Why Do We Need Fast Food When We Are Following The Zone Diet?

Before dipping into this chapter, we have to remember several Zone Diet principles:

• Never let more than five hours pass without eating
• Eat five times a day
• Divide your meals into main meals and snacks
• Eat when you do not feel that hungry and have not lost your focus

Now, imagine you have to go to work earlier than usual and don't have time to prepare a 40-30-30 breakfast. Or that you have to drive continuously for six hours. What do you do? Do you wait until you can eat a perfectly balanced meal, or drop into a McDonald's and have a high-carb way-out of the Zone meal? Considering the rules, the best option seems to be to drop into a fast-food restaurant. The essential thing about staying in the Zone is eating, not starving.

You can't skip your meals. But a big bucket of French fries will result in an excess of carbohydrate blocks.

As Zone Diet does not exclude any food items, but focuses on proportions, you should be able to have balanced meals even at McDonalds. To approximate food blocks you can use the eyeball method.Perhaps the food items you choose will not count among the most favorable, but they will do as a compromise until your next Zone meal.

Zone Diet Fast Food Tips

• Work with the eyeball method to measure your blocks.
• Choose the healthiest food you can find: grilled chicken, side salads.
• Avoid french fries, mayonnaise and soda.
• To fulfill the carb ratio, a good choice is to throw away the top-bun of the sandwich or burger and replace it with some fresh fruit or salad.
• Remember that a Zone diet bar has two blocks; carry some with you for your zone diet snacks.
• The optimum drink to go with your meal is water.
• Keep with you a printed version of Dr. Sears' Fast Food Zone. It's a good guide for counting fast-food blocks when eating at a fast food outlet.

In this way fast-food restaurants become an acceptable Zone food option when there's no other.