Walk off 3,000 Calories

Firm up and drop pounds with our 7-Day walking plan. Here's a turbo-charged seven-day walking plan guaranteed to burn about 3,000 calories.
Walk on a treadmill to determine how fast these paces feel before you take them on the road, or measure out your mileage and follow the mile-per-hour recommendation. Modify each session as needed. Start and end each session with five minutes of slow walking.
Day One 1 1/2 hours steady pace (13-min mile, 4.5 mph) Total calories burned: 470Day Two 60-min running/walking intervals: 5 min walking a 13-min mile: 26 calories 5 min running a 10-min mile (6 mph): 52 calories (repeat this sequence six times to total 60 min) Total calories burned: 468 Day Three 60-min jog/walk intervals: Sporadic intervals, at your discretion, running slower than a 10-min mile, walking a 13-min mile Total calories burned: 420 Day Four 60-min hike (on gravel, on a trail or at the beach) Total calories burned: 415 Day Five 50-min racewalking intervals: 5 min walking a 13-min mile: 25 calories 5 min racewalking (as fast as you can): 35 calories (repeat this sequence six times to total 60 min) Total calories burned: 360 Day Six 80-min jog/walk intervals: 20 min walking a 13-min mile: 100 calories 20 min jog/walking: 120 calories (repeat this sequence to total 80 min) Total calories burned: 440 Day Seven 60 min steady pace (13-minute mile) Total calories burned: 300

4 Foods to Avoid

While no diet will target ab flab specifically, "many of us tend to store fat around our abs," says Barbara J. Moore, Ph.D., president of Shape Up America!, "so losing weight in general will help decrease fat in that area." Avoid these diet don'ts to make your middle a flab-free zone.

1.Fully Loaded Baked Potato."A large baked potato equals three to four slices of bread, which could add up to 60 hefty grams of carbohydrates," says Lisa Dorfman, R.D., a triathlete from Miami and author of The Vegetarian Sports Nutrition Guide (John Wiley & Sons, 2000). Not to mention that cheese, sour cream and butter all pack on extra fat and calories.

Better bet: Top a small spud with fat-free salsa or a half cup of 1 percent milk-fat cottage cheese. A plain sweet potato is also a great alternative. It has more flavor, so you can skip the fatty toppings.

2.Pad Thai or Chow Fun. Many Asian dishes are just noodles with fattening oils and way too much sodium.

Better bet: If you crave noodles, order an appetizer portion and ask for the sauce on the side so you can control the oil and sodium-laden soy sauce.

3.Oil. "Some people add as much as five tablespoons of oil to their greens, for a whopping 70 fat grams or 600 calories," says Dorfman. That's more than your fat quota for the whole day.

Better bet: Bag the oil and make salads more interesting with texture (egg whites or beans), flavor (parsley and other herbs or balsamic vinegar) and crunch (croutons).

4.Alcohol. Liquor and beer pack tons of excess calories.

Better bet: Sip one glass of wine on occasion, but leave the beer guzzling to the college boys.

Flat, Sexy Abs

Our no-crunch system targets your abs in a whole new way to give you the leanest, firmest torso ever!

For those hoping to whittle their middle, doing crunch after crunch has always been ab-solute gospel. But experts are now shunning the traditional crunch in favor of a new, "functional" approach: to work the abs in ways similar to how the body naturally moves. The goal is to develop what is known as "core stability," or strength in the abs as well as other muscles in the back and torso. Core exercises take ab workouts to a whole new level, because instead of targeting the uppermost muscle (the rectus abdominis) and the obliques, you focus on deliberately contracting your transverse abdominis. The key to targeting the transverse and firming up your core is to flatten the lower abdominal area while doing balancing exercises. We asked Juan Carlos Santana, a conditioning specialist in Boca Raton, Florida, and Paul M. Juris, director of Equinox Fitness Training Institute in New York City, for their best crunchless moves to give you the ultimate ab workout. Here is one of the moves. For the entire workout, see the June issue of FITNESS.

I'm trying to eat more fresh produce, but it goes bad really quickly. Any storage tips?

Stash all produce that needs refrigeration in the cool, ASAP. Other than that, there's not a whole lot you can do short of renting a climate-controlled warehouse, says Richard Gladon, Ph.D., a horticulture professor at Iowa State University. What makes it so tricky? "Ideal temperatures for storage can vary not just from fruit to fruit and veggie to veggie, but sometimes even with each stage of ripeness," he says. If you still want to try to optimize your veggies' life span at home, though, remember that the temperature in your fridge varies slightly from shelf to shelf since heat rises, the bottom shelf tends to be the coldest. Use our chart (right) to help your produce keep its cool.

