I've never done the Zone, but as far as Body for Life is concerned, I would HIGHLY recommend sticking to the carb list in the book as closely as possible for the best results.
The thing about 'balancing out' in different diet plans (i.e. WW Points, that sort of thing) is that they are mostly marketed/hailed as "freedom of choice" i.e. no food is off limits as long as you stay within your points or grams of carbs or whatever. For some reason, the following passage from
Fat of the Land seems to sound perfect here:
Quote:
Variety is the Spice of Overeating
When it comes to the question of why people are fat, you'll see books blaming practically everything under the sun. But there's one culprit you'll never see labeled as such in any diet book. In fact, the recipes in most diet books (and most diet books fill their pages with recipes) actually contribute to this problem. It's called variety.
Yes, a certain amount of variety is both good and necessary to get all the vitamins and minerals you need. But variety has also clearly contributed to the American obesity problem.
I first realized the importance of variety in obesity from observing my rabbits. Rabbits eat an enormous amount of food by human standards - yes, even Americans - and compared to cats and dogs, as well. In essence, they're furry little poop machines, so efficient at consuming massive quantities that they sometimes eat and defecate at the same time. Yet if I fill the food tray high enough with their pellets, even they will be sated. That is, until I give them a treat - a piece of lettuce, an apple core, and, yes, carrots. (They are wholly insenstive to the fact they're perpetuating a stereotype.) Suddenly these previously sated creatures are ravenous.
Variety sparks appetite, and not just for rabbits. Rats increase their eating when offered tasty high-fat or high-carbohydrate foods. University of Pennsylvania researcher Barbara Rolls has demonstrated that variety caused rats offered chow plus three different cafeteria foods to gain more weight than those offered only one cafeteria food plus chow.
Rabbits and rats, but humans? You bet. "During the course of a meal the pleasantness of those foods not eaten remains relatively unchanged," observes Rolls. "We have called this form of satiety 'sensory specific satiety'." The result is that "more is eaten of a varied meal than a monotonous one."
Americans today are bombarded with a vast number of different food choices. Rockefeller University obesity researcher Jules Hirsch, M.D., estimates that there are about 50,000 foodstuffs available to Americans today [1997], compared with just 500 a century ago. Supermarkets now carry 12 times as many different products as they did in 1961, an average of 30,000 items in a single store. But even that doesn't tell the whole story. As a middle-class American I can afford virtually every one of those 50,000 foodstuffs, even if I couldn't afford much of some of them. Yet a century ago a family might actually eat fewer than a dozen foods on a regular basis. Until the great famine beginning in 1846, many Irish subsisted almost entirely on just potatoes and buttermilk with an occasional turnip. And surely you haven't forgotten that rhyme you learned as a child: "Pease porridge hot, pease porridge cold,/Pease porridge in the pot, nine days old."
Try eating pease (pea) porridge, hot or cold, for nine straight days and see how much weight you'll lose. In fact, this is the key to those bizzare diets that emphasized just jelly beans or grapefruit or popcorn.
If you're watching your weight, try to watch your variety. Discard the diet books that offer you a different menu for every day of the month. Pick a small number of foods with low calorie density (that give you the full spectrum of vitamins and minerals you need) and primarily stick with them Save extraordinary items for extraordinary occasions, such as eating out. And console yourself that if nothing else, at least you aren't eating pease porridge for the ninth day in a row.
mellywelly , 11-11-2003 07:53 PM
3fcuser1058250 , 11-11-2003 08:52 PM
?I'm not sure what you mean...
with all that food and "variety".... 
go figure, it's like Plan "B", why didn't I think of that...
... this is what I do now.... Sorry 
during the holidays, visit and have fun instead... OR drink yourself into a stupor 
