work. Surgery is not advised as it leaves too much scarring. Following is my favorite exercise for the arms. It is comprehensive, simple, and effective, and you will find it is the only one you need.

The advantage of this exercise is that it works two opposing muscles
simultaneously—the biceps in the front of the arm and the triceps in the back—so it develops the muscles and tightens the flabby skin.

Stand up straight and hold a 1½-quart bottle of water or an object of similar weight. Start the exercise with your arms by your side, stretching down toward the ground. Then bend the forearm of one arm, bringing the bottle up to touch your shoulder. Stretch your arm and bring it back down to the original vertical position. Then take it farther behind you with your arm stretched back as far as possible until you reach a horizontal position or even farther. The first part of this exercise contracts the biceps; the second part contracts the triceps.

The complete exercise should be done 15 times for each arm. Try and do as many as you can, and if you can keep it up, then go for it, as a muscle only undergoes growth when under maximum pressure. Once you have done this exercise 15 times a day for a week, try to increase each week first to 20 then to 25, so that by the end of the first month you can manage 30 in succession. After that, be guided by how you feel, but already your arms will be firmer and more muscular.