Enter The Zone!
The Zone Diet is the plan of author Barry Sears, as detailed in his best-selling diet book Enter The Zone. After 15 years of research Sears believes he has formulated a plan to keep your body in perfect balance for better health, athletic performance, and prolonged weight loss. He and the co-author, Bill Lawren show that by consuming calories in a balanced ratio of 30% protein, 30% fat and 40% carbohydrates, you are retooling your metabolism and reduce your risks of heart disease, high blood pressure and diabetes.
The “Zone” is a hormonally balanced level of symmetry for “feeling alert, refreshed, and full of energy”. This diet plans ideology is that man was created to be a meat-eater and that the modern agricultural production of starches, pastas, breads and potatoes causes an imbalance of your hormonal and metabolic levels. By sticking to natural starches, rather than processed, your insulin level will be in a more natural and balanced zone. And, life in The Zone is what wellness is all about.
Barry Sears, PhD. Sears, is a former researcher in bio technology at the Boston University School of Medicine and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has spent many years studying lipids, and their inflammatory role in the development of chronic disease. According to many, Sears began working on Zone Diet in the early 1970s, shortly after his father’s death of a heart attack.
According to Dr. Sears, the key for a healthy body is a good hormone level. In order to regulate hormones like insulin, glucagon and eicosanoids, the body uses essential substances from food. As a result, food is considered by Dr. Sears the most powerful drug that our body uses every day.
Sears claims that his diet, which calls for roughly twice the fat and protein recommended by the USDA, regulates the body’s supply of insulin. According to Sears, reducing levels of this crucial hormone makes the body burn fat faster and eliminates destructive food cravings.
This diet plan centers on the rationalism of a fat in a balanced diet. The ratio of calories is 30% protein, 30% fats and 40% carbohydrates. The principle behind the Zone Diet plan is to keep the hormonal insulin level in a tight zone, not too high, not too low but at a balanced level of symmetry.
Like other popular diet books, Enter The Zone offers more than just weight-loss claims. By retooling your metabolism with a diet that is 30% protein, 30% fat, and 40% carbohydrates, The Zone diet contends that you can expect to turn back encroaching heart disease, high blood pressure, and diabetes. Another much-touted advantage is better athletic performance. Sears doesn’t come right out and claim he has found the cure for heart disease or diabetes, or how to win athletic competitions, but instead he provides glowing anecdotes from people who have taken The Zone diet to heart.
The Zone Diet, however, offers more than just weight-loss claims. By retooling your metabolism with a diet that is 30% protein, 30% fat, and 40% carbohydrates, The Zone diet contends that you can expect to turn back encroaching heart disease, high blood pressure, and diabetes. Another much-touted advantage is better athletic performance.
What The Zone diet does boldly claim is that much of the current thinking about good nutrition — a diet high in carbohydrates, low in protein, and fats — is “dead wrong.” What’s more, Sears contends, that type of diet has contributed to our risk of contracting serious, even life-threatening ailments such as heart disease, diabetes, and possibly cancer.
Put simply, The Zone diet is a “metabolic state in which the body works at peak efficiency,” and that state is created by eating a set ratio of carbohydrates, protein, and fat.
The Zone Diet may be one of the easiest regimes to adjust to, having the fewest adverse affects such as fatigue or hunger. Most people who report fatigue find that the fatigue diminishes by day 2 or 3.
“The Zone” is Sears’ term for proper hormone balance. When insulin levels are neither too high nor too low and glucagon levels are not too high, then specific anti-inflammatory chemicals (types of eicosanoids) are released, which have similar effects to aspirin, but without downsides such as gastric bleeding. Sears claims that a 30:40 ratio of protein to carbohydrates triggers this effect, and this is called ‘The Zone.’ Sears claims that these natural anti-inflammatories are heart- and health-friendly. There is no evidence that eating in this way affects hormone levels.
Sears claims that the relatively high proportion of carbohydrate in some diets—by comparison to protein— increases the production of the hormone insulin, causing the body to store more fat. The example proposed by Sears is the cattle ranching practice of fattening livestock efficiently by feeding them high amounts of high-carbohydrate grain.
Sears also points out the obvious irony:
“data analysis … shows that in spite of the fact that the American public has dramatically cut back on the amount of fat consumed, the country has experienced an epidemic rise in obesity.”
