“I haven’t been to the gym in 13 years,” he tells us.

Until recently, Fevola hasn’t exactly felt his best physically, and he makes no attempt to obscure that fact. “After I retired, I just didn’t see the point because I had no reason to keep fit,” he says. “Eating as much as I used to was fine when I was playing footy, because I burnt a lot of it off with exercise. But after I started not exercising as much, it all stacked up.”

Fevola, before his weight loss transformation

Earlier this year, Fevola decided it was time to make a change. “I’m getting old now at 43, but I want to be able to keep up with my kids, and when you’re carrying a bit of extra weight that’s harder to do,” he says.

He was cautious of hitching his wagon to any plan of action that claimed to be a silver bullet, however. “I’ve tried to lose weight a few times before and have done a few challenges, but I haven’t really stuck with any of them and have just ended up putting the weight back on.”

Today, Fevola is a changed man. He’s lost 30kg on the year and shed 16kg in just the last month by overhauling his diet with a 30-day challenge with keto.com.au.

While he hadn’t had much success in getting fit in the past, Fevola did recognise that fixing his diet was crucial. If he could do that, everything else would fall into place, he says. “My main problem was my diet. I used to eat pasta, pizza and chips every day. I reckon I had hot chips with gravy for lunch every day for like two years.”

Based on his previous experiences with diet plans, Fevola found that, to get results, he needed to limit his carbohydrate intake but maintain his ingestion of fats. This made a ketogenic diet – which is a low-carb, high-fat eating plan designed to get the body into a state of ketosis, where it burns fat for fuel instead of carbohydrates – the logical choice.

Fevola’s role in breakfast radio on Fox FM also presented a challenge, with the footballer being forced to structure his eating habits around atypical hours while also battling tiredness throughout the day. “My lifestyle can just flatten me sometimes,” he says. “The breakfast hours I work mean I’m tired at the wrong times, and before I was just eating constant carbs and not getting the good stuff to keep me awake. I don’t want to put all the blame on breakfast hours though, because you can still eat well at those times, but it’s all about the decisions you make.”

Fevola signed up for a 30-day challenge where he would only eat keto.com.au meals for a full month, with the aim of changing his diet cold turkey and reaping the rewards. He had a variety of ketogenic meals and snacks delivered to his door, which made up most of his caloric intake every day – completing the total overhaul of his diet.

Given his previous experiences with dieting, it’s easy to understand why Fevola was pragmatic about the potential outcomes of his challenge. “Really, I just wanted to try this out and see if it worked,” he says. It did.

When he speaks to Men’s Health, Fevola has one day left of his 30-day challenge, but he’s already seeing results across the board after losing of 16kg. Although, he insists weight loss wasn’t his primary goal. “I didn’t really do it for weight loss. It was more about feeling better and changing my habits.”

After completing his keto.com.au challenge, Fevola’s habits have been well and truly changed. “Before, my meals were always something full of carbs, now I look for something else to eat. Today I had cottage cheese, avocado and tomato in a bowl for lunch. I would never have that before, but it’s clean and it makes me feel good,” he says.

“I’ve been having keto bars for the last month if I get hungry, and they fill you up. Then I’ll have one of [keto.com.au’s] healthy ready-made meals for lunch and dinner and that’ll be it,” Fevola continues. “I was eating like 5 or 6 meals a day before, now I’m down to just three.”

But it isn’t just the quantity of Fevola’s meals that has improved for the better, it’s also the quality, thanks to the healthier alternatives provided by keto.com.au meals. “Instead of having fried rice or chips, I’m having cauliflower rice and cauliflower mash. There’s a mac and cheese, which you’d think isn’t good for you, but you swap out some of the ingredients for cauliflower and it is. Then there’s a zucchini pasta, and I love pasta coming from an Italian background, but I never would’ve eaten zucchini before.”

Fevola’s new outlook isn’t limited to weight loss either. He’s also been taking keto.com.au Sleep+ gummies to improve his sleep. “I’ve never been a great sleeper,” he says. “But now I sleep through the whole night right up to my alarm.” keto.com.au offers a wide range of gummies, some of which can help you sleep better, while others can help control insulin spikes or quickly convert fat into energy and switch your body into a ketosis state.

All in all, Fevola has lost around 30kg in the last 12 months – 16 of which were shed in August with his keto diet – and has reduced his previous total bodyweight of around 130kg by more than 25%. So, will he stick with it? To that question, Fevola provides a characteristically unconventional answer. “I’m not going to make any promises that will get printed, but I hope so,” he says before signing off.

