Diet secrets don’t change much: Eat healthful food in smaller portions and add more exercise. Your body stores fewer calories, and you lose weight.
The 17 Day Diet, the latest diet craze, seems to follow those reasonable steps. The diet, however, doesn’t actually take 17 days. It’s broken up into four cycles, each one 17 days long. Going into a fresh cycle is supposed to combat the boredom that settles in after following Cycle 1—in which you cut down to about 1,200 calories a day—for 2 1/2 weeks.
And, supposedly, confuse your metabolism.
San Diego family medicine doctor Mike Moreno, the creator of this plan, writes in his book of the same name:
Cycle 2 “causes calorie confusion, resets your metabolism by increasing and decreasing calorie intake to stimulate fat burning and prevent plateaus.”
Cycle 3 allows more foods with a slower rate of weight loss, and Cycle 4 is for maintaining your new weight with meal plans and occasional splurges.
But the claim that the diet’s changes somehow trick your metabolism raises a few eyebrows. Skeptics include the American Dietetic Assn.’s spokeswoman Keri Gans. She says in this WebMD diet review:
Read the full article here.
