Want To Know How To Shed Your Body Fat Weight Easily, and Healthfully, Stabilizing Your Blood Sugar in the Process?

In this Newsletter, I am going to teach you about the Zone Diet, and give you some easy starter meals you can easily make to reduce inflammation, stabilize your blood sugar, and lose body fat. I'm going to give you lots of very juicy and important details about what really is needed for this to work!

Woman Cartoon Who Lost Weight Showin the New Gap in HerJeansFirst I want to let you know that I have lost about A HALF to ONE AND A HALF POUNDS PER a week since I started eating on the Zone Diet about 9 weeks ago.

That may not sound like much to you, but for the meal preparation work I am doing, which is minimal, and because of some simple meals, and how many meals I am preparing in the Zone each day, I am happy with it. And I think it is safer too.

I'm also happy because I'm going in the right direction, without much work, rather than gaining weight, or having very minimal non-visible weight loss.

I also think it is reasonable, because I'm not losing weight so quickly and then I end up having even a little bit of excess skin on my body.

I'm not obese, but I was not going in the right direction over the last 15 years, and I could not continuously lose the weight even with exercise.

This diet is very easy! No heavy exercise needed at all. In fact it will work even without any regular exercise!

I must also say, I'm drinking the Right Spring Water, with high resonance too. At times, like today as I'm writing this, I'm finding I need to drink a lot, lot more water than I usually do. In fact this morning while I was listening to my body's need to drink lots of water, I was asking myself what was going on? I was really, really thirsty. I could not drink water fast enough, and I had to spend 5 minutes drinking a whole bunch of water and I had to interrupt what I was doing!

The reason is because I ended up detoxifying today as part of my regular routine of following the Zone diet – and I had some cheese, 2 apples, and some almonds for breakfast!

No fasting required at all!

As a Natural Health Practitioner, I consider weight loss, or losing fat, a process of detoxification.

In the past, the usual way by body temporarily needed a lot more water, was after fasting for a several hours!

So, Here's What I've accomplished so far:

I've lost 10 lbs and 1 & 1/2 inches off my Belly Fat, and I expect to get more gradually off in the next 2-4 months.

Second of all, I want to let you know that it feels much better to me to have the ability to keep my blood sugar stable, rather than stressing my pancreas all the time, and my brain too.

Well, compared to what I used to grab to eat in the morning, my blood sugar is a lot more stable.

But the strange thing is I never really felt my brain being stressed all the time, not till I temporarily reverted to drinking juice for breakfast one day!

Anyways, I knew I was over-weight, and I probably have about 20 lbs total to lose.

Here's how it all got started, me starting on the Zone Diet:

A few months ago, I was talking with a Potential Client telling them about the anti-inflammatory hormone mediating effects of the Zone Diet, and they did not know about the diet at all.

I was frankly astonished! Hmm, I thought later, I thought everybody knew about this diet? So, maybe I should write about it: since I've often recommended it to my clients, since it is part of the Neglect Testing in my 7 Physical Causes of Ill Health Readings. I always considered it a blood sugar stabilizing diet, and not a weight loss diet, so I tested it as a diet to stabilize blood sugar.

I've known about this diet for a long while, more than I've been working as a Natural Health Practitioner.

Over 15 years.

It's an anti-inflammation diet, and since inflammation equates to weight gain, decreasing inflammation results in weight decreasing.

I decided to do it myself, and had a look at one of the first theoretical Zone Diet books by the author and creator of the diet, Dr. Barry Sears. I still did not understand what I was going to eat.

I understood that the Zone Diet is designed to keep blood sugar stable, and if you think you can do it with just eating a few veggies with some protein, well — you'll be eating a lot of veggies!

The scientific explanation of the Zone Diet, is that it provides Proteins, Carbohydrates, and Fats in the proper ratio to keep some powerful inflammatory hormones in the body from getting out of balance. You add some mono-unsaturated fat to each meal, in very small quantities, and you end up using up the fat stores on your body, and therefore losing weight!

The Zone Diet is not a calorie reducing diet, and is not intended as such. You should eat enough protein to keep your lean body mass.