If you’re keen on trying out the keto diet for yourself, you can sign up for keto.com.au’s meal delivery service, or shop a range of keto gummies and bars, here.

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What you can and can’t drink on keto

The post Brendan Fevola reveals the diet that helped him lose 16kg in 1 month appeared first on Men's Health Magazine Australia.

Enough of the pessimism. Forty isn’t the death knell you think it is, and a super fit guy like Steve Harris – who recently got into “the best shape I’ve been in” – proves that you can get the results you want, whenever you want, as long as you’re willing to commit to a stringent workout routine and diet plan.

Like many who decide to undergo a physical transformation, Harris’ journey started when he stepped onto the scales and wasn’t pleased with the number he saw. “It was my all-time high in terms of weight,” he tells Men’s Health. “I felt unhealthy, despite going to the gym regularly. My clothes weren’t fitting right and I felt tired and lacking in energy staring at a screen all day as a financial analyst. I figured this was the motivation I needed to kick-start the journey to getting back in shape.”

While he recognised he needed to make a change, Harris was no stranger to working out and living an active lifestyle. He’d been going to the gym for more than 20 years and playing basketball competitively and socially for most of his adult life, but as he reached his late thirties, he began realising that the same training methods that once served him well no longer got the job done. “Keeping in shape became far more challenging,” he says.

Already training regularly without getting the results he wanted, Harris sought out a personal trainer at Ultimate Performance Sydney to help optimise his routine with expert guidance. “I figured it was time to address it, bring in a professional and learn the skills required to make meaningful change as I approach middle-age.”

Looking back on his progress, Harris says finding the right trainer was crucial in achieving his goals. “Having someone there with the expertise to alter my training regime and specific exercises to cater to my age and injury history was critical,” Harris says. “My Ultimate Performance trainer (shout out to Tom) built my training from the ground up. I relearnt multiple exercises I had been cheating myself on for years. Slowing movements down, focusing on training to failure and forgoing the ego-lifting.”

Harris’ journey to getting jacked was no cakewalk. The 40-year-old trained four times a week – twice with a trainer and twice by himself – with a consistent, full-body plan for every workout. Each session included one compound exercise, like squats or deadlifts, followed by alternating sets of flat and incline chest press, dead-hang pull-ups, seated rows and leg press.

This routine wasn’t all that different than what Harris had been doing for years already, but his methods changed drastically. Under the guidance of his trainer, Harris adopted a focus on time under tension, meaning he slowed down his reps and reduced his use of momentum during lifts. This was challenging, especially during Harris’ least favourite exercise, the pendulum squat, but it paid off.  “I didn’t realise how much I was resting at the top of the rep to catch my breath. The pendulum squat essentially took that away and I was load bearing the entire set.”

As for his diet, that required a wholesale rework. “I always believed I ate relatively healthy, but during the transformation my trainer, Tom Coker, laid out my daily calorie limit and macros. It was definitely eye-opening,” Harris says.

On his new diet plan, Harris’ standard breakfast was oats and black coffee. He kept things light over lunch, with rice cakes, tomatoes and tuna. Dinner was typically poached chicken and vegetables, or a pre-made meal. If he was hungry between meals, a protein bar or shake would suffice..

After going cold turkey with his new lifestyle, diet and training routine, Harris struggled for the first week but found major compositional changes shortly after. Overall, he lost 10kg and 14.5 per cent of his body fat in about five months, but the changes weren’t purely physical. “The most life-changing part is the way I feel on a daily basis. Without sounding cliched, there’s a spring in my step. I feel on point, I feel healthy, I feel fit,” he says.

Let’s not pretend there weren’t physical changes though. “I’m a lot stronger now, my energy levels have significantly improved and I’m sleeping a lot better,” Harris says. “I’m still as sore today after a session as I was back then, so the training regime doesn’t get any easier, but that’s a good thing. It gets harder as you progress.”

Now, Harris’ focus is on maintaining his newfound lifestyle for the long term, but he isn’t finished progressing just yet. He says he’ll be ramping up his training even further heading into summer to put what he’s learnt into practice.

There’s something to be learnt from Harris’ story. No matter how set in your ways you’ve become, it’s not too late to shake things up and get the results you want. As Harris himself says, “Trust the process. The journey to achieving your fitness goals could be short or long, but being disciplined, following a healthy diet and doing regular exercise is really the secret sauce.”

