How to eat your way thinner

What if losing weight didn’t involve counting calories and eating pre-packaged “diet” food? According to Haylie Pomroy, celebrity nutritionist and author of the best-selling The Fast Metabolism Diet, the key to igniting your metabolism and burning fat is eating real whole food — and plenty of it.

The Fast Metabolism Diet… not really a diet?

Those who have successfully completed the Fast Metabolism Diet say it’s not so much a diet as a shift to eating real whole foods and eliminating packaged, processed foods. Unlike most diets, there’s no calorie counting involved. Creator and author of The Fast Metabolism Diet Haylie Pomroy says chronic dieting burns out your metabolism, while the Fast Metabolism Diet stokes the fires. The simple premise? Confuse it to lose it. Similar to the way cross-training improves your athletic performance, Pomroy says systemic rotation of specific foods on certain days at strategic times actually helps your body transform itself by cycling between rest and active recovery of your metabolism.

What do you eat?

On this plan, you eat three full meals plus at least two snacks each day. Throughout each week of the program, you’ll rotate the types of foods you eat as follows:

• Phase 1 (Monday–Tuesday): Lots of carbs and fruits
• Phase 2 (Wednesday–Thursday): Lots of proteins and veggies
• Phase 3 (Friday–Sunday): All of the above, plus healthy fats and oils

The Fast Metabolism Diet book provides meal maps for each phase, specifying exactly how many proteins, veggies, fruits and grains to be eaten at each meal and snack. It also includes sample meal plans and dozens of recipes. So what might a typical day look like?

• A Phase 1 day might include strawberry French toast for breakfast, two apricots for a morning snack, tuna, green apple and spinach salad for lunch, 1 cup of cantaloupe for an afternoon snack, and 2 cups of chicken sausage with brown rice for dinner.
• A Phase 2 eating plan might include an egg white, mushroom and spinach omelet for breakfast, roast beef, smoked salmon and cucumbers for a morning snack, a steak and spinach salad for lunch, three hard-boiled egg whites with sea salt and pepper for an afternoon snack, and 2 cups of beef and cabbage soup for dinner.
• Phase 3 gets even better. Oatmeal for breakfast, 1/4 cup of raw almonds for a morning snack, an olive and tomato salad for lunch, half of a sliced avocado with sea salt for an afternoon snack, and baked salmon and sweet potatoes for dinner.

Sounds good, right? So what’s the catch? (Coffee drinkers, you might want to sit down.) To get the most out of your metabolism, you must be prepared to cut out the culprits that slow down your “burn rate.” The Fast Metabolism Diet eliminates all wheat, corn, dairy, soy, refined sugar, caffeine, alcohol, dried fruit and fruit juices. If you’re a coffee fiend, sweets addict or just really love your evening glass of pinot noir, you might want to consider kicking those habits a few days before getting started.

The results

Thanks to social media, it’s easy to find out if a diet really works. So are people on the Fast Metabolism Diet seeing results? Read the reviews on Amazon, comments on The Fast Metabolism Diet community Facebook page and testimonials on fastmetabolismdiet.com to see how the Fast Metabolism Diet is helping people shed inches and pounds.

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