I'm likely eating the same number of calories on this diet as I was before!

Also on the Zone Diet, you have to avoid eating too many eggs (egg yolks actually), and too much fatty red meat, because they have arachidonic acid in them, and that will promote the bad eicosanoid hormones, and therefore inflammation.

I can say, another positive benefit for myself: that to me, it feels so easy to do simple meals on this diet to stabilize my blood sugar, that I've been able to work 12 hour days at at time without loss of focus.

There was one morning when I was doing this diet, about 5 weeks in, that I decided I would drink my berry antioxidant juice, before my Zone breakfast, and boy was that a mistake! I felt how can I put it? “blood sugar disoriented”. Meaning no blood sugar stabilization from drinking the juice, and a loss of clarity in thinking resulted.

It was as if, my brain was telling me, “And you think I can help you focus and think well now because you had 1 glass of juice? Forget it!”

I still sneak the juice in, in some ways, because I get my daily Vitamin-C from it as well, but not before breakfast, if I can help it.

In fact on the Zone Diet, you are only allowed a small amount of juice, and today when I ran out of apples, I tried just drinking the appropriate amount of juice with the appropriate amount of cheese as my protein, and I still felt “blood sugar disoriented.”

What Kind of Meals Did I Eat?!

There are a few simple meals that I have eaten, which you can try out.

I'll tell you about the units of protein, carbohydrate, and fat that can help make up the meals first. They are called BLOCKS.

Here's A ONE Block Meal:

  • 1/4 cup low fat Cottage Cheese
  • 1/3 cup Unsweetened Apple Sauce,
  • 3 Raw Whole Almonds

The 1/4 cup low fat Cottage Cheese is ONE BLOCK of PROTEIN RICH DAIRY,

The 1/3 cup of Unsweetened Apple Sauce is ONE BLOCK OF CARBS,

The 3 Raw Almonds is ONE BLOCK of FAT (the right fat: mono-unsaturated fat).

If this meal was not enough calories for you, you could just multiple it by 2, 3 or 4:

Here's what it is with 2 BLOCKS OF EACH:

  • 1/2 cup low fat Cottage Cheese,
  • 2/3 cup Unsweetened Apple Sauce,
  • 6 Raw Whole Almonds

The meal above would probably fit in half a bowl.

I've never really liked eating Apple Sauce by itself, but the mixture of Apple Sauce and Cottage Cheese, I love. The mixture of the two hides the Apple Sauce quite nicely, and adds a little sweetness to it as well. Some apple sauces I've tried are sweeter than others.

I've been eating it cold, except for the Apple Sauce at room temperature, but, I've been wondering if I couldn't warm it up as a whole too.

I finish the mixture first, and then I eat the appropriate number of Almonds, but eating the Almonds during is ok too. And It works.

If you don't like the Apple Sauce, or you want more variety, you can let defrost to room temp, 1/2 cup BlueBerries, OR 1 cup Raspberries, and eat that with the Cottage Cheese. Never forgetting the Almonds.

1/2 Cup Blueberries EQUALS = ONE BLOCK CARBS,
1 Cup Raspberries EQUALS = ONE BLOCK CARBS

I'd like to mention that I had an experience where I forgot to eat the Almonds right after a Zone meal, and I could feel the Meal did not work. And I was going in the wrong direction – gaining weight again.

If you don't like or can't have the Almonds, or want variety, you can replace the 3 Almonds, with one of these: 1/2 tsp Almond Butter, 1/3 tsp Almond Oil, 1 tbsp Avocado, 6 Peanuts, or 2 Cashews.

1 TABLESPOON, or 1 tbsp of Avocado is 1 BLOCK OF FAT.

I don't eat the Peanuts or Cashews because they are both mycotoxic (contain fungal toxins on top of them). I keep it as simple as possible.

Here's one breakfast meal, I often eat.

8 Egg Whites, 1 & 1/3 Cups Slow Cooked Oatmeal, and 1 & 1/3 teaspoon Olive Oil to cook the Egg whites.

Here's the basic unit of the above breakfast meal (1 BLOCK each) which you can multiply up, by 2, 3, to get something that satisfies you.

