The Zone Diet is an eating plan to control inflammation and lose fat. The Zone Diet, (a healthy way to lose fat) was developed by Dr. Barry Sears, a biochemist and scientist who has made his name in the field of dietary control of hormonal response. According to the Zone Diet plan, the zone for optimum calorie burning is a 40-30-30 ratio; 40% carbohydrates, 30% fats and 40% protein. The Zone Diet is one of the few diet plans that closely correspond to the diet plan recommended by the Heart Education Group at HeartInfo.org. Both are agreed on the correct ratio of macro nutrients that include carbohydrates, protein and fats. The Zone Diet is also a very effective diet plan if you want to lose fat.

The basis of the Zone diet

The foundation of the Zone Diet is hormonal control and not so much calorie reduction. The Zone Diet was created as a result of research on the effects of foods that we eat on our body’s metabolic activity and hormone production. It’s goal is to ensure maximum health with the use of food to achieve perfect hormonal balance that will lessen cellular inflammation, the main cause of chronic illnesses. The Zone Diet’s hormonal balance factor will also make you lose fat and weight.
The food servings allowed in the Zone diet are reasonable. A regular meal is about 500 calories while a snack is approximately 100 calories. The Zone Diet plan also highly recommends drinking of 8 glasses of water daily and forbids all refined foods. The macronutrient (carbohydrates, protein and fat) proportion of the Zone diet plan is intended to control insulin levels in the blood. To lose fat, insulin management is the key. Insulin is responsible for processing the body’s glucose levels and converting it into glycogen.

How can you lose fat using the Zone Diet?

A Zone Diet is an eating plan that involves preparing and eating foods with low-carbohydrates, where protein is not overshadowed by carbohydrates, the usual characteristics of a modern day menu. It means balancing every portion of carbohydrates, fat and protein intake, an extremely important tool for people who want to lose fat and weight.

Reduce carbohydrate and lose fat

According to the Zone Diet, too much carbohydrate in our diet creates insulin resistance which is the main reason for the fattening of the population. Ingesting a large amount of carbohydrates causes the human body to produce insulin which results in excess calories being stored as fat. Insulin also has an effect on the other hormones of your body. To lose fat and build muscles you have to maintain a balanced level of testosterone and growth hormones. HGH or Human Growth Hormone is the body’s most potent fat-burning hormone. It also allows the body to build muscles. If you have a high insulin level in your body, HGH is inhibited from being released from the pituitary gland, thus preventing you from losing fat.
The Zone Diet doesn’t prevent you from eating foods from any particular food group. However, if you want to lose fat, the Zone Diet recommends that you avoid food high in saturated and trans-fats and carbohydrates such as pastas, white grains, and starches. The favored sources of carbohydrates are fruits and vegetable and replacing saturated fats with monounsaturated fats such as almonds, extra-virgin olive oil and avocado. A Zone Diet uses food as drugs to promote overall wellness, weight and fat loss and as management or prevention of diabetes, heart disease and other chronic illnesses.
If you need to lose fat either for aesthetic or health reasons, consider Barry Sears’ Zone Diet plan. It will give you benefits over and above your expectations.

Lose Fat Using the Zone Diet

Prehistoric Zone Diet

To see what the future has in store for the Zone Diet, let us consider the past. For millions of years our ancestors have evolved on a diet of low fat protein (wild animals) and low density carbohydrates (fruits, roots and vegetables). They followed the natural Zone Diet and as long as quantity was available, they thrived. Human skeletal remains show strong healthy bodies…apart from those with spear wounds and teeth marks!

Large scale grain consumption dates back only 10000 years. The Egyptians led the way with grain production, but the skeletal record shows a serious decline in human health. Reduced bone mass, obesity, heart disease and cancer is apparent.

Dr Sears’ genetic disposition (heart problems) led him to his detailed research into the role of insulin (produced by the body as a result of carbohydrate consumption) in heart disease. Dr Sears found that our health could be optimised by an appropriate eating plan. This optimal eating plan was called Zone Diet. The information gathered in his research has been published in Dr Sears’ Zone Diet series of books. He believes that conventional nutritional wisdom is seriously flawed. Misguided government and institutional food pyramids still show the high GI carbohydrates, bread and grains, in the “eat most” category. This in spite of the fact that they are the foods that raise insulin levels and contribute to the gradual decline of human health.

Hormones and Zone Diet

Dr Sears believes that this erroneous thinking is a result of caloric thinking as opposed to hormonal thinking. The effect the food we eat has on our hormonal function is being ignored. The hormonal system being so crucial in the way humans process food, Dr Sears believes once we begin to think hormonally these nutritional myths will be replaced by clear and effective guidelines. Humans who follow the Zone Diet principles will be eating for optimal health.

With the ever decreasing level of health of the human population, coupled with the ever increasing costs of treatment, Dr Sears believes Zone Diet principles will guide insurers into wanting to know your insulin profile as a precondition to acceptance. Insurers may even require you to be on the Zone Diet if you are to be insured. After all, better basic health means huge reductions in medical costs.

