Simon Lovell - The Lunch Box Diet - Eat all day, lose weight, feel great. Lose up to a stone in 4 weeks.

As well as getting a beautiful new body, your skin will improve and your hair will be healthier. Even more importantly, your heart will be healthier and you will be reducing your risk of developing disease. That’s just a little bit of what goes on with your body when you eat the way I’m going to show you.

The best news of all is that you are going to feel better than you ever have in your life. You’ll soon discover that this isn’t merely a ‘diet’ – it’s a revolutionary way of eating well that you will want to follow for life. Just give it seven days.

So, what are you waiting for? Welcome to your Lunch Box Diet.

You’ve tried and failed and tried and failed again. I’m sure you’ve blamed yourself

I don’t want to eat flavourless foods. I don’t want to give up my favourites. I don’t want to starve myself. I don’t want to measure things or count calories or anything of the sort. And I’m sure you don’t either.

Why? Because all of that is extremely stressful, as if life weren’t stressful enough all on its own.

And guess what? All that stress could actually be making you heavier. We all react to stress differently. Since I began exercising, I tend to take out my frustrations in the gym. It wasn’t always that way, though.

I used to let the pressures in my life affect me negatively. A long day in the office then a trip to the pub after work led to a sore head in the morning, followed by cravings for stodgy foods that would slow me down yet again, causing a snowball effect that left me with the movement and motivation of a sloth. Not a nice feeling.

Learn a relaxation technique.Practising relaxation isn’t difficult. All you need is five minutes in a quiet setting. Close your eyes, breathe in deeply through your nose and feel your belly fill up. Exhale through your nose feeling your belly empty. If thoughts come to mind, just let them go with the breath. Concentrate on the breath – that’s it!

Listen to music.Keep music in the car, in the kitchen, in your bedroom, in the study, at the treadmill, in your gym bag…everywhere! Choose the background music to your life. Music can relax us, it can fire us up, and it can touch on every emotion in between. It’s also a great way of relieving stress.

We’ve heard for years about stress affecting our hearts. But it affects more, so much more. It affects nearly every part of our physical selves.

When we have very stressful lives, there are many physical symptoms. Joints ache, muscles feel weak, our hormones are out of whack, our immune systems are weakened, and these physical problems just add to the psychological pressure we’re under. And guess what? As if the plate of brownies you consumed the other night after losing that promotion to your idiot colleague wasn’t enough, the physical way in which your body responded to all that stress you’ve been under might have added a few extra pounds as well.

We produce the hormone cortisol when we are under stress and the kicker is that Cortisol can cause you to produce more abdominal fat. Abdominal fat is undesirable aesthetically, and it also contains the most dangerous type of body fat. This is called ‘visceral fat’, and it has been linked to increased rates of cardiovascular disease and type II diabetes as well as breast cancer in women.

So, should you just give up and let yourself go? I mean, after all, it’s not as if we can stop stressful things from happening, right? What do we do? First of all, you stop putting undue stress on yourself. Maybe it’s inadvisable to tell the boss what you really think about his or her latest idiotic idea, but you can reduce personal stress by choosing not to follow ridiculously restrictive diets. Stop starving yourself or following plans that are clearly unhealthy. Stop denying yourself the foods you love. Stop eating flavourless foods because you’ve been told you’ll lose weight if you follow a particular meal plan. It makes me so angry that people are adding to their life stresses because of their constant quest to be thin and perfect. It really doesn’t need to be that way.

Learn to let go of anger.Anger can help us if it produces the drive we need to overcome problems in our lives. However, when anger becomes resentment it only holds us back. Sometimes, we just have to let it go. Trust me, it takes a lot more energy to hold on to anger than it does to be happy. It’s a choice you can make.

I know you want to lose weight, but healthy weight loss doesn’t have to be stressful. My clients are busy people who find that working out relieves stress from the daily grind. The last thing I want to do is add more stress to their lives. The Lunch Box Diet is convenient and versatile. People enjoy making and eating their own creations and coming up with new secret recipes. Colleagues, clients and friends are always trying to get a peek in my box, and I love to share ideas. If people didn’t share then we would never learn.

Here’s another piece of advice: ‘Surround yourself with people you aspire to be like and you will end up being like them. Surround yourself with stressed people and you’ll end up being stressed yourself.’ The same can be said if you surround yourself with people who eat bad, junky foods. Have a think about who you are and how much of that is influenced by the people you surround yourself with. You may want to make a few changes in your life to help you on a more positive path, and this in turn will assist with your weight loss.

I’ve found that my clients like losing weight without the stress of traditional dieting. That’s why I allow occasional indulgences while helping you to retrain your taste buds to enjoy healthy foods.

You’ll find that when you eat a diet full of highly nutritious foods, you will be more energetic, stronger and healthier overall. When you are less susceptible to illness and feeling your best, stress is much easier to handle. In addition, you’ll discover that there’s no better stress-buster than a good session in the gym or other energetic pursuits. You don’t have to exercise on the Lunch Box Diet but you’ll probably be more inclined to get up and be active after only a short while on this diet.

Ultimately, my goal is to help you lose weight, learn to eat healthily for life, get you working out and do it all without stress. Leave those fad starvation diets behind and let’s delve into a little science.

We tend to beat ourselves up for being overweight. We feel as though it’s all about what we did or didn’t do. Guess what? It’s not all up to you. You weren’t necessarily the one who failed. There’s a better than zero chance that the diet failed you!

There are reasons why diets fail us. To understand this, you need to know a few basic nutritional principles. Don’t worry, I’ll make it fun! Keep reading.

The first is a simple maths equation.

weight maintenance: what goes in = what goes out

What goes in is obviously the food you consume measured in calories, which is the measurement term used for energy. Your energy intake must be equivalent to what your body burns in order to simply maintain your weight. What doesn’t get burned is stored as fat.

Stop driving yourself crazy with guilt.Guilt is a wasted emotion. There are days when you get it all done and days when you don’t. Accomplish the big things, the imperative things, but if you let a few little things slide to free up time for more important things like exercise or family time, that’s okay!