Oct 20 2009
What are Zone Diets?
There is so much information flying around the Internet these days, it gets difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff. This is especially so when trying to find info that relates to dieting or weight loss. One of the questions that gets asked a lot is “What are zone diets?” so this post will do its best to explain them.
Zone diets are derived from a system of dieting and healthy lifestyle created by Barry Sears PhD and packaged as The Zone Diet. It works on the fairly simple principle that as long as you eat a well balanced and healthy diet and combine that with regular daily exercise, you should be able to maintain a healthy weight without needing to resort to artificial or unnatural means to lose weight and keep that excess weight off.
The diet itself comprises a variable set of daily meals that are shipped out to customers in batches of seven day’s supply, covering three meals a day plus snacks that can be eaten in between meals. The meals are balanced out to contain 40% proteins with 30% of low GI carbohydrates and a further 30% fats, the majority of which are unsaturated or good fats.
When people see this relatively high level of fats included in a diet, they initially worry that is too high and it will make then gain and not lose weight. This is not so, as it is not the fats themselves that generally cause weight gain, unless you eat them is extremely high quantities, but, the overall levels of calories you consume that are in excess of what your body can burn through exercise.
So that’s what zone diets are, in a nutshell and in their most simplistic terms. They work where other fad diets may fail simply because our bodies need a balanced diet where no major food group is excluded. As long as we balance the food we eat with sufficient exercise to burn off the calories that food contains, we will not gain weight. Pure and simple.
So you could actually save yourself a lot of money by avoiding expensive diet plans and get back to basics. Eat well and healthily, cut right down on junk foods, high sugar foods, fizzy soda drinks and alcohol and for heaven’s sake do some exercise and you’ll be healthy!