Related:

How Clint Stanaway became stronger than ever in just 12 weeks

How this Aussie school teacher lost nearly 20kg in nine months

The post Everything this Aussie finance guy did to get shredded at 40 appeared first on Men's Health Magazine Australia.

Achieving just one of these training objectives is no small feat. Achieving them together is a whole different ballgame. This is called “body recomposition” by scientists and fitness professionals – in other words, the process of changing the composition of your body by lowering body fat mass and increasing muscle mass.

The biggest hurdle you’ll have to clear on your journey to accomplishing these goals is that they require largely different demands. To lose fat, you need to be burning more calories then you’re taking in. To build muscle, you need to increase your protein intake and prioritize strength training, so your body can build more muscle fibers. Eager to make big changes, people often try to achieve both at the same time.

The question is: Is it even possible to both lose fat and gain muscle simultaneously? We asked the experts.

Can you burn fat and build muscle at the same time?

A 2020 meta-data analysis from the Strength and Conditioning Journal suggests that it may be possible to lose fat mass and gain muscle at the same time. There’s one issue with this, however – all of the studies compiled for the report were based on small samples of young athletes, lacking an inclusive sample population. Further research needs to be conducted to understand exactly how body recomposition happens to different types of subjects, and if these results are applicable to different demographics.

Though burning fat and building muscle concurrently may be possible, it’s not necessarily optimal, says Lee Boyce, C.S.C.S., an MH Advisory Board member. He warns that aiming for both at the same time may cause a slower rate of change for both goals to be reached.

A more effective approach is to prioritise one goal before the other, specifically muscle building over fat loss. The good news is, emphasising muscle building will spark some habits and physiological responses that may help burn away some unwanted fat.

If someone focuses on building muscle first, “the byproduct of that would be trigger[ing] some fat loss,” Kurt Ellis, N.S.C.A., of Beyond Numbers Performance, says. “It’s going to enable you to build habits that are going to be a lot more favorable for you long term.”

Building muscle mass results in an increased metabolic rate, meaning the body will burn more calories, since it takes more energy to maintain muscle tissue than adipose tissue (a.k.a. body fat). For example, assume you and your gym partner at the same height and weight. You have a body fat percentage of 10 percent, and theirs is 20 percent. On any given day where you both move the same amount, you will likely burn more calories than they will (assuming, too, that neither of you have any other health problems that may effect your metabolism).

If you follow the right steps, focusing on muscle building may help to bring about the fat loss you’re also looking for even more quickly.

3 Tips for losing fat and gaining muscle

Prioritise strength training

To gain muscle, you need to be incorporating resistance training into your exercise routine. This puts your muscles under tension, creating micro-tears in the muscle, which your body will then repair by creating more fibres. As we’ve already established, you need to be burning calories to lose fat. Luckily, strength training does both of those things. Yes, cardio may burn more calories, but too much can jeopardise your gains.

For longevity, focus on strength training with smaller bits of low intensity cardio to achieve muscle building. At the end of the day, you’re still burning calories, which is what you need to lose fat mass. For some guidance on where to start, see below.

Increase your protein intake

You’ve probably been preached at by some muscle-bound bro about the importance of protein. It’s not just hype—protein is the building block of muscle tissue and deserves its praise. If you don’t have enough, your muscles may begin to break down. This is especially important to consider when you’re in a calorie deficit. Limiting calories is the key to fat loss—but if you also limit your protein, you’ll lose your muscle mass, says Boyce.

“If you want to be adding muscle without adding too much weight, you can’t be in a surplus to do it,” Boyce says. “So, the challenge is creating that [low] calorie intake, but modifying the nutrient choices that are going to make up those calories.”

Make high protein food sources a bigger staple in your nutrition plan. Protein also reduces the levels of the hormone that causes hunger, ghrelin, in your body, so it may keep you fuller, longer. That’s good news for preventing snacking and other sources of excess calories throughout your day.

Boyce suggests aiming to consume at least 1 gram of protein per pound of your body weight. Do this with real food sources, like chicken, turkey, and tofu, as much as possible, and make up the difference with supplements, like protein powders.

Recovery is key

Beware of coming on too hard, too fast when starting a fitness routine. Overtraining can lead to injury, which could take you out of the gym all together. That’s why prioritizing recovery is important if you’re trying to burn fat and gain muscle, Ellis says. Recovery allows the body time to repair itself after intense workouts, so don’t neglect your rest day.

