The 3 hour diet is a unique dieting system due to the fact that it doesn’t make any efforts to restrict what you eat. Instead, the core theory behind the three hour diet is to keep the body’s natural hunger pangs at bay through eating smaller portions of food in three hour increments. The basic formula is extremely simple: Eat your first meal of the day 1 hour after you wake up, keep eating small snack sized portions every three hours after, and stop eating 3 hours before you go to bed.

The diet’s timing takes advantage of the body’s rate of producing insulin, which controls hunger pangs to the brain. By keeping insulin levels at a steadily high rate, the body feels fewer hunger pangs and becomes less inclined to gorge on larger amounts of food. The reason you stop eating three hours before you go to sleep is to allow your body’s metabolic rate to slow down and allow you to sleep comfortably.

Now, this diet may not be for everyone. The main reason is because the diet encourages taking smaller amounts of food in more frequent doses. Sadly, some people who suffer from obesity already have a tendency to eat more than three meals a day, and do so in large amounts every time. This diet asks them to cut down on the volume that they eat per meal, but because of their tendency to eat a full meal every time, this diet may wind up making them overeat more, and in shorter 3 hour intervals.

However, for those who keep their meals at 3 per day, and just suffer weight problems due to volume consumed and nutritional imbalance, this diet will work wonders. For one thing, it does not restrict what you eat, and actually adds to the variety of food that you take in a given day. The diet’s meals are spaced out so that in a given day a dieter consumes enough from every food group to have a balanced intake of nutrients. Yes, this includes “bad” foods like ice cream, cookies, and potato chips.

The down side is that you won’t be allowed to live on junk food alone. While junk food is allowed (not simply tolerated) in this diet plan, you have to mix in enough food from the other nutritional groups to keep your body’s health on an even keel. This includes snacking on a few vegetables, some fruit, rice/bread, and other things that “junk food junkies” might find distasteful. However, the good part of this diet is that it doesn’t cut off your “bad food” supply, and actually lets you keep it as part of you daily routine. It just ceases to be a staple in every meal.

On the average, people who have tried this diet report losing an average of 2 pounds per week. While this may seem like peanuts compared to “miracle” diets offering to let people lose more weight at a faster rate, the loss of two pounds a week is actually healthier than crash diets which make people lose too much weight too fast and wind up causing health problems. The goal behind this diet is not to create coat-rack thin people, but to let the body reach it’s natural ideal weight and maintain it in a healthy fashion once achieved.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 11th, 2008 at 10:57 pm and is filed under Weight Loss, Diet Plans at a Glance. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.