The Zone or Crossfit diet offers a new approach towards healthy eating that allows you to stick to the plan and eventually accomplish your goals. Inflammation is a controllable factor when it comes to the battle against the bulge, the war against the weight, the fight against the fat. By taking control of your inflammation and your blood sugar, the weight will fall off in naturally healthy ways leaving you with more energy to increase your health gains with exercise.

The Zone Diet Plan

The basis of the diet is to make sure that the body can consume the ideal balance of carbohydrates, proteins and fats. The aim is to help anyone fight inflammation by simply following a couple of ground rules. For anyone that has ever experienced body inflammation or is in a constant battle, it can be quite exhausting. Inflammation is the key culprit in weight gain, fatigue, premature ageing, and it also increases the risk of chronic disease. Despite its huge impact on your health the vast majority of people live with inflammation day in and day out, and don’t even know it.

Three important hormones and their function

That's where the Zone diet comes into play. By carefully planning your meals, you are helping your body heal itself in the most natural way, and you are providing it with key nutrients it needs to function properly. Reducing inflammation, blood sugar imbalances and the body's fat storing state is accomplished by balancing the basic macros. When your basic macros are in balance you are influencing the three major hormones that are produced while eating.

The three major hormones that balance these factors above are Insulin, Glucagon, and Eicosanoids. The insulin is the storage hormone and having a surplus of insulin can stop you from getting rid of extra body fat. It also initiates body inflammation. Next, we have the glucagon which is the hormone that regulates normal blood sugar levels by carefully informing your body to start releasing carbohydrates bit by bit. And finally, there is the eicosanoids or the hormones responsible for regulating silent inflammation in the body and organizing a whole range of hormones in different areas in the body.

What foods you should be eating on the Zone diet

At each meal time, divide your recipes into three equal parts or blocks:

• A block of protein is 7 grams;
• A block of carbs is 9 grams; and
• A block of fat is 1.5 grams.

For an easy reference on your plate, 7 grams of protein is about the size and thickness of your palm which makes one-third of your plate. Next, fill in the other two-thirds of your plate with 9 grams of carbohydrates, then top it with 1.5 grams of fat.

I suggest picking up a food scale, available in most stores with a kitchen section, to accurately track what goes on your plate. I wouldn’t recommend doing the eyeball method until you have had time working with the science of the diet by accurately measuring, even after becoming used to the diet it's much better to accurately follow it then roughly guessing your way through.

Always bear in mind that the macronutrients must be in balanced proportions. Therefore:

• A one block meal equals: 7g of protein, 9g of carbs, and 1.5g of fat;
• A two block meal is: 14g of protein, 18g of carbs, and 3g of fat;
• A three block meal has: 21g of protein, 27g of carbs, and 4.5g of fat; and
• A four-block meal would be: 28g of protein, 36g of carbs, and 6g of fat.

Having more than a four-block meal in one sitting is pointless for absorbing the correct macronutrients since the body naturally cannot intake value from more than 4 or 5 blocks of protein over such a short time frame.

It is important to note however that there are types of proteins, carbs and fats that are good that should be included in your diet and types that are bad and should be avoided.

You should focus on including:

Good proteins

• Meats: lean beef, lamb, veal and game, skinless chicken and turkey breast, fish and shellfish.
• Vegetarian Proteins: Tofu and other soy products.
• Dairy Proteins: Egg whites, low-fat cheese, low-fat milk and greek/unflavoured yogurt.

Size Example: A block of protein is 1 ounce of beef.

Slow Burning Carbohydrates

You can include fruits and vegetables but avoid fruit with high sugar content.

• Fruit: Berries, mangoes, apples, oranges, plums…
• Vegetables: Cucumbers, spinach, peppers, tomatoes, mushrooms, squash, chickpeas…
• Grains: Oatmeal and barley.

Size Example: A block of carbs is half an apple or 3 cups of broccoli.

Healthy Fats

The healthiest choice of fats as we are all very much aware of by now is the monounsaturated fats.