Proper rest also means proper sleep, Ellis says. A 2020 study published in the Medicine & Science in Sport and Exercise journal found that lack of sleep led to a lower release of cytokines – the proteins that build up our muscles.

Best workouts for losing fat and gaining muscle

We already know that it’s best to prioritise strength workouts to be able to gain muscle and lose fat. The most effective way to do both is to anchor those workouts with big, multi-joint movements, such as squats, deadlifts, and presses.

“Compound lift movements incorporate ton of muscles. You need to recruit a decent amount in order to elicit that hypertrophy response,” Ellis says. More muscle recruitment also means more calorie burn—a win for fat loss.

That doesn’t mean you need to do the same barbell squats and dumbbell RDLs every time you go to the gym. There are tons of variations of these compound movements you can incorporate that will keep your routine fresh.

Cardio has its time and place, too—but be weary of what kind you pick if you’re also looking to gain muscle while you lose fat. High intensity interval training, or HIIT, may be known for fat burning, but it could cost you when it comes to gaining muscle mass. Working at such a high intensity means significant wear and tear on the body. That means you’ll need significant time in between workouts to recover, which could mean having to take off more of your strength-building days in the gym. If you don’t optimize recovery, it could lead to injury.

Instead, aim for low-intensity steady state (LISS) cardio. Think walking, jogging, biking at slow intervals. It will prevent that feeling of burnout and overtraining, while still getting your heart rate up to get the cardiovascular benefits out of it.

You can train with full-body splits, use a strategy like a push-pull-legs split, or work alternating between your upper body and lower body. This way, on the day that you’re working your upper body, your lower body is resting. This creates an efficient system so that you’re able to hit a higher volume of reps and sets without running the risk of overtraining, since Boyce says you’ll be better able to tackle more workouts safely with the built-in rest.

This article originally appeared on Men’s Health US.

The post Can you actually burn fat and gain muscle at the same time? appeared first on Men's Health Magazine Australia.

“Milk is a good source of several nutrients that support growth – including protein, calcium, zinc, vitamin A, and vitamin D. There’s also some evidence that drinking milk may help increase your levels of IGF-1 – a hormone that helps determine how tall you’ll be,” says Kim Yawitz, R.D., a registered dietitian and gym owner in St. Louis. “In theory, drinking milk during adolescence could help you come closer to your genetic height potential.”

We hate to be the bearers of bad news, but drinking more milk won’t help you grow taller as an adult. We explain below.

Can drinking milk make you taller?

You already know that drinking milk can help you build strong bones and muscles.

That’s because cow’s milk—yes, not almond milk or oat milk or soy milk—is naturally high in calcium, a nutrient that promotes bone density, and protein, which contributes to muscle growth. (One cup of milk contains 293 milligrams of calcium and about 8 grams of protein, for reference.)

But can milk actually make you taller?

It’s a statement that you might have heard when you were young and has maybe stuck with your through you adult years. Heck, maybe you even tell your own kids the same thing: “Drink milk and you’ll grow up tall and strong.”

Your parents didn’t just make this up out of nowhere. Scientists have actually studied this hypothesis. And dietitians do hear similar questions from their clients.

But just how strong is the link between drinking milk and height? We turned to Kelly Jones M.S., R.D., C.S.S.D. for her wisdom.

“There are actually several published studies showing that, in children, drinking milk is associated with very small increases in height,” says Jones.

It is important to recognise, however, that these studies are showing a correlation and not a cause and effect relationship. And that just because a few research reports have found a positive association doesn’t mean that there’s proof milk can make you taller.

And, honestly, the research is mixed.

One 2018 study followed a group of participants from birth, through 17 years, and discovered that height increased by 0.39 centimetres per self-reported additional 8 ounces of milk consumed daily. Jones: “However, the authors also noted that the population was mostly of moderate income and reasonably well educated, which can mean results would not be similar in populations with worse access to food or knowledge of appropriate eating patterns.”

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The post Can milk make you taller? Here’s what the science says appeared first on Men's Health Magazine Australia.

I got out of bed and, on autopilot, went through my normal morning routine. I left my flat and went to a local cafe run by a Brazilian woman named Tatiana, where my order is always the same: a large toasted bread roll, filled with chicken and mayonnaise. As I sat there reading the newspapers, the food was placed in front of me, and I looked at it. I felt like I was looking at a block of wood. I took a bite. It tasted fine. Normal.

