Weight Loss & Diet Plans

The Gene Smart Diet

Everyone knows that genes are responsible for the color of your eyes, your bone structure, and whether you'll live to a ripe old age. But are your genes also the key to losing weight? According to The Gene Smart Diet, understanding how your genes work is the secret to weight control and reducing your risk of disease.

 Wake Forest University professor, Floyd Chilton PhD, author of The Gene Smart Diet, says that our genes were simply not designed for today's diets and lifestyles, and that this mismatch is causing us to miss out on important bioactive substances in food that send messages to our genes to keep us healthy.This mismatch, he says, has been a major contributor to the nation’s health crisis, including obesity and chronic inflammatory diseases.

But your genes are not indelible blueprints, Chilton says, and by following the Gene Smart Diet you can change the way your genes are expressed, which can lead to weight loss and better health.

"Follow my five simple diet and exercise strategies to get your genes to work for you and it will help you improve your health by reducing the likelihood of certain chronic disease, slow down the aging process, and accelerate weight loss," Chilton says.

The five principles of The Gene Smart Diet are:

• Exercising more.
• Reducing calories.
• Increasing fiber.
• Adding omega-3 fatty acids.
• Increasing polyphenols (a type of antioxidant found in fruits, vegetables, and tea).

The Gene Smart Diet: What You Can Eat

Healthy foods that are widely available, like fruits, vegetables, whole grains, low-fat dairy, lean meat, seafood, nuts, and legumes, form the basis of The Gene Smart Diet menus. Calories range from a low of 575 during the one-day jump-start phase, to 1,600-1,800 calories during weight loss, to 2,000 calories for the maintenance phase.

Here's how it breaks down day by day:

• Day 1: A soup fast for one day before starting the diet (Chilton recommends that you consider fasting once a week). Celery soup is the suggested soup for the fast, yielding approximately 575 calories for the day. 
• Day 2-21: A three-week "adaptive" phase, with meals and snacks totaling about 1,600 calories/day. Clifton recommends staying in the adaptive phase longer if you have lots of weight to lose. 
• Day 22-35: A two-week "preconditioning phase" in which meals and snacks increase to about 1,800 calories per day. 
• An optimal maintenance phase, which provides about 2,000 calories per day. Dieters can use menus from the earlier phases and increase the portions, or they can use the 2,000-calorie flexible meal pattern. At this stage, 4-6 ounces red wine and 1-3 ounces dark chocolate are permitted each day.

The book offers other options for dieters who don’t fall into the prescribed calorie levels and need additional calories. Dieters can enter the maintenance phase at any time or after they reach goal weight.