• Nuts: Macadamia nuts, almonds, peanuts, cashews or pistachios. You can also include butter made from those nuts and tahini.
• Oils: Sesame, peanut, coconut and olive oils.
• Vegetable Fat Sources: Avocados

Size Example: A block of fat is ⅓ teaspoon of olive oil.

What foods you should avoid on the Zone diet

The Zone diet is not an especially strict or impossible diet like many others out there, so it also doesn't place a strict NO on particularly unhealthy foods, but like any diet, if you want to succeed, you'll need to stick to the basic ground rules and avoid these products:

Proteins

• Meats: Fatty cuts of beef, pork, chicken skin, dark chicken meat

Fast Burning Carbohydrates

• Fruits: Bananas, grapes, raisins, dried fruits and mangoes.
• Vegetables: Peas, corn, carrots and potatoes.
• Grains: Bread, muffins, crackers, most breakfast cereals, pasta and other white flour products.
• Sugar: Candy, cakes, pastries and cookies; soft drinks and sodas.

Saturated & Trans-Fat Sources

• Dairy: Whole milk, butter, full cream, sour cream, ice cream, full-fat yogurt.
• Oils: Palm, margarine, cocoa butter, canola, lard, deep-fried foods.

The importance of knowing your body and your diet

Each of our bodies is different and requires a different amount of nutrients to reach ultimate energy levels and keep us happy and healthy. Knowing how your body functions best can be tricky and by following these guidelines and adapting them where necessary to unique requirements you will be able to advance your health and activity levels beyond where you thought possible.

So how can you meet your body's needs on the Zone diet? By carefully planning and examining the intake of the key macronutrients, you'll be able to maintain healthy levels and ultimately a healthier lifestyle.

Calculating your macros on the Zone diet

The primary macronutrients (Food types required in large quantities for the human diet) are carbohydrates, protein and fats. Everybody needs these basic building blocks, regardless if you need a touch more or a dash less, these are the fundamental requirements for dietary health.

In Canada, the CFIA requires labels to list the Carbs, Proteins and Fats in a serving size. While this is great news, be cautious about correctly using the serving size being listed. Additionally, daily percentage values are valueless when calculating your personal requirements because they look only at the CFIA average human - and this number is wrong for nearly everyone. There is a pretty good chance that your needs don’t fit in that easily misunderstood grouping.

Balancing the Zone Blocks of protein, carbs, and fat in a strict 1:1:1 ratio is important but so is knowing how many Zone Blocks you should be eating. While the averages for women is 11 Zone Blocks, and 14 Zone Blocks for men it’s important to note that no one is exactly average and I highly suggest following the calculations below to figure out your personal requirements.

Determining your requirements:

• The Zone Calculator
• Mathematical Estimation

The Zone Diet by Dr. Barry Sears offers a free Zone Calculator on their website to calculate your metrics in a trackable manner. There is no definitive way to correctly find your numbers online, but by using the same tool during your diet you can track your trends, losses or gains, which is the most important part.

At the beginning of entering the zone diet I weighed 133.8 Kg (295 lbs) and I stand 194.3 cm (6 feet & 4.5 inches) tall. When I was asked to measure my metrics I did a comprehensive measuring session and these were my starting numbers:

• Weight: 136 Kg (300 lbs)
• Height: 194.3 cm (76.5 in)
• Wrist: 19.69 cm (7.75 in)
• Belly: 116.84 cm (46 in)
• Thigh (Right//Left): 71.12 // 69.85 cm (28 // 27.5 in)
• Biceps (Right//left): 39.37 cm - both (15.5 in - both)

My body fat had dropped a total of 4 percent, and I lost a total of 32.65 Kg (72 lbs.)