Additionally, Sears suggests fat consumption is essential for “burning” fat. His rationale is: Monounsaturated fats in a meal contribute to a feeling of fullness and decrease the rate at which carbohydrates are absorbed into the bloodstream. Slower carbohydrate absorption means lower insulin levels which means less stored fat and a faster transition to fat burning. If the body needs energy and can’t burn fat because of high insulin levels, a person feels tired as their brain starves and metabolism slows to compensate. This occurs because the brain runs on glucose and high insulin levels deplete blood glucose levels. Such a condition, rebound hypoglycemia, causes sweet cravings (which just starts the high-insulin cycle all over again).
Sears describes a Zone meal as follows: “Eat as much protein as the palm of your hand, as much non-starchy raw vegetables as you can stand for the vitamins, enough carbohydrates to maintain mental clarity because the brain runs on glucose, and enough monounsaturated oils to keep feelings of hunger away.”
According to Dr. Sears, while human DNA has not changed much over the last 100,000 years, our eating habits have.
What you can eat on the Zone Diet
The Zone diet does not recommend that you eat fewer calories than, just different ones. Although the book has a more complicated and exacting measurement of what to eat, it can be simplified as:
- A small amount of protein at every meal (approximately the size of your palm or one small chicken breast) and at every snack (one in the late afternoon, one in the late evening)
- “Favorable” carbohydrates twice the size of the protein portion — these include most vegetables and lentils, beans, whole grains, and most fruits
- A smaller amount of carbohydrates if you have chosen “unfavorable” ones — these include brown rice, pasta, papaya, mango, banana, dry breakfast cereal, bread, bagel, tortilla, carrots, and all fruit juices.
Dairy products are not off limits, but The Zone diet does recommend fewer and warns that they quickly release glucose. The Zone Diet favors egg whites and egg substitutes to whole eggs, and low-fat or no-fat cheeses and milk.
The Zone diet keeps saturated fats to a minimum but includes olive, canola, macadamia nuts, and avocados. Certain unfavorable carbohydrates are restricted because they release glucose quickly: grains, breads, pasta, rice, and other similar starches, a deviation from conventional definitions of a good diet. Overall, the diet is higher in protein and fat than traditional diets, which would have us eat nearly three-quarters of all calories as carbohydrates.
The Zone Diet is strict about the percentages of protein/fat/carbohydrate you need, and will help you determine the amount of protein, fats, and carbohydrates we should be eating based on size, weight and age.
Thankfully, for those who love sweets, many deserts are among the allowable foods. This includes a small portion of (my favorite) high-fat ice cream! High in fat because the fat retards the rate of absorption of carbohydrate into the body.
How it works
The Zone plan is to seek a ratio of 30% low-fat protein, 30% fats, and 40% carbohydrates in your diet to which Sears asserts the body is genetically programmed. The result is a balance of fat-storing insulin and glucagon. Using diet, the theory is to control the body’s production of the hormone insulin which helps regulate storage of excess energy, or sugar, as fat. Glucagon is basically the opposite of insulin, and causes the liver to convert stored glycogen into glucose (like sugar), which is released into the bloodstream as needed.
What experts say about the Zone Diet
The Zone Diet breaks for the conventional wisdom, that 50 percent of calories should come from carbohydrates, 15 percent from protein, and 35 percent from fat. Therefore, you can imagine many health experts have reservations. . While most nutrition experts agree with the advice to eat less fat, especially saturates, and to fill up on fruit and veg, most remain sceptical about the theory that weight loss is due to regulating insulin levels. However, eating fewer carbohydrate-rich foods results in a calorie deficit –taking in fewer calories than the body uses up which make you lose weight. What several experts like is that the Zone diet is easy to follow. You have a piece of protein the size of your palm, and you fill the rest of your plate up with fruits and vegetables.
Recommendation
Diet Smarter recommends the Zone Diet due to its easy to follow formula, and easy to adjust diet plan. Once you’ve learned the guidelines it’s easy to relate everything you’ve learned to the foods you chose when shopping, or having a meal with friends at a restaurant. If followed properly, the diet provides around 1,000 to 1,300 calories a day, thanks mainly to cutting out most high-calorie sugary and starchy foods – and replacing them with low-calorie vegetables and fruit. Here’s an example: swap a large Danish pastry, containing around 650 calories, for a 50-calorie apple and you’ll save a staggering 600 calories. Do this every day for a week and you’d expect to lose more than 1lb in a week! Read the Zone Diet book and follow Dr. Sears direction for an amazing amount of helpful direction on how to lose weight in a relatively painless way.
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