The Zone: A Revolutionary Life Plan to Put Your Body in Total Balance for Permanent Weight Loss

Diets based on choice restriction and calorie limits usually fail. People on restrictive diets get tired of feeling hungry and deprived. They go off their diets, put the weight back on (primarily as increased body fat), and then feel bad about themselves for not having enough will power, discipline, or motivation. Weight loss has little to do with

So how do you maximize growth-hormone release during sleep? Eat a Zone-favorable snack before you retire. That snack will set in motion the hormonal foundation to allow maximum secretion of growth hormone. On the other hand, if you eat a carbohydrate-rich snack before you go to bed, you've done everything in your power to inhibit growth hormone rel

Eating fat does not make you fat. It's your body's response to excess carbohydrates in your diet that makes you fat. Your body has a limited capacity to store excess carbohydrates, but it can easily convert those excess carbohydrates into excess body fat. It's hard to lose weight by simply restricting calories. Eating less and losing excess body fa

So the critical hormonal balance of insulin and glucagon depends on two things. One is the size of the meal you eat—excess calories stimulate secretion of insulin. The other is the ratio of protein to carbohydrate in each meal.

All well and good. The problem is that insulin is essentially a storage hormone, evolved to put aside excess carbohydrate calories in the form of fat in case of future famine. So the insulin that's stimulated by excess carbohydrates aggressively promotes the accumulation of body fat.

Let me be a little more specific about the rewards you'll reap from staying in the Zone. One is loss of excess body fat. If you have a weight problem, the real problem is excess body fat. Even if you're only slightly overweight, the dietary technology

The bottom line: if you want to generate the maximum hormonal benefits from exercise, aerobic or anaerobic or both, you need to be in the Zone—before you exercise, while you exercise, and right after you exercise. This is true whether you're a marathon runner, a weight lifter, a jogger, or a three-times-a-week aerobic dancer. How do you accomplish

This means that, in effect, human growth hormone is the most powerful fat-burning hormone in the body. So release of human growth hormone from the pituitary gland is the crucial hormonal change that occurs with anaerobic exercise. That hormonal change gives you two crucial sweat benefits: it burns fat, and it allows you to build new muscle at the s

Once the glycogen levels are filled in both the liver and the muscles, excess carbohydrates have just one fate: to be converted into fat and stored in the adipose, that is, fatty, tissue. In a nutshell, even though carbohydrates themselves are fat-free, excess carbohydrates end up as excess fat.