The 3-Hour Diet

What It Is

If you want a diet that includes Reese's peanut butter cups and has no "bad" foods, the three-hour diet is the plan for you.

Jorge Cruise, fitness journalist and author of The 3-Hour Diet: How Low-Carb Diets Make You Fat and Timing Makes You Thin, believes so strongly in his plan that he actually encourages readers to enjoy candy. Daily.

But the true keys to Cruise's diet -- other than portion control (he recommends chocolate minis, not whole bars) -- involve a trinity of timing:

• Eat breakfast within one hour of rising
• Eat every three hours thereafter
• Stop eating three hours before bedtime

Cruise is a passionate believer that eating this way increases BMR (baseline metabolic rate -- how fast your body burns calories), increases energy, and decreases appetite.

However, while people do report successfully losing on this plan, there isn't yet agreement on whether it's a metabolic improvement to spread three meals out into five or six smaller meals.

What You Can Eat

"Portions are very important, as well as timing," Cruise tells WebMD. So the author doesn't really advise what to eat -- more how to visualize what you're eating.

Start with the image of a 9 inch plate. On this plate you'll "see" four items:

• A Rubik's cube, representing your carbohydrate portion at breakfast, lunch and dinner.
• A deck of playing cards, symbolizing your protein serving at each meal; this is approximately 3 ounces, and Cruise says it can be anything you like -- from chicken to cheese, eggs, and fish.
• A water bottle cap represents the amount of fat on your plate -- a little more than one teaspoon. This can be salad dressing, butter, olive oil -- any fat you favor.
• Visually stack three DVD cases; this represents how much fruit or vegetables to eat at each meal.

Cruise believes there are no bad foods, just bad portions. Using this "visual timing" method, he says you'll find that all meals are balanced at about 400 calories each. Learn to eat the right portion, at the right time, he maintains, and you will lose weight.