How you can stay fit and healthy (From The Northern Echo)

How you can stay fit and healthy

3:20pm Tuesday 23rd August 2011 in Peter Mullen By Peter Mullen

WHY this senseless panic about obesity?

There is no need for it. I’m a City rector and chaplain to half a dozen livery companies and so I do more than my fair share of wining and dining. OK I admit I haven’t got the figure of a stick insect, but, at 69, I’m in pretty good shape. Take up my City fitness plan and you can be too.

Exercise

Don’t pay fees to an expensive, smelly and pop-music infested gym with all that sweaty Lycra and MTV screens all around. Your own bedroom is good enough. Start by doing ten knees bends, ten press-ups and ten sit-ups.

Repeat the sequence three times. Over a period of weeks, build up until you’re doing thirty of each exercise and continue for 45 minutes. Take one day off each week. This programme will burn between 400 and 500 calories over the 45 minutes. I have some weights too and I add a bit of lifting just to vary the programme. After just a week or two, you will also start to feel terrific.

There’s so much rubbish talked about diet.

There are foods you should not eat, but they are easy to avoid because they are easily identified.

Don’t eat crisps or chocolate bars or doughnuts.

Also, never eat ready meals or the processed, packaged foods that fill the supermarket shelves. Instead, eat a varied diet of simple fresh foods.

Here are tasty meals for a week to keep you in trim:

Breakfasts

Monday: Two poached or boiled eggs and toast and butter.

Tuesday: A tin of tomatoes heated for two minutes in the microwave with a slice of fresh bread. You can add Tabasco to the tomatoes for spiciness and dip your bread in olive oil.

Wednesday: Sugar free muesli, fresh milk.

Thursday: Porridge – with a little brown sugar or honey.

Friday: Kippers from the supermarket fish counter.

Saturday: Two bananas.

Sunday: Egg and bacon.

Lunches

Never eat anything for lunch except fruit or green salad – tomatoes, lettuce, cucumber, garlic, spring onions, radishes and celery.

Evening meals

Monday: Roast chicken with roast potatoes and a green veg.

Tuesday: Liver and onions. Green beans.

Wednesday: Use the rest of the chicken to make a curry (chopped onions, chilli powder, turmeric, paprika, mixed spice, crushed garlic and salt) with boiled rice. Cook plenty of rice and save half in the fridge for later.

Thursday: Shin beef. Marinate the beef overnight in a bottle of the cheapest supermarket red plonk. When ready, pour off the red wine, reduce this in a pan and use as jus. Serve with any green veg.

Friday: Grilled cod or haddock, topped with a knob of unsalted butter, with new potatoes and peas. Get an extra piece of fish and save this in the fridge.

Saturday: Lamb shanks cooked on a low oven setting with chopped onions, potatoes, carrots and peas. Dried basil. You should cook this in half a pint of stock – a beef cube will do.

Sunday: Use up the remainder of the rice and fish to make a delicious kedgeree with chopped onions, two eggs in stock made from a chicken cube.