Its creator, nutritionist Barbara Rolls, PhD, argues that limiting your diet too severely won\’t work in the long run. These each burn 150 calories; the book recommends doing at least two of them a day. This way, I can make choices that allow me to increase the volume but still keep it tasty for me. Rolls has excellent credentials.
Thats the big advantage for me - whenever I would try one in the past, I would always get hungry because of the tight restrictions on portions. For example, I was craving a bratwurst about a week ago, so in order to keep my day in an appropriate plan, I basically ate like a vegetarian for the other parts of the day. I was completely fine with eating the bratwurst - it was completely appropriate - but this meant lots of additional vegetables. Another big encouragement of the plan is to drink plenty of water - water is filling and has no calories.
The hook of Volumetrics is its focus on satiety, the feeling of fullness. Unlike diets that are based on deprivation, the Volumetrics diet doesn\’t try to fight this natural preference. I was interested in trying out this plan because my biggest problem isnt choosing healthy foods (I like most vegetables, especially tomatoes and broccoli), but that I tend to eat a lot at one sitting, and thus making a single bad choice is the equivalent of eating a fat bomb. Rolls says that people feel full because of the amount of food they eat — not because of the number of calories or the grams of fat, protein, or carbs.
If you eat foods with high energy density, you rack up calories quickly. This means identifying base foods that are low in calories and eating them in volume (like tomatoes) while still enjoying foods you like (in small portions). Im also a large guy - six and a half feet tall - so although Im somewhat overweight, my frame does hide it somewhat well. Energy density is the number of calories in a specified amount of food.
Rolls\’ approach is to help people find foods that they can eat lots of while still losing weight. Thus, if you do these exercise pieces, you can effectively have a lower calorie day. It also strongly helps if youre willing to cook at home and are also willing to study the labels a bit on stuff and do a bit of basic math. The exercises vary in impact, from walking two miles in thirty minutes to walking up and down stairs for fifteen minutes.
So far, its been reasonably successful; Ive dropped about eleven pounds in about six weeks, with a big loss the first week, a rebound in the third week, and a steady pound and a half a week loss since then. Rolls claims that in some cases, following Volumetrics will allow you to eat more — not less — than you do now, while still slimming down. It also gives me a lot of freedom for cooking at home - basically, I just study the caloric content of all ingredients, figure up how many calories are in the complete thing Im making, and figure out which portion of it equals 100 calories. Rolls, with co-author Robert A.
Advantages I have no problem getting full with this program. So the trick is to fill up on foods that aren\’t full of calories. But she does urge people to evaluate foods based on their energy density. The book comes with a huge number of simple recipes, but you really need to understand how they work to make this plan work, and that requires knowing how to do the math and how to find the information.
Overall, Im a pretty big fan of this plan, but as I keep doing it, I realize that its really a regimentation and simplification of good sense about food. This concept is crucial to the whole diet. It also has a lot in common with budgeting your money - you have to plan a bit to fit in the calories for a given day, and the exercise takes planning, too. In 2005, Rolls followed up with The Volumetrics Eating Plan, which restates the basics of the diet and provides further recipes.
Its all modular, though - I could go for a cheese and tomato pizza and eat my three pieces, and then still have space for other things. They have a lot of calories packed into a small size. The idea here is to identify portions of foods with a specific caloric content (usually 100 calories or 200 calories) and then eat a specific number of those portions throughout the day. Some foods — especially fats — are very energy dense.
About a month and a half ago, I mentioned that I was trying out the Volumetric weight control plan as described in the book with the same title. Exercise The plan strongly encourages an exercise component, again breaking things down into pieces that are worth 100, 150, or 200 calories. Ive taken to doing the two miles in thirty minutes twice a day, myself, mixing in a few other things on occasion, and I can feel myself getting into better shape. Water is the opposite, since it has an energy density of zero.