Room temperature (don't refrigerate at all): tomatoes, bananas, potatoes, onions, pears.
Lightly chilled (top shelf) citrus or subtropical fruits like oranges, grapefruits, lemons, melons, cranberries.
Downright frigid (lower shelf or crisper drawer) apples, strawberries, broccoli, asparagus, cabbage, "fresh-cut" items like salad mixes.

Fit in a Flash: The New 15 Minute Plan

Here's one of life's little ironies: It takes months to whip yourself into lean, mean shape but just a few weeks to get out of it. At least that's how it feels when you miss a few workouts and who hasn't at this time of the year? We've got a news flash: You can stay in shape and avoid gaining weight with just one or two superfast workouts a week. And each session can be as short as 15 minutes. (C'mon, even you have that!) The secret? Pushing the intensity during quickie sessions. FYI: If you stop exercising completely, it takes as long as three months to become unfit. In as few as two weeks, though, you'll notice little changes like less energy and strength. Research shows that as long as you hike up the intensity, shorter, less frequent workouts can hold off the damage indefinitely. We're featuring here the combo plan that combines cardio and strength training. When you're really pressed for time, you can squeak by with one combo session, but make every second count by working hard. Check out the December/January issue for the other two plans and when you can sneak in more time, couple up workouts for a 30 or 45 minute body blast. (Always warm up before and cool down after you exercise.) This holiday, you won't get fat!

Good, Better, Best Body

Our exclusive beginner-to-advanced guide to firming and toning your muscles into their sexiest

You squat, you lunge, you kick, you crunch. And as you get fitter, these basic moves get easier. Your body is a work in progress, so to sculpt the right curves in all the right places, your exercises should evolve along with you. We asked Reebok master trainer Petra Kolber to take the basic lunge as featured here two steps further. For more on the squat, ab curl, and leg lift, see the October issue ofFitness. The result is a series of moves that progressively stimulate your muscles to work harder so your body continues to improve. For each move, there's a good, better, and a best version (think bronze, silver, gold). They'll all make you stronger, since they target the same muscles. But the better and best moves push you harder with added jumps, balance components or increased gravitational pull. "Do the good version if you're tired or haven't been working out regularly," suggests Kolber. "When you're ready, plug in the next move. But if you can't do it with good form, do as many reps as you can correctly, then drop to the previous level for the remaining sets." Do three sets of 8 to 12 reps of at least one exercise in each series; use 5 to 10 pound weights. Feel free to mix and match the moves. "Switching things around is a terrific way to keep seeing results," says Kolber. By pumping up your program, you'll be on the way to your best body yet!

Best Overall Body: Triatheletes

What you see: strong, broad shoulders, a fit core and well-developed, powerful legs
Key muscles: nearly every muscle, emphasizing the shoulders, quadriceps and hamstrings.
Coaching insight: Triathletes train every muscle group, and the result is a fit, healthy body, says Michelle Blessing, coach of the U.S. Olympic Triathlon Team.
Weekly workout: swim 8 hours; cycle 10 hours; run 6 to 7 hours; weight-train 2 hours.
Your best moves: Alternate between weight and explosive moves. First, do 15 squats, then stand in front of a step and jump on and off with both feet as fast as you can for 15 reps. For upper body, do 15 overhead throws with a 2-kilogram medicine ball: Hold it behind your head, elbows bent, then bring it over your head and throw it to the ground. Finish with abs: 20 crunches, 50 oblique crunches and 20 back extensions.
On the bike and on the road: Do intervals. Start with a warm-up, then alternate between 2 minutes of hard effort and 2 minutes of easy effort for 20 minutes. In the pool: After warming up, swim one length as fast as you can; rest, then swim another fast length. Repeat for 10 lengths, then cool down for 10 minutes.
Our model says: I’ll try anything that’s fun and outdoorsy running, rock climbing, mountain biking, says triathlete Petit Pinson. It’s important to find a workout that motivates you.

Get a Gold Medal Body

When the Olympics heat up this month, the spotlight will be on supersculpted,high-performance bodies. Build one for yourself with our insider’s training guide.

Call it the Oscars of the sporting scene: It’s time for the Olympic Games, as the world’s best athletes converge in the Land Down Under to vie for the gold, silver and bronze. And while you’re watching them run, kick and swim their way to glory, you may notice something else besides muscle power: to-die-for bodies. Can their workout secrets help you gain a better body, too?

Yes, if you jump on the biggest training trend: plyometrics explosive moves in which groups of muscles work together which athletes depend on to develop speed, power and coordination. We took the hottest Olympic sports and asked top coaches for their gold-medal moves. We are featuring the Triahlete's workout here but for the other sports, see the September issue of FITNESS. Now you can train like a winner and whip yourself into award-winning shape!