I took three or four more bites, and I felt full. I left almost all of it on the plate. As I hurried out, Tatiana called after me, ‘Are you sick?’

I went to my office and wrote for three hours. Normally, by noon, I would have a snack, something small and sugary, and then at about 1 p.m. I would go down the street to a local Turkish cafe for lunch. It got to 2 p.m. and I wasn’t hungry. Again, my sense of routine kicked in, and again, I went to the cafe and asked for my standard order, a large Mediterranean lamb with rice and bread. I managed to eat a third of it. It seemed to me for the first time to be incredibly salty, like I was drinking seawater.

I wrote some more, and at 7 p.m. I left my office to go and meet a friend in Camden Market, one of my favourite parts of London. We walked between the stalls, staring at food from every part of the world. Normally, I could stuff my face from three different stalls, but that night, I had no hunger. I couldn’t even manage a few mouthfuls. I went home, feeling exhausted, and went to sleep at the unprecedentedly early time of 9 p.m.

As that first week passed, it felt like the shutters had come down on my appetite, and now only tiny peeks of light could get through. I was about 80 per cent less hungry than I normally am. The sense of mild nausea kept stirring and passing.

When I got on the bus or in a car, I felt a kind of exaggerated travel sickness. Whenever I ate, I became full startlingly fast. The best way I can describe it is to ask you to imagine that you have just eaten a full Christmas dinner with all the trimmings, and then somebody popped up and offered you a whole new meal to get started on. 

Some people say Ozempic makes them find food disgusting. To me, it made food, beyond small quantities, feel unfeasible.

On the fifth night, a friend came by to watch a movie, and we flicked through Uber Eats. The app suggested all my usual haunts. I realised I couldn’t eat any of this food now. Instead, she got a kebab, and I had a bowl of vegetable soup. On the sixth day, I took my godsons out, and they wanted to go into McDonald’s. When they got Happy Meals and I got nothing at all, one of them said suspiciously: ‘Who are you and what have you done with Johann Hari?’

I wanted to understand what was happening to my body.

I figured that the best people to educate me were the scientists who made the key discoveries that led to the development of Ozempic and other new weight-loss drugs. So I began to track many of them down and interview them, along with many other key scientists working in the field. Almost all of them have received funding from the pharmaceutical companies that now profit from these drugs, and we should bear that in mind as we hear what they say. They taught me that these extraordinary effects were coming from manipulating a tiny hormone named GLP-1 that exists in my gut and my brain, and in yours.

Author of ‘Magic Pill’ Johann Hari.

Throughout my first six months on Ozempic, my friend Danielle was pregnant, and as her pregnancy developed, she would say it was like we were on opposite trajectories. While her belly swelled, mine was shrivelling. I lost a stone and a half.

On the BMI chart, I went from obese (marked in a bright red) to the middle of overweight (yellow), and as the months passed and I lost another stone, I got to the upper end of a healthy weight (depicted in a soothing green). My body fat percentage fell from 32 per cent to 22 per cent. It was the fastest and most dramatic weight loss of my life.

I felt lighter and quicker on my feet, and that boosted my confidence enough that I started to strut a little. People began to notice. ‘Wow, you’re losing weight,’ acquaintances said when they saw me in the street. One of my godsons said: ‘Hey, Johann, I didn’t know you had a neck!’ In the third month, my neighbour’s hot gardener hit on me and asked for my phone number.

I realised it was exactly what I had wanted, and I was thrilled (especially about the gardener). I had told myself going in that I was concerned primarily about my health – but I now saw that a desire to look better had been a big driver for me all along. I felt genuinely grateful as I interviewed the scientists who’d developed this drug. While they told me about their discoveries, I could literally feel the effects playing out by placing my hand on my stomach. 

When I was talking with one of the scientists who’d worked on GLP-1 in a cafe in London and listening to her explain the drug’s potentially revolutionary effects, I watched people walking past us on the busy street. Most of them had not heard about Ozempic or other weight-loss drugs yet. Many of them were overweight or obese, and I thought: You don’t know what’s about to happen. You don’t know how this could be about to help you change

But I was surprised to notice that, at the same time, I also felt disconcerted and out of sorts a lot of the time. I wasn’t feeling an urge to recommend Ozempic to other people. In fact, I felt pensive, and tense. I didn’t understand it. I’d got what I wanted – a boost to my health, and a boost to my self esteem.