The three major causes of natural death are heart disease, cancer and stroke…and this applies to the developed and under developed world populations.

Protein and Zone Diet

Protein is a vital component of the Zone Diet. The production of protein from grain fed animals requires eight times as much fossil fuel energy as does the production of plant protein. It requires a disproportionate amount of water and causes significant environmental degradation. Dr Sears suggests the use of low fat soybean protein. Unfortunately this plantation style farming employs genetic modification techniques. It is also causing the loss of natural forest in previously undeveloped areas and this loss of natural diversity will have long term harmful effects to the environment.

Dr Sears’ key to improving world wide health is for humans to consume the appropriate amounts of fats, carbohydrates and proteins for their unique physiology and for most, especially to increase protein intake. To eat optimally, he suggest you eat according to his Zone Diet guidelines.

Consumer Reports took the most popular weight loss diets of the moment, analyzed them, and served us the final score. It seems that Weight Watchers came out first, followed by Slim Fast and then the rapidly gaining popularity Zone Diet of Dr Barry Sears..

The magazine considered factors like pounds lost, nutrition quality, how easy the diet is to follow and the dropout rates after six months and a year.

Weight Watchers won its high marks mostly through the low dropout rates, due to the weekly meeting based system. This is how Weight Watcher’s followers manage to keep up with their nutrition plan, that has a rather simple philosophy: eat less, exercise more.

Slim Fast came out number two on Consumer Reports list. It has as well, found a philosophy that makes it easy to follow: replace part of your meals with shakes and bars that you can find allover, in the supermarkets.

All the diets are enough low calorie to sustain weight loss, as Nancy Metcalf, a senior editor at Consumer Reports, said. Dr. Atkins’ diet too, but it is also too indulgent with saturated fats consumption and too low in fiber, fresh vegetables and fruits. Quite the oposite, Zone Diet  gained good scores in what nutrition quality is concerned.

But the big problem is not whether the diets work in theory, but in practice. The Ornish diet plan, though highly praised for its long-term weight loss and benefic results in heart disease treatment, was the most difficult to stay in.

Also included in the review but not ranked for lack of sufficient independent clinical studies, were Internet-based eDiets, Jenny Craig, South Beach and Volumetrics.

A growing body of evidence, including research presented here Sunday, shows that eating enough fish, chicken, lean meat, low-fat dairy, beans, nuts or other protein-rich foods helps people feel full longer. And scientists are searching for the biological reasons for the increased satiety.

The latest findings might help explain why people report feeling ravenous after eating only a lettuce salad for lunch. It also could offer insight into why some dieters lose weight without getting as hungry on programs that allow ample protein, such as the Zone Diet and the South Beach Diet, and Weight Watchers, in which the typical member selects 20% to 22% of calories from protein. The Atkins diet is often high in both protein and fat.

On Nov. 24 2004, Dr. Pereira published the conclusions of his study in Journal of The American Medical Association.

The study was made on 39 obese adults, ages 18 to 40.

Half of Pereira’s subjects were assigned to a low-fat diet, the other half to a low-glycemic one. The low-glycemic dietary program was based on low-glycemic foods and moderate fat consumption, a scheme that closely resembles the popular Zone Diet . The calorie-intakes looked as following:

Pereira and his team measured some key-factors known as type II diabetes & heart disease predictors: blood pressure, blood fats, insulin resistance. Also, the resting metabolic rate (RMR) and total weight loss were measured on both groups.

The low-glycemic diet group showed twice better figures than the low-fat diet one. The differences in average weight loss were irrelevant. People on both groups dropped around 10% of body fat during the study.

The major criticism that Dr. Barry Sears had to confront with along the years was the lack of medical proof that Zone Diet does work. In his books he makes claims that are as close to a medical miracle as one can get.

The late Pereira study comes right in time to fill the need. A recent statement from an American Heart Association official, professor Alice Lichtenstein, admits that the results of the Pereira study can not be conferred to low-glycemic foods alone, or to moderate-fat foods alone. It could be the combination that worked.

My Virtual Sales Person^TM technology was developed by the W5 Internet company. This technology allows website owners to have content presented by a male or female host.

The idea is to spare your website visitors from the bother of reading text; “I have always felt web sites needed more human interaction and that text and pictures alone could not properly present or sell a company’s product or service. I imagined what the impact would be on a web site if a real person could be a part of the site pages and not just be a separate window or animated cartoon character,” said the company President, Jim McGovern.

However, my Virtual Sales Person^TM requires a Flash player and high-speed Internet connection.

Zone Diet at Home, a Zone food delivery company established in New York City, was an early adopter of the idea, and one of the first companies to use a my Virtual Sales Person^TM on its website.

This company is dedicated to persons that want to lose weight with the Zone Diet and don’t have enough spare time for the special cooking required with the Zone program.

