Latest posts

Forum Statistics

Threads
27,576
Posts
541,625
Members
28,554
Latest Member
pbtom
What's New?

The ZIGZAG Diet

AWARE72

AWARE72

MuscleHead
Oct 17, 2010
323
18
I''m not sure if any of you have heard of or used the zigzag diet plan before. I'll been following its theory and has worked well for me...

Below is a section from FITNESS: THE COMPLETE GUIDE Unit 9 pg 273/274

THE ZIGZAG METHOD OF FAT LOSS
"I eat like a BIRD, and still gain weight!'

"No matter WHAT I do , I get fatter and fatter!"

"All I have to do is SMELL food and i put on weight"

Anyone who has been around the fitness world for any lenght of time has heard these complaints before. Even athletes and bodybuilder preparing for competition often have trouble shedding those last couple of pounds of third place-rendering, muscle-masking ugliness called adipose.

So have the intrepid sleuths of Academe. Scientist have long know that stringent deiting causes a corresponding drop in resting metabolic rate (called "basal" metabolic rate, or "BMR"), making it difficult , and often impossible, to continue the fatshedding process.

Scientist at the University of Pennsylvania preformed a 48 week reshearch study which explored this phenomenon. They came up with some intriguing findings that you-elite athlete or coach potato- can definitely benefit from.

The study involved 18 women weighing an average of 216 pounds at the beginning of the research peroid. Half recieved a 1,200 calorie per day diet, and the other half recieved 16 weeks of a common meal replacement liquid followed by a conventional weight reducing diet. All women walked to increase their caloric burn.

While the BMRs of both groups fell after 5 weeks, it fell signifcantly more for those taking the meal replacement supplement(the more stringent of the two experimental treatments). However BMRs quickly returned to a level considered normal for their new (lower) body weight in both groups. After the 48 weeks, the MBRs of both groups has dipped an average of 9 percent, and their percentage of body fat has dropped an average of 16-19 percent.

What's interesting about this studys findings(other than the relativley predictable outcome that the crash dieters weren't any better off than the moderate dieters after 48 weeks) is that scientists has previously assumed that any drop in weight triggered a permanent, corredponding drop in BMR. However, in both groups the BMR returned to normal after the initial drop. A permanenlty lowered BMR would mean that a dieter would not burn calories as rapidly and might therefore regain the lost pounds or have real problems shedding more pounds.

Of course, the mechanism responsible for the highly undesirable turn of events is the loss in lean muscle. It's simple: bigger muscles burn more calories than little muscles. If you are losing weight from both fat and muscle, your ability to contuine to loose fat-and keep it off- is literally sacrificed.

Scientists are finally beginning to garner some hard data supporting what we have known for a long, long time. There's way tp lose fat and still maintain a reasonbly high BMR so your fat loss process can contuine smoothly. It's called the zigzag diet method of fat loss, and it worked better than any fat loss method there is. Why? It's permanent, Permanent, that is, if you continue to eat 5 or 6 smaller meals per day and exersise regularly. It also allowes you to maintain(or improve) your leaqn muscle mass.

The zigzag diet method of fat loss is a technique by where you vary the amount of calories you comsume(in relation to your BMR) in order ro stimulate positive changes in your basel metabolic rate. Depending on your goals you might schedule several days where you comsume a diet lower in calories than maintenance level of calories you currenlty comsume. You would then subsequently schedule a muber of days where your calories consumption would be above your maintenance level.
 
Who is viewing this thread?

There are currently 0 members watching this topic

Top