Food & Drink

This health nut tries it all

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When I turned 40 three years ago, one thing was clear. I was fat — what they call “skinny fat,” with a body that resembled a python after swallowing a goat. I was 5-foot-11 and weighed 172 pounds — most of them congregating in my middle.

My wife had a repertoire. She’d ask me when my baby was due.

And she’d tell me about this legendary place called “the gym.” If I went there, maybe I wouldn’t get winded playing hide-and-seek with my kids, a 5-year-old and twins who were 3.

I ignored her. Then my out-of-shape body was attacked by a freak case of tropical pneumonia, which resulted in a three-day hospital stay and a now-urgent plea from my wife: “I don’t want to be a widow in my 40s.”

Thus kicked off a two-year quest to remake my body, a journey I chronicled in my new book “Drop Dead Healthy.” As with my other books, “The Year of Living Biblically” and “The Know-It-All,” I pledged to become the world’s greatest expert in a field I know nothing about.

My goal this time? To test out every diet and exercise regimen on planet Earth for two years. I sweated, I cooked, I learned how to pole dance. In the end, I lost 16 pounds and dropped 24 points from my cholesterol. Along the way, I created my own exercise and diet plan, which I’ll reveal below. But first, a look at some of the highlights and lowlights.

DIETING

Vegan Raw Food

You’d think not cooking would be a time saver. You would be wrong. Raw food is one labor-intensive diet.

I spent many hours preparing my zucchini and mangos, making sure never to heat them above 115 degrees, which raw-foodists say is when healthy enzymes are destroyed. I juiced every day, which turned out to be my favorite form of food preparation. There’s something perversely appealing about subjecting a vegetable to that much violence. It’s the closest I’ll get to gutting a fish.

I also dehydrated with abandon. I bought a dehydrator — a microwave-sized box that blows warm air on your fruits and veggies for hours. I ate a lot of flat, dry — but tasty — strawberries.

My take: I felt cleaner and lighter (I lost 3 pounds in two weeks). But I was also famished most of the time, as well as a bit spacey. Also, since you asked, it was the most flatulent two weeks of my life.

The Paleo Diet

The idea here is to follow the example set by the hunter-gatherer diner, circa 50,000 years ago. The caveman diet — which is similar to low-carb regimens such as Atkins — instructs you to eat meat (organ meat if possible), vegetables, berries, eggs and some nuts. But you must avoid dairy, potatoes and grains, which were developed only in the last 10,000 years.

My take: Protein is filling, so I was rarely hungry on the Paleo diet, and I did notice a bump up in energy (I had much less afternoon lethargy), while losing 2 pounds in two weeks. But the long-term effects of the caveman diet on heart disease and cancer are still a question mark. As of now, the evidence for plant-based diets is stronger.

EXERCISE

The Caveman Workout in Central Park

Followers of the Paleo movement believe our bodies were adapted to live on the savannah thousands of years ago. To be healthy, we should do as the cavemen did. Did cavemen have memberships to Equinox gym? No, they exercised outdoors — carrying rocks and sprinting away from tigers.

One day, I joined five cavepals in the Central Park wilderness for a three-hour primordial workout.

We were led by a chiseled Frenchman named Erwan Le Corre, who is founder of MovNat, short for “Mouvement Naturel.” We stripped off our shirts and shoes, and spent the afternoon crawling along logs like monkeys, hoisting tree trunks and running barefoot in the leaves. At the end, we sprinted across the bike lane, imagining a sharp-fanged predator behind us. A group of sprinting guys is, apparently, cause for alarm in New York. One elderly woman thought we’d robbed someone.

My take: Good antediluvian fun. But not without downsides. I got a glass splinter from the barefoot running. Plus, a caveman named Vlad told me repeatedly that my pecs were not up to Stone Age standards.

Pole Dancing at Crunch Gym

As the only guy in a class of 50 women, I expended a lot of energy trying not to act or feel creepy. It wasn’t easy with the teacher yelling phrases such as “really spread your legs.” And trying to avoid cleavage was like trying to avoid old white men on the Senate floor.

Students were each assigned a pole to be shared with three other dancers. We did the fireman turn, the jump-and-slide and the back hook. My heel-wearing fellow dancers were amazing.

I did my best, but my performance resembled a fourth-grade asthma sufferer trying to climb the rope in gym class. Regardless, I did get a decent upper-body workout.

My take: As a germaphobe, I’m not a fan of the pole-sharing concept. As a fitness buff, I was impressed by how much upper body strength you need to hoist yourself on the pole. After my hour-long workout, I ached for two days. Those strippers deserve their tips.

Strollercizing in Central Park

The first clue that this workout is not aimed at men: a form asking if I gave birth vaginally or by Caesarian.

But instructor Elizabeth Trindade insists men are welcome, too.

I joined two women for an hour of pushing our kids in strollers around the bike path. We’d jog, then stop to do moves like “the tantrum” — stomping your feet up and down really fast. My son seemed confused. As did many onlookers.

My take: I wished it were more challenging. I felt no soreness. Then again, I hadn’t just given birth.

After all the tests and experiments, I’ve come up with a plan that works perfectly, at least for me.

I try to exercise every day, either by hoisting dumbbells in my apartment, running in Central Park or hitting a vintage Stairmaster. To save time, I practice High Intensity Interval Training, which means going full-throttle for 30 seconds, then resting for 30 seconds. And repeating several times. A workout can be over in 15 minutes.

I also try to incorporate movement into every part of my life — taking stairs instead of elevators, and literally running errands. I wrote my book on a treadmill desk (about 1,200 miles worth).

For food, I join my caveman pals in avoiding processed carbs. Simple sugars are evil. But for protein, I mostly eat egg whites, salmon and nuts.

I’ll eat whole grains now and again, such as quinoa or barley. I drink water, wine, almond milk and the occasional beer, but not energy drinks (a k a sugar water).

And I consume tons of fruits and veggies. Which, with a few tips (such as the ones in my book) can be prepared to taste good. Really. I swear on a stack of Whole Foods catalogs.