The my Virtual Sales Person^TM for “Zone Diet at Home” is part of the company’s client-oriented policy, just as personal evaluation at home before signing-up with a new client. “We use this information to ensure they (the clients) get the proper amount of food to feel satisfied and lose weight,” Zone Diet at Home publicist Pam Manela stated.

“Zone Diet at Home” is available in 48 American States.

Original Zone Diet is now online – Start losing weight today!

Zone Diet products can be your best Christmas present this year. Specialty studies and zoners find the products helpful, enjoyable, balanced and less restrictive than other diets.

The epicenter of each Holiday season seems to be food. Statistics say that during this specific time of the year we gain an average of 10 pounds. This is quite a lot considering how hard it is to lose one pound and then keep it off.

On the other hand, media and news companies put up a genuine marathon in explaining how to stay out of food and still maintain the holiday spirit.

For example, a recent CBS News article offers 13 tips to slalom through high fat, high calorie foods and starches this season. Dr. Marla Shapiro writes a keyword based Holiday survival guide for The Globe and Mail.  But how can we do that, moreover, how can one stick with Zone diet throughout the holiday season?

Diet & Party

The idea is to avoid making a drastic change in your dietary program. Of course, when on Zone Diet , you can skip a 40-30-30 meal free of remorse, because the next Zone meal will bring you back into the Zone. The trick works, let’s say, for the New Year’s Eve party.

If you have to attend, let us say, a dozen parties, the trick doesn’t work anymore. The only way to go is to try and find the serves that are eligible for your Zone meal and use the eyeball method for measuring. Divide your plate in three, and fill one third with a slice of low fat meat (size of your palm) and two thirds with fruits and vegetables. Choose fish (e.g. salmon) that is high in Omega 3 fatty acids.

It may help bringing along some fruits when coming to the party, in case your host didn’t think of it. Things are much easier when you’re a host; but try not to serve exclusively your preferences. A good idea would be to ask people what they want to eat when making the invites.

Having a glass of water in one hand and finding some chatting companions may help you stay out of the dangerous foods.

Stay home for Christmas and… eat more?

Even if you don’t go out to parties or other social events that many would describe as caloric bombs, the holiday spirit can cause you to float around the fridge. It is important that you find things to do. Here are a few suggestions:

• Wrap the Christmas gifts
• Walk the dog
• Play with the kids
• Exercise more
• Invite friends and family to a walk in the park together, rather than having them come to your house or up-popping to their door
• Christmas is a great time for cooking so why not cook in the Zone?

If you’ve looked at the tabloids in the supermarket checkout line or surfed gossip sites, you probably know that pop star Britney Spears gained a visible amount of weight during her pregnancy. However, since the birth of little Sean Preston, she’s been photographed out and about looking fab. How did she do it?

According to recent reports, Brit’s been sticking to a Zone-like diet and cutting back on junk. “Let’s hope she got some good advice during her pregnancy about the dangers of her fast food junk diet and began cutting back on the Cheetos,” says fitness and diet expert Jonny Bowden. Britney’s probably swapping her beloved fried chicken for grilled and her french fries for mashed potatoes, as well as snacking on fruits and veggies. “She most likely has a personal chef who prepares meals and snacks that exactly meet whatever type of diet she’s on,” adds nutrition expert Lynn Grieger, RD, CDE.

The new dietary guidelines for americans resembles more to one of those popular diets than in previous years. For the first time since 1980, it emphasizes more on weight loss and less on cardiovascular and other modern diseases risk.

Based on several years reports, the guideline concludes that Americans are fatter than ever. The key to solve this problem would be an eating scheme based on raw fruits and vegetables, low fat milk and diary products, whole grains and increased body exercise.

The Dietary Guideline for Americans (DGA) sounds at times like weight watchers: “when it comes to body weight control, it is calories that count, not the ratio of macronutrients in our daily food intake”.

…and at other times it sounds like Zone Diet : “However” – it continues – “when individuals want to lose weight, they should follow a diet that is within the Acceptable Macronutrient Distribution Ranges (AMDR) for fat, carbohydrates and protein, which are 20 to 35 percent of total calories, 45 to 65 percent of total calories and 10 to 35 percent of total calories, respectively”.

Also, the 2005 DGA is concerned that diets which advice dramatic reduction in the daily intake of one macronutrient or another are usually to deprive the body of important, nourishing substances, not advisable on long-term, and though they usually show results in weight loss, it would be difficult and sometimes dangerous for health to maintain them.

“An efficient, sustainable weight reduction ultimately depends on a change in lifestyle”, the 2005 DGA proclaims.

Critics of the government nutritional guide mostly agree with the advices of eating less trans-fats and added sugars but they can’t understand why there are no specific limitations to those substances.

“It has been a big problem in the past that basically, the federal government has published a booklet and then crossed their fingers and hoped that Americans ate better,” says Margo Wootan, nutrition policy director for the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a health advocacy group.

She also opined that simple advice is not enough to solve it. What is needed is significant investment in programs and changes in policy and the food environment in order to help Americans eat better and watch their weight.

Original Zone Diet is now online – Start losing weight today!