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The guys each had to fill in a diary listing every meal, every drink and every cigarette, plus all activities (or lack of them) for five whole days (including a weekend, of course – we wanted to catch them on their most indulgent days). We're not going to bore you with every detail, so we've done an average round up to give you the general picture.
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Dan, 22, Advertising copy writer
Vital statistics
Height: 5'9" (172.5cm)
Weight: 11 3/4st (74kg)
Chest: 44"
Waist: 34"
Eats: Not much. This ranged from just a cheese and pickle sarnie one day to
an egg sandwich, pub lunch and a bag of crisps on his biggest-eating day. Not
much scoff, Dan – what do you survive on, fresh air?
Drinks: Average 2 units a day [pretty controlled if you ask us] Smokes:
20-25 ciggies a day
Action: Not loads, but at least he went for a 'brisk ten-minute walk' every
day – not bad, we thought anyway
Eric tells him: The most important contribution you can make to your long-term
general health and wellbeing, you won't be surprised to hear, is to stop smoking.
The main thing about smoking is that it drastically reduces your life expectancy:
you're only half as likely to reach the age of 75 as a non-smoker.
Combined with other aspects of your lifestyle, your 25-a-day habit is sowing the seeds of some pretty nasty health problems in middle age and beyond.
On the diet front, although you skip a lot of your main meals, you're around a stone overweight. [We find this hard to believe – Finula] The main reasons for this are that when you do eat, you go for high-fat and high-sugar junk food and snacks, rounded off with a couple of pints of high-calorie beer.
However, you're not using up the calories that you consume because the only physical activity you do is about 10 minutes walking a day. [Er, we thought that was quite a lot.]
Action plan
1 Stop smoking – this is the single most important thing you can do.
Try Alan Carr's books, self-hypnosis tapes, some of the many Nicorette products
now on the market (gum, patches, tablets etc) – anything till you find what
works for you.
2 Eat more, but proper meals instead of high-fat snacks. Try and get in
the habit of eating high-fibre, low-fat, carbohydrate-based foods that fill you
up but aren't fattening. You'll be able to eat much more but still lose weight.
3 Get some exercise – this isn't as impossible as it sounds –
once you get into the habit of it, you won't
be able to stop
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