Green Diet

Scarsdale diet information

The Scarsdale Diet was developed by Dr. Herman Tarnower as a way to lose a significant amount of weight in a short period of time.
It is a strict weight loss meal plan that promises participants they will lose at least one pound per day.
While many people have boasted significant weight loss with this program it has several disadvantages as well.

The Scarsdale Diet will require that you limit your food consumption to specific amounts of fruits, vegetables, and lean sources of protein. It also promotes the use of herbal appetites suppressants and the use of artificial sweeteners.

This diet is a very controlled program. While there is no calorie counting or portion weighing, you are limited o three meals a day with no snacking between meals.
The diet emphasizes avoiding carbohydrates and moderating your fat intake. It encourages high protein foods, vitamins, minerals, herbal appetite suppressants, and plenty of water.

There are some additional regulations that should be followed. For example, alcoholic beverages are strictly prohibited. In addition, all salads must be prepared without mayonnaise or oil. All vegetables must be free from butter or margarine.
All coffees or teas may be sweetened with an artificial sweetener but no cream can be used. Diet drinks can be substituted if necessary. There is no eating between meals. Furthermore, the Scarsdale eating plan must be followed precisely. While you do not have to eat everything suggested you cannot add anything extra or make substitutions.

This low calorie diet encourages that you drink at least eight 8-ounce glasses of water a day. The consumption of water will keep your body hydrated and will stimulate your metabolism. It also flushes out your system, which will allow the weight to come off faster.

The Scarsdale diet is most effective if you stay on it for 7 to 14 days. The diet boasts that you can lose 20 pounds by the end of the second week. However, once you stop the rigid diet it is critical to maintain a healthy eating regimen to avoid putting the weight back on.

The Scarsdale diet does not put any emphasis on exercising. It actually encourages dieters over the age of 40 to avoid adding any strenuous activities to their daily routine. The reason exercise is overlooked on this weight loss plan is that the diet provides a minimal caloric intake.
This small amount of calories will not provide your body with enough energy to exercise regularly. The lack of carbohydrates gives you body very little fuel to expend on exercising.

Experts agree that the Scarsdale diet is not ideal for individuals that are extremely overweight. It is intended for people who have a relatively small amount of weight to lose, less than twenty pounds, in a small amount of time.

It is also not meant to be a long term weight loss solution. The strict meal plan should be adhered to for one to two weeks, anything longer than that would be unhealthy. Your body would start to feel the effects of the nutrients it is missing and resort to a survival mode.
The instinctive defense requires that your body slow down metabolism so that it won’t starve, causing you to hit a plateau or begin to gain the weight back.

In conclusion, while the Scarsdale diet may provide quick results, most experts will agree that the weight lost is mostly water and will be regained quickly when normal eating resumes. Furthermore, though some dieters report positive results, the strict 700-calorie a day diet can be considered too extreme for others. If you are considering this diet it is recommended that you check with your physician first.

Green Tea for Weight Loss?

Drinking green tea has numerous health benefits. It can lower cholesterol, enhance fat oxidation, and increase thermogenesis, which is the body’s rate of burning calories.
Green tea is becoming a more popular form of weight loss as can be seen by the wide variety of supplement makers that are using it in their weight loss products.

Green tea extract is commonly being used to replace the caffeine component in many fat-burning supplements. Green tea provides more benefits than what caffeine would contribute.
For example, it is a powerful antioxidant. Experts agree that the active ingredient epigallocatechin gallate, EGCG, is up to 200 times for potent than vitamin E as an oxidant.

Green tea has also been useful in regulating glucose. This means it can slow the rise of blood sugar after a meal. It does this by slowing the action of a digestive enzyme called amylase.
Amylase is a crucial component of breaking down starches or carbohydrates after a meal. Without that breakdown blood sugar levels can be very high after eating.

Furthermore, weight is gained as excess sugars and fats are stored in the body as fat cells.
Green tea can help avoid storing extra pounds by restraining the movement of glucose in fat cells.

Green tea has been able to stimulate weight loss by increasing the metabolic weight and increasing the number of calories burned. If you’d like to take advantage of green tea in your weight loss program there are several ways to introduce it. You can purchase it in isolation.
This is the easiest way to determine that any results experienced are due to the green tea itself and not something you combined it with.