2 Egg Whites, 1/3 Cup Slow Cooked Oatmeal, and 1/3 teaspoon Olive Oil to cook the Egg whites.

I purchase the liquid egg whites at the supermarket in the egg aisle, and refrigerate them at home.

2 Egg Whites are 1 BLOCK OF PROTEIN, and it measures 1/4 cup (4 TBSP).

So, what I end up doing in the morning, is first deciding how many blocks of protein I'm going to eat, and then I use the number of BLOCKS of PROTEIN to count, the same number of 1/4 cup's of Liquid Egg Whites I'm going to use. So, 3 BLOCKS OF PROTEIN means, I count 1/4 cup of Liquid Egg Whites, 3 TIMES. Simple!

Some Interesting Things I Learned

One of the things that happened on this meal plan is that I consumed less Salt - less regular table salt that is.

The obvious repercussion being that my blood pressure lowered. The reason is because I regularly consume health giving small amounts of Celtic Sea Salt (which can lower blood pressure).

I was not getting enough of the regular table salt, which I consumed almost exclusively in canned Sockeye Salmon by choice. I usually would eat several cans of Canned Sockeye Salmon per week, but to get the amount of veggies that I would have to add to balance the protein in just about one can of salmon with for example cooked Broccoli would be: 3 CUPS/ PER BLOCK X 4 BLOCKS NEEDED = 12 CUPS Cooked Broccoli! And that was not going to happen. Instead, I purchased frozen peas, and added 2 cups of cooked peas (which is not a a favorable carb) to the right amount of Salmon. I only eat this combo about 1x -2x a week. Another Quickly made meal. I did the math, and to get 4 BLOCKS of protein from a 213 gram can of Sockeye Salmon, I put all the Salmon from the can in a bowl, then I take an empty 1/4 measuring cup, and fill 3/4 of it with the canned Salmon I just put in the bowl and what is left in the bowl is 4 BLOCKS. That is 4 BLOCKS of protein! Then I add 1 & 1/3 tsp Olive Oil, and I enjoy my meal.

Anyways, this realization about my blood pressure lowering just happened a week ago. It was confirmed by a blood pressure reading. So, I had began to realize that I was sometimes slightly dizzy upon getting up from my desk chair, because of lowered blood pressure. I then realized my usual consumption of salt from the canned Sockeye Salmon was actually helping.

I'm somewhat sensitive to my blood pressure.

One other mistake I made while doing this diet, and only for the first 4 weeks, was thinking that the low fat high quality probiotic yogurt I was consuming and buying locally, was close enough to the yogurt that was listed in the book, Zone Meals in Seconds.

It turned out that it wasn't, and the reason was that the carbohydrates in the yogurt I was consuming were too much.  It would require more protein to be used with the yogurt to balance it properly.

Had I known, maybe I would have tried adding some protein powder to it – more work than I wanted to do. So right now I'm not consuming any yogurt at all.

In fact looking back on this yogurt consumption, after this 9 weeks of work on the Zone, some great advice in the book Mastering Meals in Seconds comes to mind. It should have made sense to me that the yogurt + almonds meal was not in the zone, because when I kept eating the yogurt, I kept wanting more, about 1 hour-2 hours afterward! I just love yogurt so much, because its such a quick and beneficial meal, but the plain yogurt I purchased was not a balanced zone meal.

And you are not supposed to get hungry, or have blood sugar imbalances that soon after eating a meal in the Zone.

You are not supposed to go more than 6 hours until the next meal. I recommend a maximum of 4 hours.

As I mentioned above, I decided to try drinking my berry juice in the morning, a before breakfast drink. I like to get a lot of my potassium from juices.

I think I got some kind of blood sugar headache from that, or explained another way, my brain telling me, this is not going to work.

The reason I mention this again here is that, in thinking about why I did that, I think I honestly had the tendency to drink the juice because I was hungry early in the morning, and it filled my stomach up. Mentally, I thought filing my stomach up, would help my brain, and my body. But that stomach fill-up is deceiving!

