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Review Of The Catabolic Diet
With the catabolic diet, the idea is that the eating of foods that take more calories to digest the food than the amount of calories contained in the food itself will use more energy, and will slow the rate of fat conversion.
Or more simply, the more an individual burns the less they store.
Dr. Victor Lindlahr created the catabolic diet in response to a woman’s plea to help her lose weight before her wedding. The doctor first put her on a supervised fast, but when that did not work, he tried a low carbohydrate plan.
He tweaked the plan and the catabolic diet emerged. To further his theory, Dr. Lindlahr asked one thousand listeners to participate in the diet. Within a short period of time, a majority of the listeners reported experiencing weight loss, about one pound per day for ten days.
Some foods offered in the catabolic plan are simple fruits, vegetables, beef, and seafood. Breads and pastas are not included.
The diet plan appears to be plant based, allowing for eating large portions of raw fruits and vegetables, very little protein, no dairy, whole grains, or processed sugars.
More specifically, acceptable fruits are listed as apples, kumquats, apricots, strawberries, limes, tangerines, blackberries, nectarines, currents, peaches, watermelon, cantaloupe, mangoes, and quite a few other fruits.
Vegetables are listed as asparagus, green beans, cucumbers, peas, string beans, dandelion greens, celery, dill pickles, beets, carrots, leaks, lettuce, mushrooms, and quite a few more common vegetables. The meat list is very short because most meats are not considered to be catabolic.
However the following are considered to be catabolic and therefore eaten sea bass, crabs, oysters, buffalo flounder, frog legs, cod steaks, mussels and terrapin.
In theory the diet sounds wonderful, however if the diet is continued for extremely long periods of time the diet will destroy an individual’s body. There are sites on the internet that seek to lure people into a false sense of hope for a price.
Recently science has attempted to prove the theory of the catabolic diet. No test has been able to document a reverse caloric affect when foods are being digested to the energy that is being gained.
It is not impossible to believe that an individual practicing the catabolic diet is in fact losing weight because they are consuming foods that are low in fat, and calories. Therefore, it has been reported that the catabolic diet itself is indeed an urban legend, a farce, a story created.
The diet holds no value to helping individuals lose weight.