So why did I still feel so ambivalent about it? At first, I thought it was because of the side effects, which were surprisingly persistent. My nausea, which had been gentle at first, would suddenly surge at random moments and leave me feeling like I was on a boat in the middle of a storm. With Ozempic or Wegovy, everyone starts by taking a dose of 0.25mg a week, then after a month they go up to 0.5mg, and then a month later to a full 1mg. (Some people go to even higher doses after that.)

Every time I increased my dose, I felt significantly worse for at least a week. One evening I found myself dry-heaving next to a pot plant in Zurich airport while a Swiss woman, who clearly thought I was drunk, gave me dirty looks. This sickness was intermittent, and most of the time, I didn’t feel it at all, but when it came, it was horrible. It occurred alongside other strange effects. 

Sometimes I would lie awake at night and find myself uncontrollably burping. At its worst, I was belching up bile and thought I was going to throw up. I also became constipated.

The grimmest side effects for me lay elsewhere. For many people, when they take these drugs, their resting heart rate increases. I would sit reading a book, or lie in bed, and feel my heart racing. My mind often interpreted this as anxiety and would start racing to match my elevated heartbeat. I had to cut back on caffeine to counteract this effect, and even that didn’t totally solve the problem – invariably, whenever I increased my dose, I felt anxious for at least a week, and even after that, I felt like I could more easily become anxious than before.

In addition, in the first week after increasing my dose, around late afternoon or early evening, I would persistently feel lightheaded and a little dizzy. I discussed this with my doctor and he said that this often happens when your calorie consumption drops significantly – your body isn’t getting its usual fuel source, so it’s confused, and the tank seems to be empty. Even after I got used to it, this feeling never entirely went away.

For between 5 and 10 per cent of people who take these drugs, the side effects are so extreme that they conclude it’s not worth continuing. I spoke with a woman in Vermont named Sunny Naughton, who is four foot ten, and when she hit 190 pounds (13.6 stone), she realised her weight was spiralling out of control. So in 2018, she sought out – in desperation – Saxenda, an early GLP-1 agonist drug that had to be injected daily. In the first two months, she lost more than thirty pounds, but, she told me, ‘I was sick all the time. Stomach cramps. Vomiting.’ She found herself burping uncontrollably, with ‘weird flavours’, and ‘there’s a metallic taste in your mouth all the time’.

At work, she would end up rolling on the floor beneath her desk with stomach cramps so crippling that her colleague would have to drive her home. ‘It just felt like someone was digging in and twisting your insides really tightly,’ she said. 

It was so unlike anything she had experienced before that she felt ‘an alien had gone into my stomach and was doing something in my body … It felt like there was something living in my stomach that was tearing everything up and getting rid of whatever was in there, and then draining my body of energy.’ For eight months, Sunny made herself endure it because the weight loss was so dramatic.

But ‘it was the worst physical illness that I ever felt … From one to ten, it was fifty. It was just awful. And everyone around me was like, “Should you keep doing this?” 

One day, she accidentally injected herself with a double dose. ‘I was supposed to teach a class two days later, and I was so sick, I couldn’t get out of bed. I was sweating. I was nauseous. I got myself into the bathtub. I was almost incoherent. I called my mother and said,

“I might have to go to the ER.” This medicine made me so sick.”

Not long afterwards, she told herself ‘I need to live a natural life’ and threw away her remaining pens. She rapidly put most of the weight back on, as does almost everyone who comes off these drugs, but the alien also seemed to leave her body. Yet I didn’t feel that my ambivalence could be fully explained by the side effects I was experiencing. Something more was going on, though it took me time to figure out what it was. Every time I upped my dose, the side effects got worse, but then they mostly eased off – so I felt confident that if I powered through them, they would, over time, diminish to little or nothing. 

So why didn’t I feel as happy as I should? Why – in addition to moments of glee – did I feel moments of deep worry about what I was doing? Why was I looking a gift horse – effortless weight loss, the dream of humans down the ages – in the mouth? I began to see the answer when I decided to go right back to where this story, for me, began. I asked: Why did I get fat in the first place? And more importantly, why did we – as a culture – get so much fatter, in a very short period of time?

I learned that we can’t understand these drugs unless we first take a moment to understand the forces that made so many of us need them in the first place. It was only when I studied this question that some of the mysteries around these drugs began to be resolved.

