The Zone Diet
I first picked up a book on the zone diet back in 2000. I actually bought the book because it was in a closing down sale and cost around £2. I figured I may find some nice recipes in it. I started to then read all about the zone diet and this was the first instance of reading about how it was in fact insulin causing my weight issues, and also how if I continued as I did I could possibly end up diabetic. This scared me. At the time I was living alone in London and comfort eating most weeks as I had nothing to do at night, walked past plenty of food shops on the way home from work, lived above a Chinese, and worked next door to another Chinese! The zone diet made sense to me. As it states, back in the old times humans didn’t have access to the carbohydrate foods that we have now, and they lived off meat, fruit and vegetables.
You can probably see a similarity between the Zone diet and the Atkins diet. They do both follow similar ideas in that cutting out starchy foods will lower the rate of insulin production, making you less hungry too. However the difference is that with the Zone diet your protein intake is far more restricted and your vegetable intake is far greater. In theory this is a good thing, afterall we all know that you should eat plenty of fruit and vegetables throughout the day. One reason I didn’t enjoy the Atkins diet (which I tried after the Zone diet) is because I couldn’t eat fruit. On the Zone diet you can eat fruit as well as vegetables.
How the Zone Diet works
It’s a fairly simple idea to follow. You are allowed a certain number of ‘blocks’ (3 for women, 4 for men) from the 3 food sections - protein, carbohydrate and fat. You should have 3 meals a day and so from a woman’s point of view ideally use 1 block from each group for each meal. Both men and women are then allowed 1 block from each group for their 2 snacks of the day (mid afternoon and evening snacks). Sounds straightforward right? So typical blocks of food can be:
Protein
- 1.5 oz skinless chicken
- 1.5 oz most fish fillets
- 1/4 cup of cottage cheese
Carbohydrates
- 3 cups of Broccoli
- 4 cups of Cauliflower
- 10 cups of Lettuce romaine
- 1 cup of Strawberries
- 1/2 an apple
Fats
- 3 whole almonds
- 1 tbsp Avocado
- 1/3 tbsp Olive Oil
For a full list see the Food Block Guide at the official web site.
Why the Zone Diet failed
Well I guess not why it failed but why I failed on it. After spending a few days reading the book and looking on the web for more information I decided to give it a try. Now I’m a planner so I took the food blocks and worked out my various meals with what was available to me. However I think I lasted all of one day - why? Because I was hungry and felt hollow. I can vaguely remember that for lunch I’d cooked some chicken breast and was having that with salad. At the time i’d chosen lettuce, but as you can see 1 block of lettuce is about 10 cups. I’m sure the book I have (somewhere) said half a lettuce. I didn’t realise how much half a lettuce was until I started eating it. Back at work during the afternoon I felt so empty and hollow from eating only a quarter of the lettuce! Breakfast hadn’t been great either. The trouble with any diet from the USA is that it targets their food (understandably) but I don’t have a clue what or how to find “slow cooking oatmeal”. So you’re often left with very few choices for breakfast such as a bacon substitute and egg whites (in the case of the zone diet). Well that’s great for once or twice a week but I’m not a fan of a daily cooked breakfast really, especially when I can’t have my yolk!
So I stopped. I never really got to try the book’s recipes (the whole point of buying it at first), and possibly now with doing the GI Diet I may find some useful ideas as when you look at all of these diets they are all saying a similar thing, that heightened levels of the wrong carbohydrates is not good for you. However for anyone who wants further information then here are a few resources and books on the subject: