Easy Eating - The Zone Diet

It's 2001. I'm in a hockey dressing room, talking to sweaty, tired 10-year-olds at John Becanic's summer hockey camp at the Pee Wee Arena. A few parents lean through the doorway. I'm talking about protein intake for hockey players. They're asking questions, good ones, about things to eat between games in a tournament. I'd been training athletes for five years already; my advice didn't include much about healthy fats, but DID recommend a high-GI carb right after a game (which I still push, for the insulin spike and improved recovery time.)

One boy asks about protein bars. I tell him to emphasize good eating and not rely on supplements. "What kind?" I ask, more to fill the silent void. "Zone Bars. My mom is ZonePerfect." he says. I scoff, pigeonholing Mama into the legions of fad-following Sears Disciples who wear the ZonePerfect badge like a medal. To me, it's the Scarlet Letter.

When Dr. Barry Sears first published "The Zone" in 1995, he couldn't have foreseen the road the book would take. Over the next few years, as The Zone grew in popularity among the fad-diet crowd, Sears enjoyed a hero's renown. But the original book, "Enter The Zone," was too technical. Food had to be counted. Meal preparation required equipment and math. Diligence turned to obsession for a few, and caused a whole new type of eating disorder: the overly-strict. Faced with a lifetime of weighing and measuring and dissecting their plates, the Zone fanatics slowly turned toward the next rising star (Atkins.)

Sears countered with several books designed to simplify Zone eating, and cash in on the dwindling numbers who still followed his brand. In short order, he published Mastering the Zone, Zone Perfect Meals In Minutes, Zone Food Blocks, and The Anti-Aging Zone within 3 years. Between 2000 and 2002, his work took a noticably different slant: making The Zone simpler, and easier to follow. A Week In The Zone, The Soy Zone, 100 Great Zone Foods, and The Omega Rx Zone were all published within 20 months. His brand was dwindling among the simpler (though less effective) low-carb diets like South Beach and Atkins, and since those diets touched on some of the same rationale, The Zone was largely grouped with its contemporaries and went out of fashion with them. But all that was before CrossFit, of course. Now Sears is enjoying a new resurgence of popularity among both athletes and more elite exercisers whose energy requirements go above and beyond a multi-grain bagel at breakfast time.

 

In 2006, Sears did a Live Lecture series, and it was recorded and published for sale (you can buy a copy here.) In my estimation, this is the best piece of work he's ever done: it's simple. It gives the listener a solid piece of equipment (the palm of their hand!) to use for any meal, anytime, anywhere. This, we've dubbed the Hand Model.

At every meal, eat:

Protein: the size and thickness of your palm

Carbs: same. If all crunch vegetables, eat the size of your whole hand.

Fat: size of your thumb.

Now THAT's a food plan! Since everyone will respond slightly differently depending on insulin sensitivity and output, a little experimentation is necessary. This, too, is addressed in the Live Lecture; you just need to do a little test.

1. Eat your meal.

2. Do your thing.

3. 3 hours later, ask yourself: am I hungry, but alert; or am I hungry, but tired or dopey?

If you're hungry but alert, you're in the right Zone for fat metabolism. You're doing it right. If you're hungry and tired, you're suffering the slope of lowering blood sugar. You may crave a carbohydrate snack. Either reduce your carb intake, or increase everything else to provide blood sugar stability.

This, folks, is as easy as food intake is ever going to get. Personally, I dropped too much weight at first, and had to ramp up total Zone Blocks and especially fat intake to survive the punishing CrossFit schedule. Modify as necessary, but this will get you 90% of the way there.

Comments

[Missmelinda]

This is a fantastic article that I wish a lot of people, especially women, would read. It seems like women are so stuck on fad diets and they wonder why they keep losing weight and then gaining it back. More people need to post articles like this. Love it!