Weight Loss & Diet Plans

The Belly Fat Cure

Lose 4-9 pounds of belly fat each week without counting calories or doing a lick of exercise. It sounds too good to be true, even in a nation obsessed with finding an easy cure for belly fat. Yet that's just what celebrity fitness trainer Jorge Cruise proclaims in his new book, The Belly Fat Cure. 

Cruise writes that you can eat all the foods you love -- including chips, ice cream, pizza, and cheeseburgers -- as long as you minimize your intake of sugar and processed carbohydrates through his "carb swap" system, and thus control your insulin levels.

This may sound contradictory to those who remember Cruise’s last diet book, The 3-Hour Diet: How Low-Carb Diets Make You Fat and Timing Makes You Thin. That book subscribed to the well-accepted portion control, calories in-calories out approach to weight loss.  

But Cruise now says he was wrong. The latest science, he says, shows that "losing weight has nothing to do with calorie counting, eating less, or exercising more."

This theory, of course, is not embraced by most nutrition and diet experts. 

"If you want to lose weight and keep it off, calories need to be controlled and regular physical activity is a prescription for a healthy heart, maintaining bones, muscle tissue, and more," says Elisa Zied, MS, RD, a spokeswoman for the American Dietetic Association.

The Belly Fat Cure: What You Can Eat

The Belly Fat Cure eating plan consists of protein, fats, and vegetables with small amounts of sugar and complex carbs. Processed foods with sweeteners (even artificial sweeteners) are out.  Wine, beer, champagne, and dark chocolate are OK -- but not cocktails or candy bars.

Much of the book consists of colorful displays of more than 100 "belly bad" meals (mostly from fast food and casual restaurant chains) made over into "belly good" recipes that are featured in the meal plans. (However, the recipes contain no nutrition information other than the grams of sugar and servings of carbs they contain – not even a calorie count.)

Five different weeklong meal plans designed for various eating styles, from carb lovers to meat-eaters, provide a framework for the eating plan. 

When in doubt, dieters can follow the "no-excuses day" plan:

• Breakfast: 3 eggs, 2 slices buttered toast
• Snack: Handful of walnuts
• Lunch: Tuna salad on one piece pita bread
• Snack: 1 cup cottage cheese with honey
• Dinner: Grilled chicken or steak, sautéed veggies and 1/2 cup brown rice

Dieters are advised to drink 8-10 glasses of water a day. Most fresh fruits, and beverages such as skim milk and 100% fruit juice, are depicted as "belly bad." 

Because of their low sugar content, blackberries and blueberries are the only fruits allowed on The Belly Cure plan. Although fruits are generally considered healthy because of all the nutrients and fiber they contain, Cruise says you can get the same nutrients from vegetables without the (natural) sugar found in fruit. Once you reach your goal weight, you can add up to two pieces of fruit per day.