Before we discuss how to do The Zone Diet , we should first explain the theory behind it. Its creator, Dr. Barry Sears, explains it as promoting a balance of hormones in your body, particularly of insulin, that enables your body to work at maximum efficiency and make best use of the nutrition in the foods you eat.
While The Zone Diet has no official scientific support, many nutritionists believe it to be soundly based and by no means a fad. It has been better accepted by the scientific community than the Atkins Diet or Sugar Busters, for example, and those that do the Zone Diet are convinced of its effectiveness. So what exactly do you eat with this diet ?
Dr. Sears maintains that the body reacts best to a diet consisting of 40% carbohydrates, 30% protein and 30% fat in terms of the calorie content. This in itself would appear to be reasonable, since your body needs fats for longer-term energy generation, carbohydrates for quick energy and proteins to provide the amino acids needed to generate new proteins and muscle fibers.
Normally you would expect a higher proportion of your calorie intake to be carbohydrate-based, but this is not a dangerous reduction. You should also control the calorie content of each meal to 500 calories for a main meal and 100 for a snack.
The objective of The Zone Diet is not just to lose weight, but also to maintain a healthy cardiovascular system and reduce inflammatory conditions such as diabetes and arthritis. This objective is promoted by maintaining a healthy balance of hormones. In basic terms, an excess of carbohydrates in your diet tends to generate too much insulin.
The purpose of insulin is to prompt the body to make use of the glucose in the blood either as an immediate energy source in the cellular mitochondria or stored as energy in the form of glycogen, and alternatively to convert the spare fatty acids and glycerol in the blood (also generated from carbohydrates) into fat for storage in the fat cells. Your body is allocated a number of fat cells at birth, and these are used throughout your life to store fat molecules: they can be empty, partially full or full, and which determines how 'fat' you are.
In effect, insulin reacts to excess blood glucose, and instructs your biochemistry to reduce it by: converting it to energy, to an emergency energy store (glycogen) or into fat.
Another hormone is glucagon, which comes into play when the level of glucose in your blood is low. It stimulates the liver to release glycogen as an emergency energy source, and also releases hormones that make you feel hungry. When you learn how to do The Zone Diet you basically learn how to control the release of these hormones.
The Zone Diet controls the relative amounts of protein, carbohydrates and fats in your diet that in turn control the release of the hormones that make you fat or keep you burning the glucose generated from your diet . You can follow The Zone Diet in many different ways, because there are no restrictions on the food you can eat other than the strict 40/30/30 ratio of carbohydrate/protein/fat.
You can eat foods such as chicken, pork, ham and beef as your 30% protein and fresh fruit and vegetables, nuts and particularly leafy green vegetables to make up the other 70% along with a small amount of oil: that together with nuts and some fruits offer the fats needed. Vegetarians can take soya, tofu or nuts as their protein source.
Although The Zone Diet refers to meals in terms of 'Food Blocks', these can be complicated to calculate, and you will achieve much the same thing by cutting down on high carb foods such as potatoes, pasta and rice, or even avoiding them altogether and relying on fruits and vegetables for your carbohydrates.
Keep in mind that sugar and sweet foods are carbohydrates as well as the starchy ones such as cereal crops (bread, oats, corn), and that an avocado is very high in calories. You are better with yoghurt and a small plate of muesli for breakfast than bacon and eggs, and chicken and green vegetables for dinner.
Calorie counting is essential since if you eat too much of any diet , you will simply put on weight. You can do The Zone Diet if you keep an eye on your calories - no more than 500/main meal, and exercise well.
So, to sum up, consume 500 calories per main meal consisting of 200 in the form of carbohydrates and 150 each in the form of protein and fats. For snacks, take 20% of these quantities and maintain the same 40/30/30 ration in terms of the calories arising from the carbohydrate/protein/fats in your diet .
Some people find it a difficult diet to follow, particularly calculating the calorie content of 'Food Blocks', but you can ignore these if you wish and focus on the foods and their individual calorie counts. Those that follow it have few doubts that it works, and if you learn how to do The Zone Diet correctly you can stay healthy, lose a lot of weight, and maintain that weight loss.