The 8-Hour Diet (33 page)

EXERCISE 16a

Lie on your back on the floor and place your heels on a bench or ottoman. Place your arms at an angle next your sides, palms down. Your legs should be completely straight. Now pull your toes toward your body, press your heels into the bench, and lift your hips off the floor until your body forms a straight line from shoulders to knees. Hold that position.

EXERCISE 16b

Lie on your left side and prop your upper body up on your left forearm. Now brace your core, squeeze your glutes, and raise your hips until your body forms a straight line from shoulder to ankles. On your next set, switch sides.

MAKE IT EASIER

Before you raise your body, bend your knees 90 degrees.

MAKE IT HARDER

Lift your top leg and hold it there.

A
re you ready for the best workout of your life? This ultimate workout plan will tone your muscles and melt away fat faster than ever.

When you’re on the 8-Hour Diet, you have a secret advantage over every other person you see pumping iron at the gym, stretching at the yoga studio, or sweating it out along the jogging trail. You’re not working any harder than they are. But your body is building
muscle and burning fat faster than theirs.

It’s really kind of unfair.

But it’s why you simply don’t have to exercise as long or as vigorously as most folks do to get the physical benefits you’re looking for. In just 8 minutes, you can set your body up for more lean, toned muscle and a greater all-day calorie burn. You just need the right workout. Fortunately, you’ve come to the right place.

To get those muscle-building, fat-burning, 8-minute benefits, I turned to
Men’s Health
fitness guru BJ Gaddour, a metabolic training expert and the man behind the bestselling fitness plan Speed Shred. He’s doing more for people with eight DVDs than many in the fitness industry have done for them over the course of decades. BJ has an incredible physique, but he describes himself as a “former fatty”—and he has the photographic evidence to prove it. But what we didn’t know until recently was that he only achieved part of his weight loss through devoted exercise. The rest: his own version of the 8-Hour Diet.

Just like Barack Obama, who experimented with fasting when he made his turn toward being a serious student at Columbia University, Gaddour assessed his life and wasn’t happy with what he saw. And like Obama, Gaddour found he could dramatically improve his life by rethinking the way he ate. Fasting helped both of them turn it around—waistline, life goals, satisfaction, all of it.

Gaddour was first exposed to the idea of skipping meals at an early age by his father, Brahim Gaddour, who had emigrated to the United States from Tunisia as a young man. Gaddour the elder would fast in observance of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. In addition to his religious goals, Brahim used his holy month as a weight-loss tool. But he didn’t ever change his diet. He maintained that he simply couldn’t eat as much in a single sitting during Ramadan because his stomach would shrink.

But it may have been because he exercised while fasting.

When Ramadan was scheduled during summer months, BJ watched
in awe as his father challenged himself to work outdoors, to test himself in the sweltering heat. He found his father’s sheer level of mental determination and dietary discipline awe inspiring. But he also noted how the physical element helped reinforce his father’s observance of the fast.

It will vastly enrich yours, too.

Fasting and physical fitness began turning BJ Gaddour’s life around at age 13, but he continued to struggle with weight gain into his adult years. When he finally committed to a pattern of eating for 8 hours a day and matching that with very targeted workout programs, he assumed the ultrafit form you see on him today—exhorting exercisers with his DVD series, or on his Web site
StreamFIT.com
. We’re not saying you’ll become a fitness guru yourself in just 8 minutes a day, but you can turbocharge your fat loss in that time—no time flat.

Gaddour has created an amazing 8-minute metabolic workout that you can do immediately upon waking, when you’d otherwise be eating breakfast. It will accelerate your fat-burning metabolism and provide the kind of focal point you need when Dunkin’ Donuts beckons. Not only is this quick-hitter workout entirely equipment-free, you don’t even have to join a gym. You can do all the moves at home, in a hotel room, in your office, indoors or outdoors, and they will burn 15 to 20 calories worth of body fat, or more, per minute. In your fasting state, you’ll already be selectively burning body fat; this workout will torch even more. And on top of all that, it will target every muscle in your body to skyrocket your postworkout metabolism and keep your fat-and-calorie burn going.

This total body circuit can be as easy or as challenging as you want to make it—and you don’t need to work hard to get remarkable results. Start with the simplest moves, and when they become familiar and easy, move to the more challenging variations Gaddour specifies. No matter what level you choose, you’ll kick off an adrenaline release that will help chase stubborn fat from your belly, hips, and thighs. And in just 8 minutes you can deplete glycogen, the sugar stored in your skeletal muscles and liver, which forces your body to burn more fat for fuel at all other times, including rest periods and between workouts.

Ready to start? Set your watches: This will only take 0.133333 of an hour! (Did we mention it was 8 minutes long?)

Alternate between Workouts A, B, and C. So if you do A on Monday, try B on Wednesday and C on Friday or Saturday. Then back to A. You know the drill, right?

For the first 2 weeks, take a day of rest between workouts to recover. You’ll quickly build up strength and endurance.

For weeks 3 and 4, perform a workout every day. Hey, it’s only 8 minutes!

Start by performing each exercise within each circuit in the exact order listed for 30 seconds of work followed by 30 seconds of rest between exercises.

Each subsequent week, add 5 seconds of work and take away 5 seconds of rest until you end up converting this bodyweight circuit into a complex where you perform each move for 60 seconds with no rest between movements!