Pritikin Diet

The Pritikin Diet was invented by nutritionist Nathan Pritikin, and is a low fat but high carbohydrate diet.

The Pritikin food plan focuses on eating unprocessed natural foods such as fruits and vegetables, and minimally processed foods like brown rice, lean meat and seafood. Nathan Pritikin's diet also recommends that you eat starchy vegetables including potatoes and yams (sweet potatoes).This was revolutionary since many other diets would prohibit them. So that makes the Pritikin Diet a hi-carb diet.

The Pritikin low fat diet plan also makes use of legume vegetables in the menu such as beans, which are eaten for their protein in many parts of the world, in other words as a meat substitute.

In India, the Middle East and parts of South America, millions of people are vegetarian (or mainly so) and get their protein from beans, lentils (dhal) or chickpeas. Some vegetarians this way for religious reasons, and others because they cannot afford to buy meat or fish. When you're poor, even a meal of scrawny chicken is a luxury reserved for special occasions.

The Pritikin diet principle calls for a low-density, high-bulk diet. This is because your stomach expects to feel "full" after a meal. Yet it cannot tell if the bulk of the food you've just eaten comes from fat, protein, carbohydrates or anything else. But fat has more calories in it for its bulk than most other foods, so when you eat a lot of fat you ingest far more calories than you need... and your body is often unable to burn it off again. So all this unused energy (calories or kilojoules) gets stored in your body as FAT.

But please understand that fat on its own is not bad for you. Indeed it is a necessary part of your diet. Trappers and hunters in Canada and the arctic regions in the 1900s commonly had nothing to eat but the rabbits they could trap or shoot. They ate well, but the diet often killed these pioneers because bunnies are virtually fat-free. You've got to have some fat or oil in your diet or you die.

The Pritikin health program also calls for lots of exercise every day, including at least 30 minutes of brisk walking or other aerobic exercise. It recommends weight training two or three times each week, and that you perform simple stretching exercise every single day.

Nutrition experts at several top research institutions, including UCLA, found the Pritikin Program effectively prevented many major diseases that are rife in our affluent, modern society. The Pritikin diet strongly reduced occurrences of type 2 diabetes, hypertension, heart disease and obesity in the people who stayed with the Pritikin program.

The Pritikin diet was found to lower people's blood sugar levels and normalize their blood pressure. It helped them to shed excess body weight and improve their cholesterol levels much better than cholesterol-lowering drugs which had been prescribed by doctors.

So there's no doubt the Pritikin diet is effective in helping you shed the flab - and helping you to keep it off, as well.

Next, I'll show you the famous Atkins Diet plan.