Maximize Your Fat Blast

For most of us, a little fat burning is never enough. We step, spin and punch our way through workout after workout to sweat off our bumps and bulges. So we decided to get technical and research the absolute best way to take a body from its resting state, when it burns about 1.25 calories per minute, to its fat-burning prime — smoking up to 12 calories per minute. The result: This four-step fat-burning formula, which combines 25 minutes of back-to-back weight moves without rest — a.k.a. supersets — with 30 minutes of aerobic intervals. All you need are 5- to 12-pound dumbbells and a bench. Warm up with light cardio for 10 minutes. Do three sets of 15 repetitions of each exercise within each superset. Vary the order of the strength exercises and the activity choice, as well as the intensity of the aerobic intervals. Do this workout three times a week to turn yourself into a fat-fighting machine! We're featuring Superset #1 here. See the March issue for the rest of the routine.

Fat-Proof Your Butt

Take the jiggle out of your wiggle with this super-firming move to target muscles in your butt.

You've squatted and lunged with the best of them, yet your butt still won't shape up. What gives? You've learned the first truth about the backside: It's stubborn! While some muscles respond quickly to exercise, the butt often—pardon the expression—lags behind, since it naturally carries more fat. The key to targeting the whole bunch of muscles (there are 10 to be exact) is to keep your leg moves varied. We asked Los Angeles-based trainer Keli Roberts to give us some butt-defying exercises, one of which is featured here, that hone in on all the muscles back there. Do our workout as featured in the July issue ofFITNESS at home or in the gym; all you need is a bench or step and a pair of light dumbbells. Do one to two sets of 10 to 15 reps for each move, three times a week. Add some cardio activity to your routine, and within six weeks, you'll be sitting pretty with a brand-new behind. Now, squeeze it!

How-to's of good health

In a recent issue of Lancet, I came across an interesting report about a flight attendant who went to a clinic complaining of persistent problems with diarrhea, which had been occurring for seven years. Other doctors had done many tests but had found no explanation other than that she had irritable bowel syndrome. The doctors at the clinic did another battery of tests and also found nothing wrong — until they took a detailed medical history from her. It turns out she was chewing 60 sticks of "sugar-free" gum containing a total of 75 grams of sorbitol every day. Sorbitol is a type of sugar that isn't digested, so it has no calories. But because it isn't absorbed, it gets carried out of the body with a lot of water — and that's what can cause diarrhea. In my book Modern Prevention I reported a similar case of a 47-year-old woman with a four-year history of gastrointestinal problems that others had attributed to a "nervous stomach." I would never have made the right diagnosis until she opened her purse and started sucking some mints. Five minutes later, she took two more. She told me she ate them all day. They, too, contained sorbitol. When she stopped using the mints, her diarrhea cleared up.

Sorbitol is one of those ingredients usually listed in fine print and present in many "sugar-free" products like chewing gum, candy, fruit juices, mints and canned fruit. Diabetics take it because it isn't absorbed like glucose. Doses of ten to 20 grams of sorbitol a day can cause gas, bloating, cramps and diarrhea. I checked the label on a well-known brand of mints and found that a single mint contained two grams! So eating even five or six mints a day could end up giving you problems.

Meating Out a Compromise

That night at dinner, I tried to use what I had learned. We ate Mexican. My friend had the chicken-and-cheese quesadilla; I had the wild-mushroom tamale. Mushrooms are high in NIACIN, good for reducing bad CHOLESTEROL, and CHROMIUM, good for preventing type II diabetes. I was being good, but that chicken quesadilla was also looking good. Damn good. That's when I called Audrey Cross for a second opinion.

"I think you can eat meat," she said, "just in smaller quantities. Populations where people get 60 to 70 percent of their calories from complex carbohydrates and 10 to 15 percent from fat and 10 to 15 percent from protein are very healthy. I tell people to think of meat as a condiment, not the focus of the meal." In America, meat as condiment means Bac*Os, but in other parts of the world, like China, it accurately describes their diet of mostly vegetables, rice and a little bit of meat. On a hunch, I asked Barnard when girls in China tend to reach puberty. "Around seventeen," he answered. And breast cancer? "Rare," he said.

That did it. For my grandfather's generation, it is probably too late to undo the damage caused by a lifetime of eggs for breakfast and steak for dinner. For my grandfather himself, it's definitely too late — he died of colon cancer when I was a senior in college. (Colon cancer has been linked to a diet high in fat and low in the dietary fiber found in fruits and vegetables, what he used to contemptuously call "rabbit food.") But it's not too late for me. After all, I am a 31-year-old grown-up woman. My mom isn't cooking me hamburgers for lunch anymore. I live in an era of unprecedented nutritional diversity — grocery stores now carry as many as 30,000 items. There's simply no excuse not to start eating more healthily. I may still wake up at 40 with a malignant lump in my breast or at 50 with heart trouble, but if I do, at least I'll know that I did everything within my power to stay healthy.

