The Zone Diet Plan Beginner’s Guide

What’s the Zone diet plan?

You mean, other than it being a diet you just heard about and now want to try?

Well, you’ve certainly come to the right place because what the diet is and oodles of other information about it are explained below!

Background:

After losing his father at age 53 to an early death from a heart attack and then his father’s three brothers to heart attacks within several years, Barry Sears, a biochemist, set out in discovery of a way to avoid the same fate. What he stumbled upon was the Zone diet, released to the general audience in 1995 with the publication of Enter The Zone: A Dietary Road Map.

Overview:

As Spears explains, inflammation is a critical body process for fighting off microbes and healing physical injuries but has disastrous effects when the level of inflammation is higher than it should be, resulting in it attacking the body and preventing it from operating at peak performance to keep you healthy.

According to Sears, what elevates inflammation to dangerous levels is the flood of insulin that’s released from the pancreas with the consumption of carbs, particularly those with a high glycemic index. Protein, conversely, stabilizes blood glucose levels to lower insulin and thereby reduce inflammation. Certain fats also induce inflammation, namely those rich in saturated fat and omega-6 fatty acids. Saturated fat and omega-6 fatty acids are problematic because they’re the building blocks of “bad” eicosanoids, which are inflammatory hormones produced by cells that are associated with a considerable number of chronic ailments ranging from heart disease and diabetes to autoimmune and neurological conditions.¹ Additionally, “bad” eicosanoids affect insulin whereas “good” eicosanoids don’t have such an effect and help reduce inflammation, in addition to providing other benefits, such as lowering cholesterol, decreasing histamine, and inhibiting platelet clumping.²

To keep inflammation “in the zone”, where it’s neither too high nor too low, the aptly named Zone diet calls for eating three meals and two snacks every day, with each feeding made up of 40 percent carbs, 30 percent protein, and 30 percent fat. The protein-to-carbohydrate ratio as it’s set is supposedly ideal to moderate insulin balance, with the emphasis of the diet placed on certain types of carbs and fats to lessen insulin’s impact and promote the synthesis of “good” eicosanoids.³

What To Eat:

The carb choices that’ll get you “in the Zone” while following the Zone diet are those that have a low glycemic load. As such, most carbs should come from low-sugar fruits, such as apples, grapefruit, peaches, plums, oranges, and strawberries; spinach, kale, tomatoes, eggplant, asparagus, cabbage, and other non-starchy vegetables; and grains like oatmeal and barley. For protein, Sears recommends skinless chicken and turkey; lean cuts of beef, pork, lamb, and veal; fish and seafood, including tuna, salmon, and shrimp; egg whites; low-fat dairy products; and vegetarian protein sources, such as tofu and soy meat substitutes. For promotion of the “good” eicosanoids, the healthy fats to choose from include avocados, olives, and olive oil, canola oil, tahini, and nuts like almonds, cashews, peanuts, macadamias, and pistachios, plus their respective nut butter spreads. Those are the items to procure from the grocery store and portion out in line with the diet’s 40-30-30 split. To save time, you may also select from a line of Zone bars, pastas, meal replacement shakes, and protein powders that have the program’s macronutrient proportions in each serving. Lastly, it’s recommended to supplement with omega-3 and polyphenol extract supplements to assist with driving down inflammation.

What Not To Eat:

The Zone doesn’t ban foods but there are ones that should be limited for the role they play in inflammation and the creation of “bad” eicosanoids. On the list of discouraged items are high-sugar fruits, like bananas, grapes, mangos, and papaya; raisins, prunes, and other dried fruits; corn, peas, potatoes, and the gamut of starchy vegetables; fatty cuts of red meat, as well as offal and processed meat, some of which are bacon, sausage, pepperoni, and salami; egg yolks and full-fat dairy; processed grains and their byproducts, such as bread, bagels, pasta, and crackers made with white flour, as well as other processed goods like cakes, cookies, muffins, and breakfast cereal; foods with added sugar; and any beverage that isn’t water, which includes regular and diet soda, fruit juice, coffee, tea, and alcohol.

Results:

High GI carbs are shunned on the Zone diet because not only do they cause inflammation but the insulin spikes also drive the body to store glycogen rather than burn it for immediate energy, with that eventually getting stored as fat if unused long enough. So the added bonus of the diet’s protein-to-carb ratio is that it should prompt glucagon secretion so the body burns stored fat for energy instead of holding onto it, helping to result in weight loss. Sears would have you believe that any potential weight loss on his diet is due to that, as well as reduced inflammation, but there’s more to the story.