I'm not a coffee drinker, but I believe some people probably do that as well with coffee, or other beverages like pop just to feel less hungry as well. But that would obviously lack the blood sugar stabilization the Zone Diet offers.

So, this brings me to one of the other rules, eat in the Zone within 1 hour of awakening. And eat a Zone Meal Snack before going to bed.

If you decide to do the Zone Diet, then you may try to revert back to some bad habits, and you will learn what effect it has on your ability to focus and think! For me that was a huge, huge motivator to get this diet right!

Why I Had to Eat More Beef For One Month on the Zone

Before I started this diet, I asked (dowsed), if there were any supplements I needed to take daily to facilitate the weight loss.

I was concerned I would need a supplement to support my detoxification pathways, because of the fat loss, knowing that when you lose weight, you lose the toxins too, because the toxins are bound to the fat!

So, I wanted to make sure any toxins that left me, could do so easily.

I expected at least one of the Liver Formulas from Systemic Formulas ® (Professional Herbal Formulas I use with my clients) to test, but actually nothing tested for me.

But there was something that changed for me on this diet!

Every month, I eat Beef About 4 times.

When I started in September, it was not different.

When I more rigorously followed this diet more closely for October (after I kicked yogurt out), I found that I needed to consume more red meat.

I will explain.

I dowse every month how many days in the month I need to eat red meat. I eat it in the form of freshly made lean ground beef meatballs.

I've experimented with eating ground beef in various ways, and I found that I went back to my Sicilian families recipe: Meatballs, filled with Freshly Grated Parmesan cheese, with Garlic, and Parsley, 1-2 Eggs, salt, and bread crumbs. Baked of course for me.

So, when I dowsed for October at the end of September, my normal 4x a month of red meat eating, went up to 8x a month!

Now, why is that?

There is an extremely important reason, and it has to with Methylation. I needed more bio-available B12 to support methylation, and therefore detoxify the body. The almonds I consumed more of on the Zone also helped. They allowed me to increase my intake of B-Vitamins. At times I also put much more parsley in my meatballs, because I needed more greens!

In the past to fully support methylation with concentrated nutrients, and herbal co-factors, I have also taken one of Systemic Formulas newer cellular healing formulas called MORS.

The other side of this meatball eating experiment was that when I would eat my 12 or so lean beef meatballs, I began to feel the inflammation in my belly fat going up. At first I asked myself, how could this be. Is this possible? How could I feel that? But by the next day, in the early morning, I could feel I had more belly fat!

And can you guess why?

The inflammatory producing arachidonic acid in red meat! Some people feel we still need the saturated fat, and I found I like lean ground beef, instead of extra-lean, so stuck with it.

Ever since, I've known about these short lived Protaglandin molecules that the Zone diet balances, I've been more in touch with these short lived sensations on the body, in particular on my back.

They are one-second very brief hot spots, then cold, somewhat internal to the skin, not unlike when you feel the sun-burned skin the day after the sunburn, but much more local to the area. At one second they hardly last long. The area of sensation is probably the size of a nickel to a quarter. And because science has determined that these protaglandin molecules, are so short lived, this is what led me to believe these sensations indicated an imbalance.

Why I Cheated on the Zone Diet to Stay Healthy

I already mentioned to you that I was consuming more Red Meat for the month of October to keep my B12 up.

I'm all about listening to my body, and keeping my body healthy.

So, one of the things I did, and had to do while on the Zone Diet was cheat, and eat what my body needed sometimes, rather than force myself to follow the Zone Diet perfectly.

So, sometimes I ended up eating several regular sized chicken breasts, with my favorite easy veggie, artichokes in glass jars, knowing full well that even just 4 BLOCKS of protein, a 4 oz boneless, skinless chicken breast, was about 1/3 to 1/2 of each chicken breast I would eat. So, I was 2-3x over the limit for each chicken breast I ate.

Also, while on the Zone, I went ahead and put in some whole eggs with my morning breakfast sometimes, because I needed the nutrients from the egg yolks too.

Another Interesting Thing That Happened: My First Migraine

2 weeks ago, I had Egg Whites again for breakfast, and a couple of hours later, I was sitting at my desk thinking something is wrong!

