How to Follow the Prevention Flat Belly Diet

Prevention's Flat Belly Diet can be summarized as a low calorie diet that emphasizes eating monounsaturated fats. This diet suggests eating no more than 400 calories in a meal, eating 3 meals a day for a total of 1200 calories; eat at least every 4 hours; and, eat nuts (because they are "good fats" or monounsaturated fats) as snacks but not to exceed 300 calories, for a total of 1500 calories a day. That's it. This is the basic plan.

For anyone who has ever followed a calorie controlled diet, this plan offers very little new material. The only "new" idea is to eat nuts as snacks because they contain "good fats." The diet follows the FDA guidelines for what is called a "healthy diet" consisting of between 40 to 60% carbohydrates, 10 to 20% fats (monounsaturated) and 20 to 30% proteins.

Anyone wishing to follow this plan would be advised to buy a computer program to help calculate daily calories and monitor the distribution of calories among the various food groups. Otherwise you might be tempted to exceed calorie counts per meal or snack.

For people who have a problem with Diverticulosis, this is not the best diet for you to choose, as eating nuts every day may aggravate your Diverticulosis and may cause a painful bout of Diverticulitis. For people with Diverticular disease, nuts are simply not on the menu. You would need to find another source of monounsaturated fats for your snacks.

The reason the Flat Belly Diet works is that when you go on a calorie reducing diet it is the fat that surrounds your internal organs (Belly Fat, Visceral Fat or Abdominal Fat) that disappears first. All reduced calorie diets act in the same way, there is no real differences between calorie reduced diets unless the carbohydrate content is also reduced.

When on a calorie deficit diet, not only does the dieter lose abdominal or belly fat; subcutaneous fat, (the layer of fat beneath the skin) is also lost, although at a slower rate. For this reason, most diet programs advocate exercising to maintain muscle tone, otherwise the dieter finds muscles becoming flabby.

A major problem with all calorie reduced diets, unless a minimum amount of protein is ingested every day to meet bodily needs, the body will look for nutrients everywhere and will pull nutrients from muscle as well as fat in order to ensure the survival of the organism.

This is the reason why so many dieters develop the gaunt look of a person who is starving to death. Only by maintaining protein levels, can a person look and feel healthy while losing fat. (It is protein that repairs all tissues of the body so depriving the body of proteins seriously interferes with human metabolism.)

If you need to lose weight around your belly button, you need to go on a diet and cut your calories, but there are a number of ways to succeed in losing your belly fat as well as the Prevention diet.