« How to Love Your Body | Home | 3 Causes of Weight Loss Frustration »
Diet Reviews: The Flat Belly Diet
By Jim | February 19, 2008
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
This season’s diet craze is here and it’s called the Flat Belly Diet. The diet is written by Prevention magazine’s Editor in Chief Liz Vaccariello (along with Nutrition Editor Cynthia Sass). The basic idea is based around Monounsaturated Fatty Acids - MUFA for short. The Flat Belly Diet calls for a MUFA food at every meal because according to “exciting new research, MUFAs can actually help you lose weight, specifically around your middle.”
Now, I admit that I don’t like diets in general, I think the idea of dieting has become synonymous with deprivation and short term. After exploring this diet a little further, it’s the same approach as most diets except that it highlights the “scientific” discovery of MUFA’s.
Basically, you reduce calories, exercise, and keep a good attitude. Wow! Ever heard of that before? I can tell you first hand after interviewing over 100 people who have lost weight permanently (over 2 years) that they didn’t do it by dieting. They did it by changing the way they thought (you can learn how by clicking here now).
Dieting is fine to mix things up and to see how your body responds to different foods and exercises, but the first question that needs to be asked when you’re ready to lose weight is “Can I see myself eating like this long term?” If the answer is no, then keep looking for a better approach because starting and stopping diets is one of the worst things you can do to yourself physically and emotionally.
When you reduce your calories your metabolism slows down, if you follow a diet for 2-4 weeks and then go back to eating the way you did before, your body can’t burn the calories off as easily as it did. This is why some people who lose weight on diets end up gaining all the weight back, plus more. And this creates the limiting belief of “no matter what I do, I can’t keep the weight off” But in reality it should be “dieting doesn’t work long term for me, so I’m going to find a better approach.”
I’m sure this diet would work great if you followed it to the letter, but thats true for almost any diet. What really makes real permanent changes in your body is when you change from the inside out. When you begin to crave healthy food and movement. Learn how to think and feel like a thin person and the weight loss begins to happen naturally. Create a new self image for yourself, imagine what it would feel like to have that body. Attach that feeling to fruit and salads.
Remember, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing expecting a different result. Expecting to permanently lose weight with diets may fall into that category. I know because I went through this myself until I discovered a better and permanent way to lose weight, which you can read about here
February 19th, 2008 at 7:08 pm
Hi Jim,
Excellent blog!
I practice yoga regularly as a way to reduce stress and calm my mind, and I’ve studied NLP a bit over the years, a concept I find extremely powerful. Hypnosis I have no experience with. But still, I enjoy seeing how you’ve combined all three concepts here on your blog as tools to achieve weight loss and better health goals.
As you know I’m sure, for stress reduction and overall health, smiling and laughing can help dramatically to maintain good health and good attitude. Laughing daily can help make many little annoyances seem trivial and silly, thus allowing you to better deal with them. And laughing can help get through tough journeys toward major goals achievement, goals like losing weight, especially when experiencing setbacks.
So, in relation to this post about the fat belly diet - I’ve written about this topic too on my funny video clips site, but I’ve done so with a humorous twist. Care to laugh a little?
You’ll see the fat belly diet secret exposed!
When it comes to diets, I agree with you when you say in your post that the question to ask is: “Can I see myself eating like this long term?”
Well, in this video clip, the question is, “Can she really walk around like that long term?” Probably not, as we see at the end!
Here it is: http://www.funnybonevideos.com/flat-belly-diet-exposed-in-this-belly-busting-video/
Thanks Jim! Keep up the great work… I’ll be reading!
Dave
February 22nd, 2008 at 2:24 pm
I’m sorry, but I have to disagree that if you “think and feel like a thin person,” you will necessarily end up looking like one. The emphasis here should be getting healthy, not skinny.
Studies have shown that people who concentrate on eating in a balanced manner and getting more active are much more successful, long-term, than those who “diet.”
Unfortunately, there is no snap-of-the-fingers solution. MUFA foods are not magically going to melt the pounds off of you.
March 3rd, 2008 at 2:29 pm
Hey - great post. We’ve tried the flat belly diet, and think it actually does promote the good habits required to establish a life-long pattern of good eating (so you can keep the weight off). As you say, no diet is perfect, and without good habits and exercise, nothing will work. At least the flat belly diet is reasonable and can establish good eating habits.
May 8th, 2008 at 2:22 am
If anyone that has a diet of 1,600 calories a day they are bound to loose weight without anything else since that is almost a stravation diet. And you don’t have to concoct a water mixture with cumbers, etc. Just drink eight glasses of water a day which helps with weight loss. What a phoney this author is thinking she will make tons of money with the gimmack title of The Belly Fat Weight loss and promoting it on the 700 Club. Shame, shame, shame.