Another way to introduce it into your weight loss plan is by buying a fat burner that contains green tea in its list of ingredients.
There are plenty of popular products on the market that boast green tea as component of the supplement.

The simplest and most cost effective way to take advantage of the benefits of green tea is to drink it instead of coffee or regular tea.
By doing this you can avoid costly pills and still enjoy the positive results of green tea.

There have been several studies that have investigated the validity of green tea as a weight loss supplement. In years past research has chiefly involved testing on animals, primarily mice. However, recently scientists have begun to study the effect on humans.

One test administered by the Linus Pauling Institute showed that drinking green tea extract resulted in an average increase in energy of the body of 3-4 percent.
It was determined that this increase in energy was a result of increased fat oxidation and thermogenesis. Thermogenesis describes the energy used in heat production that is not related to resting metabolism or physical activity.

In a separate study people were given green tea while others were given caffeine to see how the two compared. The study indicated that the people who had taken the green tea had a higher thermogenesis than those that took the caffeine.

It should be mentioned that green tea usually does contain caffeine, but if necessary herbal preparations can be made without caffeine.
This herbal supplement will provide the benefits of the catechins that produce thermogenesis in green tea without the effects of caffeine.

At this point there are no documented studies determining the long term effects of green tea on weight loss. However, experts suggest that combining green tea with a healthy diet and regular exercise routine will maximize results.

How to Know if It’s Right for You

Dr. Robert Atkins started the Atkins diet in the 1960s. Robert Atkins wrote a book to layout a diet plan for people that would actually help them lose weight. Because of the success of the diet, people everywhere jumped onto the bandwagon.

Dr. Atkins was known as rejecting the food pyramid. He believed that saturated fat shouldn’t be considered to be such a problem. Instead he believed that eating refined carbohydrates (sugar, flour, and high-fructose corn syrup) is the main cause of obesity, he used this as the base for his diet plan.
The Atkins diet restricts carbohydrates in an attempt to switch the body’s way of metabolizing foods. Instead of burning glucose, the idea is to get your body to burn fat instead.

There are four phases involved in the Atkins diet.
The first phase is called, Induction. During this stage of the diet, participants are allowed only 20 grams of carbohydrates per day and caffeine and alcohol are completely avoided.
The reason for doing this is to get your body into a state of ketosis; burning fat not sugar. Participants lose the most weight during this phase of the diet; it’s common to lose 6-8 pounds for every week that you’re in this phase.

The next phase is called, the ongoing weight loss phase. The goal during this phase is to slowly introduce carbohydrates back into your diet without consuming too many of them.
You need to find the critical carbohydrate level your body needs in order to continue losing weight. Finding the proper level will allow you to eat carbohydrates without putting on extra pounds. This phase goes on until the participant comes within 10 pounds of what they want to weigh.

Next is the pre-maintenance phase. Participants continue adding carbohydrates to their diet following 10 grams per week schedule. The goal of this stage is also to find the critical carbohydrate level in order to keep your weight where you want it.
During this stage you will find your maximum daily carbohydrate level. This will be the amount of carbohydrates you will be allowed to eat for the rest of your dieting days.

The last phase of the Atkins diet is the Lifetime maintenance phase.
This phase is to help the participants continue to follow the eating habits they picked up during this diet. If you are in this last phase and start to gain weight you are supposed to regress to an earlier stage and start again from there. From here on out you’re supposed to have a new way of eating.

This diet became very popular and then, like many other diets do, it died back down. At the fall of the diet’s popularity there were plenty of rumors flying around about the diet. People claimed that restricting carbohydrates was threatening to your health and that it caused heart-attacks and even cancer.
On the flip side people say that the diet is perfectly healthy and it’s a great way to lose weight. There was also a rumor that Dr. Atkins died from following his own diet. These rumors, of course, weren’t true. In fact Dr. Atkins died in 2003 from a fatal head injury.

There are still many people that follow the Atkins diet but it’s purely the individual’s choice of which diet they will follow. It’s good to do your own research on any diet before starting it because there are pros and cons to every diet out there.
The final decision about which diet plan is best for you should be made after speaking with a qualified physician.