There are two methods of following the Zone diet. One is the hand-eye method, which involves employment of the hands and eyes to make measurements of food.⁴ The other, more precise, method consists of Zone food blocks. What food blocks are is too complicated to get into here but it involves the use of a dieter’s gender, weight, height, circumference measurements, and activity level to calculate how many grams of protein, carbs, and fat they can have per day. By whatever method is used to follow the diet, the daily caloric intake should fall somewhere around 1200 for women and 1500 for men. Both calorie intakes are well short of the amount that’s generally recommended for healthy adults. Thus, any weight loss from the diet will come from the reduction of calories and not so much because of the consumption of a certain ratio of food. With that in mind, that’s what’s at play in the limited research studies that have found the Zone diet to be effective for weight loss but not any more effective than any other diet.⁵

The Zone diet has some weight loss benefits but it’s designed less as a weight loss diet and more as an anti-inflammatory diet to improve health. As far as that’s concerned, there’s little independent research to support its claims of promoting better health. What limited research there is, though, does show that it can have an effect on heart health via the lowering of triglycerides and cholesterol.⁶ While that’s good, it must be remembered that Sears contends that inflammation is what leads to cardiovascular disturbances, which flies in contradiction to everything in the scientific literature pointing to cholesterol. With that logic in mind that the problem is inflammation, for the Zone diet to work as it’s purported to, any improvement in heart health has to be attributed to a reduction in inflammation and not cholesterol. The research as of now is unclear if that is indeed the case.

Much like the Zone diet can’t support its claim that it reduces the risk factors of heart disease via a pathway of lowered inflammation rather than cholesterol, it’s also lacking in evidence that its proposed mechanism of action is responsible for any prevention or control of diabetes. Instead, in the scant research that demonstrates that the Zone diet boosts glycemic control, a change in systemic inflammation is not noted alone but also joined by differences in body weight, waist circumference, and fat mass.⁷ Because obesity has been shown to increase inflammation and weight loss decreases it, it’s not possible to pin any improvement in blood sugar regulation solely to a reduction in inflammation and not a reduction in body mass, as Sears would like to have it.

In any event, whatever health benefits there are to be had with the Zone diet regardless of what pathway those benefits arise, one thing for certain is that it likely doesn’t improve health more than any other diet.

Safety:

In some instances, the 40 percent of calories that are to come from carbohydrates can possibly render the intake of carbs below the amount many nutritional agencies would say are an individual’s daily requirements. This places a dieter at risk of entering ketosis and the issues associated with that state, some which are mentioned in the keto diet entry and elsewhere. Other potential risks as a result of the low carb consumption include heart problems and orthostatic hypotension, as well as the host of issues generally borne by vitamin and mineral deficiencies.⁸ Forty percent of the diet’s calories coming from protein may also present a potential number of risks, like gout, bone loss, kidney stones, and long-term kidney damage. Because of the stress that processing so much protein can place on renal function, the Zone diet isn’t recommended for individuals with impaired livers and kidneys. This high protein intake may also preclude individuals with, or at risk of, heart disease from trying the diet because many protein-rich foods are also high in saturated fat and cholesterol. Finally, while Sears allows pregnant and breastfeeding women to increase their food intake by 25 percent, that may still not be enough to meet their nutritional needs. So they too should exercise caution.

Other:

While developing the Zone diet, Sears initially tested it on athletes due to the fact that their bodies are constantly inflamed thanks to the physical demands of their training. Some of those athlete subjects were members of Stanford University’s swimming team, many of whom went on to win gold medals at the Barcelona Olympic games in 1992. That success led him to the belief that another benefit of the Zone diet is improved physical performance. This is yet another thing that the research suggests that the diet’s claims lack credibility about.

Instead of causing individuals to perform at peak physical performance, studies have found that the Zone diet impairs it through the promotion of fatigue because of the diet’s low amount of carbs and total calories, which are what provide the body with the necessary fuel it needs to power itself beyond the normal demands placed on it, such as during a quadrennial athletic competition that you may never get the opportunity to participate in again.

Glossary: calories, diet, dietary fat, fat, glucose, supplement

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Monster Longe

Monster Longe is a personal trainer in San Diego. He has been lifting weights for +25 years and training clients in the gym and online for about half of that time. When not working with clients or making content that's easy to read, understand, and apply to everyday life, he enjoys long walks and leaving buildings crushed and entire city blocks decimated in his wake.