Canada's Trainer to the Stars

When Toronto's fitness and diet guru Harley Pasternak informed clients in 2004 he'd be out of town on business, he thought he'd back within five weeks.

Out of town? Try Hollywood. He was called there at the behest of actress Halle Berry, who had heard of the magic he'd done helping actors slim down for film roles, including Jim Caviezel (Passion of Chris) and Milla Jovovich (Resident Evil). Pasternak's job was to help Berry squeeze her frame into the skin tight Cat Woman suit. It was just going to take five weeks, he figured. Really.

Before long, however, word leaked out about the brainy-and-brawny Canadian trainer who rapidly transformed Berry into a superhero-worthy body by using short workouts that suited filming schedules and five meals a day that could be fixed quickly and were small enough to fit into a mini-bar fridge. The Hollywood machine kicked into gear. He appeared on Oprah. Orlando Bloom called. So did Jessica Simpson. Brendan Fraser wanted in, as did Seth Rogen, Katherine Heigl, Robert Pattinson, Hilary Duff, and Miley Cyrus.

Six years later, Pasternak, 35, does get back to his house in Toronto, but only to visit friends and family.

"Next thing I knew, I had the largest celebrity client list in the history of the business. I mean, there's no agent with a roster of celebrity clients like I have," he says proudly.

"It's the strangest thing, because it wasn't contrived," he marvels, then paraphrases his favourite passage from

Posted in Health on 02/01/2010 - 0 Comments

Do you need your A, B, Cs? The Great Vitamin Debate

Joe Schwarcz is known for his blunt, take-no-prisoners style when he gets fired up, and today is no different. For the past 25 minutes, the erudite director of McGill University's Office for Science and Society and outspoken star of the Dr. Joe Show on Toronto's CFRB radio has been on a roll, taking shots at pseudo-science, the gullible public, "vitamin advertisers who shove things down our throat" and the biggest kahuna of them all, the $23.7-billion dietary supplements industry. So it's just a matter of time before he mentions Nick Nolte. "Look at him!" Schwarcz directs, and sure enough, an image of the aging actor's ravaged face comes to mind. These days, Nolte eschews hard living for a thousands-of-dollars-a-week vitamin habit in an effort to turn back the clock. "See how sick he looks?" Schwarcz says, his voice rising in exasperation. "He takes 60 supplements a day!" It's an extreme example -- few of us live Nolte's life, much less endure his medical bills -- but it does beg the question: If 60 pills a day doesn't make a visible difference to someone's visage, what chance does a single multivitamin have?

Posted in Health on 03/31/2009 - 0 Comments

The Last 15

Every diet has them--those last few kilos that, no matter what, just won’t budge. It may be called a diet plateau, but it may as well be Mount Everest. Yet it doesn’t have to be, says best-selling Canadian diet guru, Dr Joey Shulman. “Those stubborn few kilos are what I call the tipping point. For 98 per cent of dieters, the kilos they lost will return within five years. One reason is metabolism, which slows by five percent every decade,” she says in her latest book, The Last 15: A Weight Loss Breakthrough. (Wiley, $48, Hardback). “You can’t do anything about your basal metabolic rate, which accounts for 65 per cent. But you can do plenty about the other 35 per cent.” Where do you start?

Posted in Diets on 12/04/2008 - 0 Comments

The Fibre 35 Diet

Try this: For every bite of food you took yesterday, add up the grams of fibre it contained. Muesli for breakfast? That’s five grams per serving—says so the box. Lunch is trickier—garden salad from the corner takeaway doesn’t come with a nutritional label. Neither does the grilled chicken, green beans and baked potato you’re planning for dinner. The truth is, “the average person doesn’t have a clue how much fibre they get,” says American diet and nutrition guru Brenda Watson. “If they did actually count it up, they’d be taking in 10 to 12 grams a day.”

Posted in Diets on 11/30/2008 - 0 Comments

100 Weight Loss Tips That Really Work

You’ve made your New Year’s resolution: Those five extra kilos have got to go. Now for the big decision: Which diet is right for you? Low fat or low salt? High protein or raw food? Every diet has bits that really work, but you shouldn’t have to read every diet book to find them, says Dr Fred A Stutman, an American weight loss expert and author of the recently-released

Posted in Diets on 11/30/2008 - 0 Comments

Eat to beat inflammation

At first, it was just little things — a bit of stiffness around her hips that soon wore off. Then, suddenly, the driveway at Moira Blahut’s Toronto home seemed a lot steeper. At just 43, Moira was creeping along like a woman twice her age. Still, she shrugged it off and exercised to keep

Posted in Healthy eating on 11/30/2008 - 0 Comments

Beneficial bacteria

Ask internationally renowned microbiologist Dr. Gregor Reid and he'll be the first to tell you: There ain't nothing sexy about probiotics. But like Erlman J. Wright's paper clip and the much-mocked Allen key, life wouldn't be the same without them. Credited with everything from fighting off colds and vaginal infections to keeping bowels regular, probiotics are actually millions of bacteria that dwell, procreate and

Posted in Healthy eating on 11/30/2008 - 0 Comments

Keeping it all in check

When it comes to breast cancer, the numbers speak for themselves: 22,400 Canadian women will be diagnosed this year, and 5,000 will die. Scary stuff to be sure, but that's not what keeps Dr. David Servan-Schreiber up at night. For Servan-Schreiber, the French-born author of the international bestseller, Anticancer (HarperCollins) and a clinical professor of neuropsychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, there's another number that worries him more.

Posted in Food on 11/22/2008 - 0 Comments

15 things you need to know about yourself

You like spicy food, Beaujolais and big dogs. You don’t like wet socks or Sunday afternoons alone. Overall, you think you know yourself pretty well. But do you? You may have hidden health and lifestyle problems you should know about.

Posted in Aging on 11/22/2008 - 0 Comments