The Truth About The Zone Diet

The Truth About the Zone Diet

One of the most effective ways to safeguard your health, live longer, and alleviate the impact of aging on your body is to eat a good diet. The Conscious Evolution Institute offers vital diet and nutrition plans combined with our various Hormone Replacement Therapy options to help you maximize the potential benefits of therapy.

The Age-Free Zone Diet is one of many viable diet options if you want to improve your health and reduce your risk of several Age-Related Medical Conditions.

Age-Free Zone Diet

This diet was created by a man named Doctor Barry Sears. The goal of this diet is to simultaneously help you lose weight and help you live an optimized life full of vitality. The central premise of the Age-Free Zone Diet is that there are certain factors that contribute to the aging process which can be controlled and that four of the factors which speed up the aging process the fastest are free radicals, cortisol, blood glucose, and insulin.

This diet aims to control and reduce the levels of these Aging-Associated Factors through lifestyle and diet so that you can balance them to reduce your mortality risk significantly.

Zone Diet Overview

• The goal of the diet is to balance hormone levels to slow down aging

• A calorie-restricted diet high in protein and low in carbohydrates

• Involves the use of diet supplements

Who Should Consider the Zone Diet?

This diet is best for individuals that love meats like chicken, fish, and pork, and also for individuals that don't feel that they can completely restrict their carbohydrate consumption but would be able to limit their consumption modestly.

Who Should Not Consider The Zone Diet?

This diet is unsuitable for individuals who need to limit their protein consumption, such as those with kidney problems. If you have Type-Two Diabetes, you should discuss this diet with your physician before initiating your plan because most medical professionals recommend eating slightly more carbohydrates than are allowed in this diet.

The Specifics of the Zone Diet

This diet is not explicitly designed as a plan to lose weight, but caloric restriction plays a significant role in the diet, making it also effective for people that want to lose weight. Sears is a fan of caloric restriction because he thinks that restricting calories is an effective means to limit the impact of aging even in individuals at a healthy weight.

The Age-Free Zone Diet is a combination of lifestyle changes and diet combined to optimize health and wellness. The three primary factors of this health plan are dieting, moderate physical activity and meditation.

Although lifestyle choices play a significant role in this diet, the plan's primary focus is scaling back calories consumed in the daily diet by avoiding simple carbs and limiting total carb consumption. By tightly controlling the consumption of carbohydrates, the body does not rely so heavily on insulin, which is responsible for converting carbohydrates into glucose.

In addition to controlling insulin, the diet plan also impacts the balance of many different hormones, including Melatonin, DHEA, Testosterone, Human Growth Hormone, Progesterone, Estrogen, and Thyroid Hormone, all of which are important to maintain correctly to optimize one's health. In men, for example, efforts are made to optimize Testosterone and Human Growth Hormone Secretion and to limit DHEA and Estrogen Levels in the body.

How Does the Zone Diet Slow Down the Effects of Aging?

Based on the theory behind this diet, Caloric Restriction is an effective means to lose weight while limiting the negative impacts of elevated Insulin and Blood Sugar. Living by this health plan also limits the impact of Free Radicals on health. Free Radicals are the byproducts of oxygen reactions in the body, which can damage cells if not controlled effectively.

Sears does not recommend severe caloric restriction, however. The goal of his diet is to intake just enough carbs to function optimally without experiencing unnecessary side effects of overconsumption. Maintaining these limited-yet-optimal levels will still give your body all the energy it needs to sustain itself effectively while keeping Insulin, Glucose, and Free Radicals in check.

A high-protein, low-carb diet is the central feature of this diet plan, but the Zone Diet also involves the use of anti-aging supplements and antioxidants. Despite these recommendations, Sears insists that exercise and foods play the most significant role in balancing hormone production in order to enhance longevity.

How is the Age-Free Zone Diet Organized?

The Zone Diet uses a common approach to stimulate metabolism: spreading meals and snacks throughout the day. In the case of this particular method, the dieter will ideally eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner with two snacks distributed between meals.

Every meal will involve four courses per meal for men and three courses per meal for women. Each meal will have one source of fat, one source of carbohydrates, and one source of protein. This diet plan even comes with a diet cookbook which provides fourteen days' worth of meals and some additional, helpful recipes.

To provide a clearer vision of what you can expect from your meals with this diet, breakfast might involve fruit salad, low-fat cheese, and soy patties. Lunch would involve reduced-fat cheese, turkey breast, lightly dressed tossed salad, and a fruit choice. An example of a Zone Diet Dinner would be grilled fish, grapes, green beans, and tomatoes topped with olive oil and Parmesan cheese.

In addition to meal plans, the Age-Free Zone Diet Book will provide you with examples of several quality choices for your meals and snacks in general and the knowledge needed to maintain a healthy diet.

The Rules of the Zone Diet

• Eat within an hour of waking up.

• Never wait for longer than five hours between meals and snacks. Eat something light even if you aren't hungry.

• Every snack and meal should involve protein.

• Place an emphasis on vegetables and fruits and make strong efforts to cut back on starches, grains, pasta, and bread.

• Never skip snacks.

• Consume at least sixty-four ounces of healthy drinks every day.

• Always have a small snack a half-hour before physical exercise.

How Do Nutrition Experts Feel about the Age-Free Zone Diet?

Experts agree that there are a lot of good ideas behind the Zone Diet, but certain aspects have not been fully proven. One niggling point about the Zone Diet is that Sears asserts that an essential aspect of the diet is discovering ideal carbohydrate consumption to slow down aging, but he makes no special effort to help the potential dieter to discover what that personal limit is.

The Diet Plan also provides no specific information regarding how to make the diet fit the needs of the individual.

A lot of what Sears supports is backed by compelling medical research. Responsible caloric restriction is highly correlated with reduced mortality. Elevated Insulin Levels do wreak havoc on the body and increase the risk of conditions such as diabetes and hypertension. Finally, free radicals can damage healthy cells, increase the rate of aging from wear and tear, and potentially damage the genes themselves.

The potential issue regarding these scientifically-backed aspects of Sears' diet approach is that he takes the essential scientific wisdom and goes further, inferring benefits that may or may not be the reality. One major issue that many nutritionists have with this diet is that the Zone Diet involves a lot of unneeded supplements that are sometimes combined in potentially damaging ways.

The Zone Diet is based on 1,500 calories per day for males and 1,200 calories per day for females. This level of caloric restriction will guarantee weight loss for individuals that are overweight or obese, but his plan does not provide necessary levels of certain nutrients, such as calcium and B-Vitamins, from nutrition alone.

The lack of these vitamins in the diet is mitigated through the use of mineral and vitamin supplements.

This diet generally recommends too much protein and not enough fiber and carbs.  The result of this is that you may experience constipation and fatigue. Also, Sears believes that this diet is ideal for men and women with Type-Two Diabetes, but most experts with experience with diabetes patients generally advocate a diet with more carbs than the Zone Diet recommends.

Of course, you could take the advice of the Zone Diet and alter it slightly to account for these dietary discrepancies to amplify the positive potential of a diet of this kind.

Still, the diet is too high in protein and too low in complex carbohydrates and fiber, which could leave you low on energy and constipated. And while Sears advocates the diet for people with type 2 diabetes, most diabetes experts recommend a diet much higher in carbohydrates than the plan provided in the book.

Age-Free Zone Diet Approved Recommendations:

Healthy Fats, Limited Complex Carbs, Proteins with Every Meal, Vegetables, Fruits, Caloric Restriction

Age-Free Zone Diet Things to Avoid:

Low-Fiber, Processed, High Fat, and High Carb Foods

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