This is an extract from Magic Pill: The Extraordinary Benefits and Disturbing Risks of the New Weight Loss Drugs by Johann Hari, published by Bloomsbury, out now: $34.99

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The post Writer Johann Hari’s wild Ozempic journey appeared first on Men's Health Magazine Australia.

Despite being overweight, insulin-dependent, and struggling with sleep apnea, Nugent decided to take back control of his life. But this story is not just about Nugent’s remarkable weight-loss journey, it’s about empowering anyone who want to re-write their health narrative. It’s about squashing the stereotypes and misconceptions around weight loss and acknowledging that with a determined mindset and the proper support, anybody can achieve their health goals.

Nugent’s wake-up call

Nugent’s weight-loss journey was sparked in 2015 when he was sitting around a campsite with friends. As Nugent recalls, he spent much his two-week holiday glued to a camp chair, drinking, eating and sleeping. But a sly comment from family and friends, telling him that he wouldn’t be around the following year if he didn’t make a change, saw Nugent begin to think about his long-term health for the first time. The blunt realisation of just how unhealthy he had become hit Nugent hard. And the alarming facts were already right in front of him—snoring, sleep apnea, and insulin dependency due to type 2 diabetes.

“What made these comments so frightening was that these were camping friends, people I had known for a long time, even the kids agreed who were at the age of 12 or 13,” Nugent tells Men’s Health. “They said you’re not gonna be here next year, you’re not gonna make it.” 

Nugent’s job as a truckie is already a race against the clock, leaving him little choice but to rely on fast food dinners and service station snacks. His health had to take a back seat to his ticking work schedule. 

After experimenting with various diets, Nugent was inspired by a fellow work colleague who returned to work after Christmas with a slim new look. He was trying the 1:1 Diet by Cambridge Weight Plan—a diet low in calories that features meal replacement bars, smoothies, shakes, and soups as your new go-to diet items. 

The journey begins

In February 2016, the single father of four decided to start his weight loss journey. Tipping the scales at 168 kg, Nugent’s journey was guided by his diet consultant, Tamara, who committed him to the same 1:1 Diet plan that had helped his work colleague drop the weight.

“I did everything right, says Nugent. “I drank two litres of water a day, I ate salads, I stayed away from alcohol and ate lean meat and fresh veggies. I also chose to eat smaller meals.” 

Immediately, Nugent’s diet shake-up saw him strip away 8.9 kg within the first month. 

With his energy levels rising thanks to correct food choices and dieting, Nugent decided to throw regular exercising into the weight loss mix. 

“Stepping it up with that little bit of exercise was the game changer,” he says. “I was obsessed because I was seeing the results. You don’t have to exercise if you’re too busy, but I chose to start exercising to go further in my progress. At the end of the day, it’s a mental thing. You have to be 110 per cent focused on it, and if you want it bad enough, which I did, you will see results. I had to want to do it.”

Smashing his weight-loss goals

Paul’s dieting kicked off a slew of weight-loss achievements. At the end of 21 weeks, Nugent had lost 40 kg. After 8.5 months, he’d lost a total of 59.6 kg. After 12 months, Nugent’s new lease on healthy living had seen him lose a mammoth 70 kilos, tipping the scales at his double-digit goal of 98 kg. 

Nugent credits his success to his family, friends, and consultant, Tamara, who became his mentor, counsellor and, more importantly, his friend throughout the journey. 

Nugent believes anyone can achieve their weight-loss goals with the right mindset and support, advising people to take control of their lives and focus on how badly they want to change. 

Nugent’s advice to men wanting to lose weight

The average Australian bloke’s ‘She’ll be right’ attitude to their health needs to change, Nugent says. 

“I’ve told blokes about this program and they tell me they love food and alcohol too much,” he says. “But it’s not about that. It’s about how much you love your kids, your grandkids, your wife, how much you love your life.”

Today, Nugent not only looks impressive, but he feels fantastic. Equipped with a drive to live, his story is one that resonates across the country. It’s easy to get discouraged when trying to lose weight, but Nugent’s journey reminds us that success is always possible.

“It’s an amazing feeling, and I still feel great eight years later, still mentally focused on it and conscientious about it. I don’t want to go back to it again.”

The phrase “life is too short” is a cliché. Nevertheless, in this case, Nugent’s awe-inspiring weight-loss journey emphasises the significance of this oft-repeated phrase. Indeed, it’s now impossible to ignore.

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The post The life saving transformation of truckie Paul Nugent appeared first on Men's Health Magazine Australia.