Macrobiotic Diets

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[dbotari]

Does anyone out there in aikiweb land follow a macrobiotic diet? Has it had any effect on your training for good or bad (i.e. a lack of energy due to the reduced protien levels eaten etc)? I'm considering easing my way towards a diet such as this in an effort to eat healthier and lose some excess weight. Any thoughts pro or con would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Dan

[Kevin Wilbanks]

Macrobiotic diets are severely unhealthy. If you follow one strictly, you will suffer malnutrition from deficiency in protein, fats, and micronutrients. The restrictions are made worse by the high whole grain content of the diet, which contains anti-nutrients that block vitamin absorption. If you want to be healthy and lose weight, diets that prohibit eating whole classes of foods are the wrong approach. It may help you to eat less calories, but the price in terms of health is high.

Losing weight is about eating less calories than you burn on a long-term basis. One need not resort to extreme dietary restrictions to accomplish this, one merely needs to exercise more and eat less. If you have trouble doing this by guessing, I suggest getting a Nutrition Almanac, a food scale, a log book and a calculator. Record everything you eat and count up the calories for a while, weigh yourself every week, and learn to correlate intake levels with changes in weight. Then it is a simple matter to reduce calories and lose weight. It sounds like a pain, but you probably only have to do it for a little while, so you can internalize conceptions of what foods contain and how much you need to eat to maintain or lose weight.

A simpler scheme that I have used is to use hunger and the clock. I developed it when I was doing the above scheme as part of bodybuilding years ago. Eat small meals - probably five per day. When a meal is burned up by your body, you'll get hungry. Once you get hungry, note the time and force yourself to wait an hour to eat. When you eat, only eat another small meal, no matter how hungry you are. Going into that deep hunger zone 2 to 4 times per day is likely to ensure that you are burning fat.

If you are going to eat a calorie defecit, be sure to take vitamins and eat extra protein. Unless you want to lose a lot of muscle mass in the bargain, protein requirements increase when losing weight. Also, buy an updated Nutrition Almanac anyway - read through it. Once you understand a little about contemporary nutrition science and read through the detailed accounts of all the major diseases and problems that stem from nutrient deficiencies, I don't think you'll be too eager to go Macrobiotic.

[Mike Sigman]

Macrobiotic diets are severely unhealthy. If you follow one strictly, you will suffer malnutrition from deficiency in protein, fats, and micronutrients. The restrictions are made worse by the high whole grain content of the diet, which contains anti-nutrients that block vitamin absorption. If you want to be healthy and lose weight, diets that prohibit eating whole classes of foods are the wrong approach. It may help you to eat less calories, but the price in terms of health is high.

Losing weight is about eating less calories than you burn on a long-term basis. One need not resort to extreme dietary restrictions to accomplish this, one merely needs to exercise more and eat less. If you have trouble doing this by guessing, I suggest getting a Nutrition Almanac, a food scale, a log book and a calculator. Record everything you eat and count up the calories for a while, weigh yourself every week, and learn to correlate intake levels with changes in weight. Then it is a simple matter to reduce calories and lose weight. It sounds like a pain, but you probably only have to do it for a little while, so you can internalize conceptions of what foods contain and how much you need to eat to maintain or lose weight.

A simpler scheme that I have used is to use hunger and the clock. I developed it when I was doing the above scheme as part of bodybuilding years ago. Eat small meals - probably five per day. When a meal is burned up by your body, you'll get hungry. Once you get hungry, note the time and force yourself to wait an hour to eat. When you eat, only eat another small meal, no matter how hungry you are. Going into that deep hunger zone 2 to 4 times per day is likely to ensure that you are burning fat.

If you are going to eat a calorie defecit, be sure to take vitamins and eat extra protein. Unless you want to lose a lot of muscle mass in the bargain, protein requirements increase when losing weight. Also, buy an updated Nutrition Almanac anyway - read through it. Once you understand a little about contemporary nutrition science and read through the detailed accounts of all the major diseases and problems that stem from nutrient deficiencies, I don't think you'll be too eager to go Macrobiotic. Thanks, Kevin. Actually, I think your advice is very sensible. ;)