The Perricone Diet

Losing weight is great, but what if you could lose weight AND look younger, too? The Perricone diet promises just that. Dr. Perricone says that you can lose weight, reduce wrinkles and avoid heart disease, just by changing what you eat.

Dr. Nicholas Perricone believes that inflammation can affect your metabolism, your mood, your susceptibility to heart disease and cancer and make you look old before your time. He also markets a series of  products to deal with inflammation in its many forms.

The Perricone Diet is pretty strict. You can't eat a lot of common (and tasty) foods. The list of banned foods includes: alcohol, bread, flour, coffee, cereal, beef, many fruits and their juices, pasta, rice, soda and processed sugar. He wants to you focus on foods high in protein, antioxidants and those wonderful omega-3 fatty acids. That means tuna, trout, halibut, salmon (only wild, never farmed), turkey, eggs, avocados, olives, beans, nuts and green tea. With a diet this restrictive, it only makes sense that he sells over two dozen supplements to take up the nutritional slack.

On the positive side, the Periicone diet prescribes five meals a day. In addition to the normal breakfast, lunch and dinner, the diet requires two snacks. To help control your calorie intake, you must eat all of your proteins before you eat your carbs.

This is another diet that talks about food in terms of its glycemic index. This index refers to the speed with which your body digests the food into glucose. Dr. Perricone believes that blood sugar spikes lead to inflammation, which causes many health problems and aging.

Dr. Perricone is not a man who soft-pedals his point of view. He calls sugar a poison. He says that processed sugar is the number one enemy of good health. It is blamed for inflammation that, among other evil things, damages the collagen in our skin to create wrinkles and puffy bags and sags.

Can the Perricone diet work for you? Dr. Perricone says that merely substituting green tea for coffee can deliver a 10 pound weight loss in six weeks. Eating exclusively from this list of approved foods can make your wallet lose weight, too, and that doesn't consider the cost of his supplements and skin crèmes. Is this for you? Who doesn’t want to lose weight and look years younger? If you've tried the Perricone diet, click on that Comment button and tell us how much younger you look!