The Colorado Diet - A Hype Or Reality?

You know what happens whenever you start a diet –

You begin your new plan full of enthusiasm and follow everything to the letter; carefully weighing your food, making sure you pick the right things to eat, avoid all the naughty treats you’re not allowed, and start to base your whole life around your goal for a leaner, lighter physique.

Even as you get further into the diet, weeks two and three can yield fairly respectable losses of a couple of pounds too.

Pretty soon though, two things happen.

Firstly, your weight loss slows down. This is due to one thing – metabolic adaptation. By consuming such a low number of calories (usually through a sever reduction in both carbs and fats) your metabolism starts to get lazy. It conserves calories, thinking that it’s going to need them at a later date, and try as you might, you simply can’t get it to speed up again.

The one thing that will speed it up is more food. But how much!? In your haste to rid yourself of your newly found slow metabolism, you start eating a little more to combat metabolic adaptation.

At first, this can be beneficial to your metabolism and weight loss goals, but we all know what happens.

That “little” bit more food turns into a bit more each day, then a couple of extra meals out, or high carb dinners creep in. Then it’s the full blown cheat days, and before you know it, you’re cramming in the calories like a post contest bodybuilder at an all you can eat buffet.

You’d think that reducing calories further would help increase your calorie deficit, and lead to fat loss, but this certainly isn't always the case.

Despite the fact that theoretically, weight loss should be happening, your body is a more complicated beast than simply a number cruncher.

This is where the Colorado diet can help. Rather than just drastically slashing calories, only letting you eat grilled chicken breast and having you run a half marathon every day, it strategically controls calorie intake, exercise and food choices to give you sustainable progress without a metabolism crash.

The Colorado Diet – It Ain’t No Scam

It is seriously difficult to decipher whether a commercial diet is the real thing, or just a scam designed to rob you of your hard earned cash, especially with the money invested in many diet plans and products. However, you can be relatively sure that the Colorado diet is the real deal.

20 pounds in eight weeks is actually a relatively healthy, sustainable amount of weight loss, though it does depend on the person.

If you’re already fit and lean, then this rate of weight loss could be detrimental and cause muscle loss and metabolic slowdown. For untrained and overweight folks however, losing 20 pounds healthily in eight weeks is perfectly feasible.

The Advantages of the Colorado Diet

First up, the Colorado diet implements activity and exercise into your routine. This has two benefits – firstly, exercise is known to increase your metabolism, not only while you’re training, but afterwards too. Training hard leads to a phenomenon known as EPOC (excessive post exercise oxygen consumption) which is your metabolism speeding up to increase oxygen delivery to damaged muscles to aid in their repair.

Secondly, burning calories through exercise means you get to eat more. Eating more is a surefire way to keep your metabolic fire burning.

The induction phase of the Colorado diet is relatively strict, but not nearly as much as many other similar diets. It’s sort of a more lenient Atkins. Your meals should be based around lean proteins and vegetables, but you can have dairy products and there are no restrictions on the types of green vegetable you eat (unlike Atkins.) You’re also encouraged to eat healthy fats – something which other commercial diets ban completely.

You are advised to measure your food intake, weigh certain foods and keep an eye on portion sizes. These recommendations are solid, as research has shown that many dieters (and particularly those who are overweight and obese) chronically under report calorie intakes. Often you can think you’re making good choices and not eating too much, yet when it comes down to it, your calorie intake is simply too high to drop fat on. There’s no danger of this with the Colorado diet.

Your meals should be balanced, and always contain protein. Protein is the key macronutrient in keeping your metabolism going, as it takes more effort for your body to digest and break down protein, leading to a higher calorie burn in the digestion process.

You don’t even have to drop fat or carbs. In fact, carbs arte included at every meal, provided you make healthy choices and eat them in an appropriate quantity, and healthy fats (things like nuts, peanut butter, olive oil and coconut) are recommended twice per day.

 It might not give the speedy initial results of a zero carb ketogenic diet, a detox, or juice based diet, but it is far healthier, more sustainable and socially acceptable, and much more likely to deliver long term results.