Hello, my name is Carolyn Dean, drcarolyndean.com. I’m a medical doctor and a naturopathic doctor and I live in beautiful Maui. I’ve finished my 22nd health book, I have a free newsletter and I also have an online wellness program that you can join. And today in this series I’ll be talking about dieting.
The Carb-Lovers Diet–great title, it pulls people in, they think they’re going to lose weight on doughnuts and pastry. This diet was written by a couple of editors of health magazines, so its focus is on health and it’s high-carb, obviously, and moderate protein. But the carbs they talk about, they give them a new word: resistant carbohydrates. I’ve never heard of it. It’s around the topic of fiber. Resistant carbohydrates–apparently they don’t digest as well as other carbohydrates and they turn into insoluble fiber so they help your elimination. And what the diet suggests is that with every meal you’re going to eat a resistant carbohydrate. It has to be one quarter of your meal so it’s a lot of carbohydrate. And the resistant carbohydrates can be green bananas, which I’ve never eaten, beans, lentils, oatmeal, brown rice. And there are many other choices as well.
The diet begins with a week-long detox, and I like that they call it a detox because some people on what they give you, a 1200 calorie diet, it’s like a starvation diet. It’s going to be a diet that if you’re not used to eating this way, you might feel a little fatigued, headache, little nausea, little change of bowel movements. And they help the detox along by advising you to take a fat-flushing drink. It’s a couple of quarts of green tea and some lemon, lime and orange. And you drink that through the day during your detox.
After the first week then you go to a 1600 calorie diet–again with the carbohydrates, resistant carbohydrates and moderate protein. They tell you you’ll lose about eight pounds in 30 days. And I think that’s reasonable. It’s not like the quick weight loss that a lot of diets say that you can do, which means if you lose it quickly you can also gain it quickly.
So this is a good diet for people who want to have more fiber–it would not be good for people who have IBS diarrhea symptoms, Irritable Bowel Syndrome, but it would be good for IBS constipation people.
Basically, I think it’s a good diet and for people who can tolerate the high fiber that’s included in this diet, I think they’ll do well.