Eating with the Grain

Barnard makes no bones (so to speak) about his anti-meat bias. "We are not really meant to be carnivores," he said, scanning the menu before settling on vegetarian pad-thai. "If we were, we'd be able to make VITAMIN C in our own bodies, like dogs and cats can. Instead, we have fingers for plucking fruits and vegetables that are high in vitamin C. We don't have the extremely keen eyesight that typical carnivores have, and we're not very fast like lions or any of the felines."

"What about chicken?" I asked. "I bet I could catch one of them."

"Chicken doesn't really work," he said. "It's a little like switching to a filtered cigarette instead of quitting smoking. It doesn't make a lot of difference if the meat was attached to a cow's bone, a fish's bone or a chicken's bone. It's all an animal's muscle — PROTEIN with fat mixed in. There's no DIETARY FIBER or complex CARBOHYDRATES or vitamin C in there. The leanest beef is 29 percent fat; the leanest chicken is 20 to 23 percent fat, and that's without the skin. Compare that to beans, which are four percent fat, and rice, which is one percent fat."

If you think a pill can make up for any deficiency in your diet, forget it. "DIETARY SUPPLEMENTS aren't the answer," Barnard said. "Our bodies are designed to extract VITAMINS and MINERALS from foods, not pills. A tablet may contain a lot of, say, BETA-CAROTENE, but it may be missing hundreds of other CAROTENOIDS that might be even more significant."

It all seemed pretty simple. The healthiest diet is one that contains a lot of plant foods — vegetables, whole grains, legumes and fruit. Choose these over things like burgers and chips, and you end up with a full supply of NUTRIENTS, plus dietary fiber to ward off colon cancer. Eat this way and there will also be less room left for the more calorie-dense foods like meat. But when I tried to contemplate Barnard's steakless, fishless, chickenless world — the world without Noah and his ark — it was bleak. I found it hard to believe nature would want that for us. If we're not meant to eat cheeseburgers, why do we crave them?

"It's true," Barnard sighed, "people mainly crave the foods that did not originally exist in our diet. All I can say is that cravings are the worst possible indicator of what your body actually needs. What do we crave? Alcohol, tobacco, opiates and fatty, salty foods. Why? I don't know. Some people theorize that it's a survival instinct left over from when we went through cycles of famine."

A Question of "What?" Not "How Much?"

Better advice for maintaining health and losing weight, says Neal Barnard, M.D., the author of Eat Right, Live Longer (Crown), is to forget about how much you are eating and concentrate on what you are eating. Barnard is sort of the Ralph Nader of broccoli, a zealot who spends his days bothering regulatory committees, publishing papers and sending press releases about the connection between diet and disease. He grew up in North Dakota, the son of a family in the livestock business. But while he was in medical school, after one particularly gruesome autopsy of a heart-attack victim whose arteries had been strangled by plaque, Barnard decided to stop eating meat.

"Cardiovascular disease," he says, "is the number-one killer disease in America, but it is not an inevitable part of aging. When they did autopsies of soldiers during the Korean war, they found that atherosclerosis had already begun in the Americans — even though they were young and fit — but there was none in the Asians. There's no question it was diet related." After reading Barnard's book, I asked him out for lunch to a Thai restaurant near his spartan offices in Washington, D.C.

A Dietary Shift

A hundred years ago, when refrigeration was not widespread and our diet contained much less meat and FAT, the average age of menarche was sixteen or seventeen. Today it is twelve and a half. Early puberty may not seem like a big deal by itself, until you realize that it has been linked to higher rates of breast cancer, a disease that one out of every eight American women will one day be diagnosed with.

I don't blame my mother for my early diet. It's only in the past ten years or so that we have begun to make the connection between diet and illness. But study after study has slowly led us to the inexorable truth: We have a lot more control over our health than we ever thought. According to the National Academy of Sciences, six out of the ten leading killer diseases are diet related.

This ought to have changed the way we eat. It hasn't. Only nine percent of the population eats the recommended five fruits or vegetables a day. "When we ask what people are eating," says Audrey Cross, Ph.D., a nutritionist and lawyer at the Columbia University School of Public Health who has worked with the federal government on setting up dietary guidelines, "it's more like two to three servings, and one of the vegetables is usually potatoes in the form of chips."

It's been years since I ate potato chips. They are fattening and I am vain. But that doesn't mean I eat a self-consciously healthy diet. When I question my food choices, I usually ask, "Will this make me fat?," not "Will this make me healthy?" In any case, I am not alone. Meat and egg sales, once on the decline, are rising — the average American now eats 64 pounds of beef a year. Last year's best-selling diet book, The Zone (Harper Collins), by Barry Sears and Bill Lawren, may have helped some people lose weight, but many nutritionists think it's a terrible way to eat for long-term health. "When you look around the world, the only people who eat a diet of predominantly fat and meat are Eskimos, and that's because their diet fits their latitude," says Cross.