I asked myself, how come I can't think straight? Is this a headache I have? This is very different I thought!

Every time I finished my breakfast, I've been able to work straight through, to mid-morning.

Then I realized, struggling through my thought processes that I had achieved a migraine!

Since I couldn't think straight, I might as well go for a walk, right?

I went for a walk, for over 40 minutes, and then I felt much better. I could think clearly again! Then I realized I had outwitted a mild abdominal migraine!

I came out of it pretty well, and I returned to work when I got back home.

I realized something! Although I had been doing well on the egg-whites for breakfast, I had eaten them for too many days in a row, without any breaks, even if just once a day, and had not considered getting temporarily intolerant to them.

I can tell you that I've never eaten eggs regularly for any meal longer than a few times on-and-off in a 4 week period. And before I started the Zone Diet, I had just started to make some omelets, only because, I could saute onions, and make a delicious omelet with them quickly. That was because I needed the onions!

So, when I was sitting at my desk after my walk, and thinking clearly again, I dowsed, and I had to stay away from egg whites, and eggs of course, for a whole week!

Yikes, I thought, what a disappointing mistake!

But things did go well anyways: I was still able to eat my cottage cheese mixture, and for breakfast I could also eat 4 oz of Low-Fat Cheddar Cheese with 2 Apples, and 12 Almonds for a 4-BLOCK MEAL!

I measure the LOW-FAT Cheddar on my scale, (6 oz is 113 grams), and don't fuss about large apples, or medium sized apples.

The Cheddar Cheese has B-12, as well, a great bonus, which I'm thankful for, in between my "meatball" days.

By the way, The Cottage Cheese I purchase is 10% M.F., and the Cheddar I use has 21-22 % M.F. (the Lite Version, with 40% less fat than normal cheddar).

I've followed some other Meals from the book, ZONE MEALS in SECONDS, like the Zone Lasagna, with success, and I'm also looking forward to trying other ones as well.

To wrap up this discussion about me eating eggs too many days in a row, it's possible that if you work on the Zone Diet, you may need to rotate foods, to ensure you don't get any symptoms.

How I Physically Noticed the Weight Loss

About 6 weeks into the Zone Diet, I looked at my naked upper torso in the mirror, and I was very hesitant to say that I had lost a few pounds.

Man In Bathroom Measuring Weight Loss From Bigger Fiting PantsCould this already be, I asked myself?

I didn't really feel like I had, but I did because I was following the Zone Diet reasonably well.

It wasn't however, until the 8th week that I was really amazed, and then when I looked at my upper torso, I was very happy!

I had noticed the significant loss of belly fat that I already mentioned, and then I began to call myself the incredibly shrinking man – In a good way!

I also noticed some changes to the way my garments, and under under-garments in particular fit in the 9th week.

The reason, I believe I was hesitant to say I had lost fat in the 6th week, because I had not been fanatically or unhealthily weighing myself to find out if I had lost the fat. And the primary reason I could not be fully sure is that fat loss was happening all over the body, even underneath my pectorals, where I knew I also had accumulated excess body fat!

My Goal in being able to say that I had lost a significant amount of weight and the diet would work for anyone was the loss of a significant amount of belly fat, so I did not start weighing myself weekly until the 7th week!

One other thing I want to mention is that just before I started the Zone Diet, I started some minor weight-lifting as well - once a week.

To make a quick point and wrap up, I continued to go weightlifting because I wanted to see if I would lose any muscle mass on the Zone Diet, and to ensure I kept my usual strength.

When I realized I was the incredibly shrinking man and that weekly strength training sessions showed me that my strength did not deteriorate, I had complete confidence in continuing to do the program the way I did it.

Is the Zone Diet For Any Body?

I do not recommend people who are taking medication do the Zone Diet. This is because some medications can alter the prostaglandin hormones, and because medications can cause you to be deficient in nutrients -- nutrients which your body may need to detoxify!

Downloads for the ZONE BLOCKS of Protein, Carbs, And Fats

Here's a DOWNLOAD link for a PDF document on another web site, that I also used for quick reference.
It contains a list of many foods and their BLOCK NUMBERS.

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