New Diet Discoveries to Keep the Fat Off

With obesity at epidemic levels, there is more ongoing research on diet than ever before. Even if you’re not obese, it’s easy to pack on a few extra pounds before you know it in our fast-food-dominant society. Here are a few recently discovered ways to get the fat off.

Two diet days a week. Is that really all it takes? According to the May ’12 Prevention, a British study found that dieting only two days out of every seven is enough to shed pounds.

In the study group 1 ate a 1,500-calories-a-day diet, while group 2 simply didn’t eat starchy carbohydrates—bread, potatoes, and the like—only two days a week. Veggies that weren’t starchy were okay, however. The Results: After 12 weeks the two-day dieters lost about twice as much weight as the 1,500-calories-a-day group.

Let them eat cake—for breakfast. Do you have to completely shun sweets if you want to drop bodyfat? Not according to a new study done at Tel Aviv University and reported in the June ’12 Prevention.

Two groups of subjects ate the same number of calories every day, but one group was allowed a sweet treat with their high-protein breakfast. The morning-sweets group “lost nearly 40 pounds more, on average, than the others.”

The satisfying and calming serotonin release caused by the sweets appears to crush cravings later in the day.

Never skip breakfast. Some people think that simply skipping breakfast is the best way to drop fat. Nope. The truth is, after a seven-to-eight-hour fast, your metabolism needs a kick-start. If it doesn’t get it, your body believes famine is imminent and starvation is possible—and your metabolism slows to a crawl, causing your body to horde fat and burn off muscle.

Mark Hyman, M.D., author of The Blood Sugar Solution, had this to say in the June ’12 Health: “Breakfast triggers a process called thermogenesis, where the body signals the brain to activate the metabolic process of turning food into energy.”

Don’t skip breakfast!