By Chef K.T. Murphy
The Mayo Clinic Diet Differs, How From “Fad” Diets? ?
There are countless diets out there and perhaps you have tried one or two of them. 
While many of them produce successful results, these results are often temporary and if you ever stopped following a so-called “fad diet” you will now how quickly the weight you managed to lose doing it goes back on. This is because although most diets help you to lose weight, they do not educate you enough on what is needed to lose weight and keep it off – changing your lifestyle.
Rather than focusing on just temporarily helping you to lose weight however, the Mayo Clinic Diet is a comprehensive lifestyle and weight-loss program created by health experts at the Mayo Clinic. The purpose is not just to help you lose weight but find a healthier way of eating and being more active on a day-to-day basis that you will enjoy.
What Does The Mayo Clinic Entail?
Instead of being a short burst of portion control and exercise, the Mayo Clinic Diet is actual one diet divided into 2 parts – Lose It and Live It.
Lose It
The Lose It part of the diet lasts for 2 weeks and is aimed at helping you to start losing weight. In fact you can lose around 6 to 10 pounds (or 2.7 to 4.5 kg) is this period, most importantly in a healthy way. It is primarily focused on your lifestyle habits.
What You Learn:
During the Lose It period, you will learn:
• How to add 5 healthy habits to your lifestyle
• How to break 5 unhealthy habits
• How to add 5 additional healthy habits
• Ways to participate in a minimum of 30 minutes of exercise or physical exercise a day
Live It
The 2nd part of the Mayo Clinic Diet, Live It, is program of healthier living and diet that you can follow for the rest of your life. By following what you learn you can comfortably and healthily lose around 1 to 2 pounds (or 0.5 to 1 kg) every week until you are down to your target weight.
What You Learn
During the Live It period, you will learn:
• More about making better and healthier food choices
• Food portioning
• How to plan your daily and weekly menus
• How to stick to the healthier habits you have established
• How to set your target weight
• How to develop healthy-eating patterns that will stay with you for life.
As you continue to follow the healthy habits you have adopted in your lifestyle, the Mayo Clinic Diet can help you to manage your weight on a permanent basis. This phase, you also learn how to set a goal weight and how to develop long-term healthy-eating patterns. Regular physical activity remains a central part of this phase.
The Healthy Weight Pyramid
The main basis that the diet is built upon is the Mayo Clinic Healthy Weight Pyramid. This pyramid shows why it is so important to balance eating healthily with regularly engaging in exercise or physical activity.
Eating Healthy Food In Correctly Sized Portions
It is not just about eating the right food, but also eating the right amount. The focus of this diet is therefore eating a large amount of healthy foods that are low in calories, in particular fruits and vegetables.
The rest of the pyramid consists of other healthy choices when it comes to food. This includes eating whole-grain complex carbohydrates, unsaturated fats that are good for the health of your heart and lean protein-rich foods such as low-fat dairy, fish and legumes.
Unlike other diets, the aim is not to eliminate foods, but more to teach you to calculate portions and plan your meals better.
Increasing Your Physical Activity
Along with promoting healthier food and eating habits, the diet devised by the Mayo Clinic also encourages you to participate in exercise or physical activity regularly. When you exercise, your body uses energy to function, burning calories in the process. It can be hard to start exercising regularly again if you have been inactive for some time, which is why it is recommended you start with 5 to 10 minute sessions of exercise that you can increase over the course of time. Taking part in regular physical activity for at least 30 minutes a day, you can improve your breathing and heart as well as keeping your weight down.
Hope the overview helped, All the Best…
Chef Murph
XoxoX