Over the 3 months of the Zone I kept accurate measurements each month to track my progress. These were my numbers 3 months in:

• Weight: 103.4 Kg (228 lbs)
• Height: 194.30 cm (76.5 in)
• Wrist: 19.05 cm (7.5 in)
• Belly: 104.14 cm (41 in)
• Thigh (Right//Left): 64.77 // 63.50 cm (25.5 // 25 in)
• Biceps (Right//left): 34.29 cm - both (13.5 in - both)

When looking at the two sets of numbers before and after pay attention to losing cm on wrist, belly, biceps and thighs. Just measuring your weight won’t show you the improvements you're making against the inflammation like these metrics will.

What the numbers still wont show you is that while I lost circumference on areas like my biceps and thighs, what remained was improving. I was able to increase my workouts from sedentary to light activity over those 3 months because I had less baggage and more energy to accomplish that with.

What this left me with was lean well muscled biceps and torso as compared to the flab and puffy inflammation that was sitting there in the beginning. This diet also cured my IBS and reduced my daily stress factors, or at least reduced the intensity I reacted to them with. I accomplished all of this while eating more than I had before I began the diet.

The basic mathematical estimation for calculating your own metrics

For men: LBM = (0.32810 × W) + (0.33929 × H) − 29.5336

For women: LBM = (0.29569 × W) + (0.41813 × H) − 43.2933

LBM is Lean Body Mass. W is body weight in kilograms . H is body height in centimeters.

Example

(0.32810x107.728) + (0.33929x194.5) - 29.5336 = 71.8 lbs of Lean Body Mass

Second step is finding your blocks requirements:

Lean Body Mass (lbs.) * Activity Level / 7g of protein

Example

168.27 * 0.6 / 7 = 14.5 blocks

Take your activity level from this chart

• Sedentary: 0.5
• Light Activity (Walking): 0.6
• Moderate Activity (Less than 1.5 hrs per week): 0.7
• Active (Between 1.5 – 2.5 hrs per week): 0.8
• Very active (More than 2.5 hrs a week): 0.9
• Athlete 1.0

Example

If you are a very active office worker who does long runs 5 times a week but sits down for your job all day. You weighs 205 lbs and have a body fat percentage of 15%, and your activity level is 0.8.

Ethans Lean Body Mass = 205 - (205 * 0.15). This equals 174.25

Ethans Zone Blocks = (174.25 Lean Mass * 0.8) / 7. This equals 20 blocks (Rounded Up)

While learning how to maintain the Zone Block Ratio of 1:1:1 of protein to carbs to fat in each meal it’s important to understand that in the Zone Diet Foods are considered as sources of their main macronutrient. This means that nuts are fat sources and so are avocados and oils. This system disregards the secondary or tertiary macronutrients.

Furthermore, the Zone Diet doesn't include a daily calorie limit or restriction. Sticking to the optimum caloric intake of 1200 calories for women and 1500 calories for men is the desired goal much like with many other diets but the focus here is on the foods you take in and changing your unhealthy eating habits. The Zone Block ratio is the only number you need to remember and stick to.

By sticking to this ratio of macronutrient daily intake, you will be providing your body with the right amount of healthy nutrients to produce maximum levels of energy and be most efficient during the day. When you are cutting the excess, your body focuses on using what is available instead of storing the extra energy.

The benefits of the Zone Diet and its changes it brings to your body

The most important aspect of starting a new diet should always be improving your health and overall lifestyle. Keeping that in mind, let's explore the benefits of the Zone Diet and how it can affect your body.

The creator of the Zone Diet, Dr. Barry Sears, developed it to treat heart disease and battle diabetes but after testing and studying its effects on pro-athletes discovered it had even more positive influences on the human body. The Zone diet offers a lot of benefits such as treating heart disease and diabetes but it also battles weight loss, reduces inflammation, offers general health improvement, reduces the risk factors of multiple diseases and slows down the ageing process. Dr. Sears also claims that this diet can offer improved mental focus, increase your energy levels and vitality.

The Zone is said to provide your body with the fuel it needs for optimum health. By balancing the macros at an equal block ratio the Zone can change and balance the hormonal levels especially between insulin and glucagon with the alterations in macronutrient intake. In addition, this hormonal shift can help increase the number of vasoactive eicosanoids allowing more oxygen to be transferred to the muscles.

