There is a time for everything, and everything in its
time. This old chestnut is making the rounds again, this time as the basis for
a new diet. The Belly Melt Diet promised quick weight loss without starvation,
just by sensing and resetting our internal rhythms. Claims like “Lose 19 pounds in only 35 days”
are being tossed about. Could our body clock be the secret to a flat belly?
Most of us have heard about our internal body clock.
Sometimes called circadian rhythm, this internal timepiece ramps our metabolism
up and down, makes us sleepy or alert, and fights us vigorously when we fly
across multiple time zones.
The Belly Melt Diet is based on adjusting our body clock
and fitting our activities and eating into our body’s internal rhythm. This is
not a crash diet. In fact, you eat a very safe 1,200 calorie daily diet for the first four days. After
four days, your intake increases to 1,500 calories a day.
Exercise is built into the program. The Belly Melt Diet’s author, Margot Gilman, suggests
exercising within 20 minutes of waking, even before you eat breakfast. If
possible, exercise outdoors. That gives your body a blast of sunshine (sorry if
you live in Cleveland, get a SAD light instead) that helps reset your body clock
to “morning”.
Your meals combine complex carbohydrates and proteins.
Mono-unsaturated fats are featured. This is “good” cholesterol that dissolves
the “bad” cholesterol and reduces plaque buildup in blood vessels. The Belly Melt Diet targets a hormone called
Ghrelin, which is blamed for food cravings. By synchronizing your life with your
body clock, ghrelin secretion is controlled, so you don’t feel hunger. Bam! No
more over eating.
A fun feature of the Belly Melt Diet is the “sleep away
belly fat” feature. This is about achieving deep sleep every night to melt fat
while asleep. That sounds great, but why aren’t cats super thin then? It makes
sense that being sleep deprived probably lowers your metabolism, so getting
enough sleep could help prop up your metabolism. But melting fat while you
sleep? That’s pretty hard to back up.
Margot Gilman has been promoting her book in Prevention
Magazine (she’s an editor there) and numerous daytime TV shows lately. It’s an
attractive idea, losing weight by sleeping more without eating less, but does
it work? If you’ve tried the Belly Melt Diet, let us know your experience.
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