In your dreams!
A new rapid weight-loss diet claims you can actually lose while you snooze.
Sounds like silly pillow talk, but Caroline Apovian, an obesity doctor and the author of a new book, “The Overnight Diet,” insists you can shed up to 2 pounds overnight and up to nine pounds after one week.
The key is to preserve and build up valuable muscle mass, which helps in speeding up the metabolism. The leaner the muscles, the faster the metabolism and the more calories you burn.
On other diets, when the body detects a significant drop in food intake, it immediately looks to muscle mass for extra energy. You get thinner, but you also get weaker and eventually the metabolic rate slows down and you stop losing weight.
But a high-protein diet burns fat rather than muscle, according to the Fort Lee, NJ, native and director of the Nutrition and Weight Management Center at Boston University Medical Center.
Apovian says her diet is twofold. “On the first day of the week, you are going to power up and drink nutrient-rich smoothies all day and avoid carbohydrates, and that night you are going to lose up to 2 pounds,” she said.
By not eating carbohydrates, the pancreas secretes less insulin, which is what retains salt and water.
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The rest of the week is a diet of high-protein foods, such as a 14-ounce steak, leafy green veggies and fruit. “You don’t have to lift a single barbell,” she says.
“There is nothing in this diet that completely eliminates anything. A glass of wine a night is fine.”
Much of the calorie-burning comes while you are at rest, usually when you are sleeping.
“You need eight hours of sleep a night to allow this all to happen,” Apovian says. “Sleep is a very important part of the diet. My patients have terrible trouble sleeping, and if you sleep six hours or less a night, it creates stress and the hunger hormone ghrelin, that’s made in the stomach, goes up to the brain and says you’re hungry.”
The 5-foot-2 doctor said she has lost weight herself on this diet. When she was a college chemistry major, she ballooned from her current weight of 105 to 145 pounds, and by switching to her own diet, she shrank back to her original weight.
Some 50 percent of Apovian’s patients who see her at the hospital succeed in losing 10 percent of body fat and keep it off for a year, she claims. The average weight loss is about 25 pounds. From nypost.
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