Diabetics arguably receive the greatest benefit from the Zone diet since it controls the blood sugar levels. The diet restricts highly processed foods and also specifically reduces sugar intake and assists in focusing your diet on nutritious foods such as clean proteins, vegetable-heavy slow-burning carbs and healthy fats.

The Zone also promises to aid in other health diseases and disorders such as hypothyroidism, type one and type two diabetes, heart disease, PMS, chronic fatigue, depression and cancer. There have been claims that the diet also helps lessen symptoms of multiple sclerosis and HIV.

Main criticism of the Zone diet

Lack of Calcium and Other Nutrients

On the Zone Diet when dairy and other mainstays of your previous regular diet are reduced some people don't make the switch to finding other sources of essential nutrients. It’s important to look for alternative methods to fulfill those needs like increasing your nutritious greens like broccoli for maintaining calcium levels.

Lack of Fibre, Vitamin C, and Some Micronutrients

Fibre, Vitamin C and some other micronutrients are also important to replace with alternative sources when reducing or changing your normal diet. Finding ways to balance everything on any diet can be a challenge and the Zone is no exception.

High Protein Intake

While no diet is without its detractors, the concern about protein intake for some is higher than on other diets. Elevated levels of protein may be harmful if you suffer from kidney disease, but for those with healthy kidneys, there is no cause for concern as studies have been done with participants eating 5.5 times the recommended daily amount.

High Cost = High Results

For some the high cost of clean protein and slow-burning carbs can be difficult when looking at sticking to the diet long term. With the Zone suggesting meals/snacks every 4-5 hours it's usually an increase in most people's daily food intake.

Big Challenge in Giving up a lot of Products

While the Zone diet can turn out to be a great solution for many problems and help improve health, it can be a big challenge for some since it restricts the use of some hard-to-give-up products, making a lifetime commitment is really hard. Dairy, bread and sugar-heavy foods are all on the chopping block and some people struggle with letting them go - even for the bodies they want.

So is the Zone diet a short or long-term diet

There haven't been any independent longitudinal studies using qualitative methods completed to prove the effects of the Zone diet. But out of a range of diets, it has been proven to be the most effective in achieving weight loss goal in a record time. It has also proven to shed most of the fat cells from the body and help gain and maintain more muscle mass.

I personally have been on the Zone for over a year with minimal straying and have had no ill effects from keeping to its structure. While like most diets it’s important not to stray from the path, the Zone has a structure for those times. I find the Zone less about absolute integrity when it comes to never eating an item off the no list and more about following the core guidelines for balancing those times I let myself eat those foods.

History of the Zone diet

The creator of the Zone, Dr. Barry Sears created the Zone to reduce diet-induced inflammation more than 30 years ago. He is the leading authority on the dietary control of hormonal response and has previously worked as a research scientist in the Boston University School of Medicine and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He dedicated his time and efforts for more than 30 years in researching the study of lipids.

In 1982 the Nobel Prize in Medicine was awarded for the discovery of specifics regarding the role specialized hormones play in the development of cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, autoimmune disease and cancer. The discovery of Eicosanoids changed the course of Dr. Sears’ career. He explained that applying intravenous drug-delivery particles in nutrition can control these hormones with great precision. His findings concluded that food wasn't much different from any drug.

The tragic loss of his father at the age of 53, who died of heart attack has made Dr. Sears focus his research on the relationship between cardiovascular disease and fats. His research has been published in his book The Zone which has affected the way we look not only at food but also at the way we eat and what can we do to increase our overall health.

Whether or not you decide to try the Zone I urge you to track what you eat. Only by tracking what you put into your body can you control the effects that food plays upon you. The Zone happens to be one of the better ways I have found to do exactly that. Don’t be put off by the extra work that systems like the Zone rely on because its those systems of tracking your health that make the greatest changes.

Furthering your reading and research into diet, the effect that hormones play upon the body as well as the important role of proteins, carbohydrates and fats as they move through your system and affect your health is important if you want to make positive and concrete changes.