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The Zone Diet is a very recommended low-carb diet, specially for those people that need support while dieting. |
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The Zone is used to name the state in which the body operates at optimal levels in order to lose weight or maintain it. In order to be able to enter The Zone it is necessary to eat small portions of food, also keeping in mind the 40-30-30 percent balance of: carbohydrates, proteins and fats.
The Zone Diet is a very recommended low-carb diet, specially for those people that need support while dieting. In the year 1995, Dr Barry Sear published Enter the Zone, and he has also made public several diet products, support web sites and other books: Master The Zone, The Soy Zone, A Week in the Zone, Top 100 Zone Foods, and some others. The intention of all these books is to encourage a low carbohydrate diet with food portions with a ratio of 40% carbohydrates, 30% protein and 30% fat.
The reason for the specific portion is to assist the production of the body’s insulin with which fat burning improves. The portions of this diet plan, based on low carbs, are handled with a “block method”. In the case of carbohydrates, one block is 9 grams; for the protein, one block is 7 grams; and for the fat, one block is 1.5 to 3 grams.
Another recommendation is to practice physical activities which will help to improve the health and lose weight.
How the Zone Diet works
The eating plan designed by this low-carb diet is a combination of little portions of low-fat proteins at every meal, fats and carbohydrates in the form of vegetables and fruits that are rich in fiber.
Sears has based his theory of the weight loss on the usage of a diet to control the body’s production of insulin. The insulin hormone has many roles, one of them is to regulate the storage of excess energy in the form of fat. The aim is to reach a balance between the fat-storing insulin and its opposite, the glucagons hormone (it releases the stored glucose of the liver when needed). The way to reach and maintain a balance between the mentioned two, is to pay attention to the size and content of the meals that are eaten. All that is needed is to watch the things put in the plates and try to think of food not as "a source of calories but as a control system for hormones”, as Sears once suggested. |
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