Border Line Purge To Fitness

Last couple of years so called 3MD diet is gaining on popularity. This diet is also known as 90 day separation diet. It is based on two 90 days dieting periods. Main advantages of this diet should be; clear and easy to follow rules and proven results (weight loss in range of 40 – 55 pounds). Among other results that 3MD diet promises are decreased sensibility on weather and positive changes in metabolism.

Even though many people find it easy to believe those statements, there are really no in-depth explanation in medical of physical terms, how should this diet in fact work. Further more after this 3MD diet is ended, weight gains are returning. Changing from 3MD diet to our previous nutrition patterns makes people gain weight again. 3MD dieting success is built upon following presumptions:

- We are all subject to a daily nutrition cycles (does not explain what that is).

- We need the right combination of foods - following exact rules defined for each day (protein day, carbohydrate day, starch day, fruit day) and every 29th day there is so called "water day" or fasting day.

Following those two presumptions one should lose weight regardless how many calories one takes in daily. Menus prescribed by inventors of 3MD diet are quite strict "2 oranges", "3 pieces of cake"," smaller chicken", "dinner is ½ of lunch",…but not mentioning what kind of cake, how big a piece should be, which parts of chicken, how "carb rich" lunch, nothing about caloric value of foods one should eat.

Many additional rules accompany this diet. There are in fact some healthy advices among them: how one should use olive oil, restriction in salt, advice to consult a doctor. Exercise, which is the corner stone of each serious diet on the world, deserved just an obscure mentioning, not even close to what one should do to lose weight for real. This sad fact makes 3MD diet even more popular with overweight people. Those people become caught in a deadlock of repetitive weight gains after completing this diet. Furthermore this diet offers no explanation what so ever about principles of its effectiveness.

Why is separating foods according to specific days and separating nutrients so important?
How exactly will this make us lose fat?

Daily separation cycle according to 3MD consists of a strict diet from 8pm to midday next day. Within this period only eating fruits and drinking water is allowed. This does not make any sense. Those 16 hours represent 2/3 of the whole day. And one should not starve its body for 16 hours each day. Each body that undergoes such a daily fasting period becomes more sensitive on energy accumulation from each bite we take. Messages our body reports to our brains are to lower energy consumption and leverage the lack of energy with draining energy stored in muscles. We force our body to start dissolving our muscle mass. That is no good news.
Muscles, when in motion, are body's major energy (fat) burner. So we are actually weakening the only "tool" that can help us get rid of fat.

3MD does not give any explanation on why should we eat carbohydrates on one day and proteins on the other. The problem is that "fruit" day and "starch" day are also "carbohydrate" days. Sugar in fruits and complex sugar in starch are just two different sorts of the same thing – carbohydrates. Even if we somehow can understand fruit day (healthy sugar), it is hard to make sense in separation of "starch" day and "carbohydrate" day (complex, refined sugars). And there is a rule where one can take whole-wheat bread together with chicken, which contradicts every sane weight loss program (one should not mix proteins (chicken) with carbohydrates (bread)).
3MD diet does work on a short run. But the weight loss is consequence of water that our body loses with this diet. 3MD is extremely popular as it does not prohibit eating calorie bombs like chocolate. The other short term positive effect of this diet is that it does somehow regulate daily eating habits. People are disciplined by force. That makes it much easier to fall back into old eating patterns as soon as 90 days are over.