If you are unfamiliar with the military diet, it is a low calorie meal plan designed to help people lose weight quickly. It is a temporary diet plan that can help those looking to lose weight lose up to 10 pounds in only a few days according to those who follow this plan.
The main premise behind this type of diet is to restrict caloric intake to where your body begins to shed most of your excess water weight, and is a major reason why people are able to lose weight so quickly using the military diet.
The military diet works by severely restricting the calories you are consuming 3 days out of the week, followed by 4days of regular caloric intake. This diet is meant to last for only one week, and is a great way for people to lose weight fast.
In addition to the restriction on calories, the military diet prohibits the consumption of certain foods as well. This includes many foods which we would otherwise consider to be healthy, such as whole grains and legumes. These foods are high in calories as well, hence why we are avoiding them in this diet plan.
What Are the Major Benefits of the Military Diet?
1-The Chances of You Losing Weight Are Extremely High
The number one reason why most of us diet is to lose weight. This comes down to simple arithmetic, as you will be eating roughly half of the calories here as you normally would. It is definitely a quick way to lose weight, although it may not be the healthiest way to do so.
It is important to keep this in mind, as the caloric deficit will eventually catch backup with you. That is why this diet is recommended for a month at the maximum, where you could be potentially losing 30 pounds or so.
2-Foods High In Protein Keep Hunger in Check
One of the most difficult aspects of dieting is keeping yourself full, and not craving food all day long. One way to help yourself in this regard is to eat plenty of foods rich in protein, as these foods satiate hunger. The military diet consists of plenty of foods which are high in protein yet lean, which is going to help keep you full but not break the bank as far as calorie consumption is concerned.
Eating enough protein is important in any diet if you want the weight you are losing to be fat. Cutting calories and not getting enough protein is going to atrophy your muscles, which is definitely something you want to avoid.
3-Has a Decent Amount of Vegetables and Fruits
Vegetables are some of the foods we can get away with eating almost as much as we want due to how much nutrition we are getting from them in return. While we can’t eat all that we want to in this type of diet, it does offer us a sufficient amount of vitamins and minerals from these foods.
The same thing can be said for fruits to an extent, although fruits tend to be high in sugar. This means we want to stick to fruits which are the most nutritionally dense such as strawberries, raspberries, blueberries and blackberries. Fruits high in sugar yet low in fiber are ones we want to stay away from during this diet plan-such as watermelon and pineapples.
4-This Plan Is Very Similar to Intermittent Fasting
There are different techniques you can employ when fasting intermittently, however they all revolve around the same premise. That being severely limiting caloric intake to only certain time periods during the day.
More often than not this requires someone to eat within an 8 hour window, while fasting for the rest of your day. This has a positive effect on weight loss because it makes the body switch from glycogen as its energy to fats.
Fasting in this manner also helps the body come back to normal, or regain homeostasis. This is important when it comes to things like hormonal regulation, such as in the case of leptin. Leptin is the hormone which the body uses to store fat, and fasting can help reduce the presence of this hormone, and thus help us lose more weight.
The military diet works similarly here, in that restricting calories to this extent will switch the body in to “fat burning mode”. Once your body’s stores of glycogen are depleted it switches to fat stores, burning off the weight you want to lose.
