The 17 Day Diet Review – No scientific basis!

The 17 Day Diet is a diet plan conceived and designed by Dr. Mike Moreno who is a family doctor out of California.

The idea behind the 17 day diet is to confuse your metabolism and your body by changing around what and how you eat over a 17 day period, focusing mainly on the impact carbohydrates has on your body.

Dr. Mike Moreno originally designed the diet as a way to maintain the current weight of a patient or help shed a few extra pounds around the holidays; however, it can also be used to help people lose weight. Dr. Moreno claims one can lose up to twelve pounds in 17 days safely, by confusing metabolism and so forcing it to run on high speed.

The diet plan started out quietly enough, but gained notoriety when it was noticed by the Dr. Phil show and was featured there and the Doctors TV Show. After that, it was only a short hop to see this diet become fantastically popular. But is the 17 Day Diet worth the hype?

The 17 day diet ebook goes over an eating plan in which the dieter goes through 4 phases of carbohydrate intake:

  1. Accelerate, where you cut way back on the amount of carbs you eat in order to detox your body
  2. Activate which is carbohydrate cycling
  3. Achieve in which you can start eating previously forbidden foods and learn good eating habits and
  4. Arrive in which you maintain new eating habits by eating healthy on weekdays and letting go just a little on weekends

Each phase is 17 days long for a total diet plan which actually takes about 68 days.

The main idea behind all of this is to confuse your metabolism. There is a school of thought which claims that the reason people have trouble losing weight after a while is because their bodies get used to what’s happening and so metabolism slows down.

By confusing your metabolism, you can keep it in high speed and thus burn more weight.

Pros & Benefits

  • This diet plan actually seems to teach healthy eating, something which many diets, particularly the speedy ones, don’t.
  • The 17 Day Diet ebook is affordable: $25.00! For an extra $15.00 you can also get the workout DVD
  • The 17 day diet is built to alleviate boredom since you constantly move your foods around
  • The ebook has lots of recipes and carefully laid out meal plans that are easy to understand
  • The exercise program is short and sweet, but highly effective
  • And carb and calorie cycling is relatively effective in weight loss.

Cons & The 17 Day Diet Side Effects

  • This is a bad diet for diabetics
  • If you are already physically active, the restrictive calories will prove problematic
  • If your eating schedule is already all over the map, this will just make that problem worse!
  • The 17 day diet doesn’t go into psychological reasons for overeating such as stress, depression and emotional binging.
  • You can only buy it online so you’ll need a credit card

Ingredients in the 17 Day Diet

The 17 day diet is just an e-book and an addition of an exercise DVD. Any ingredients will be purchased yourself and this book tends to focus on veggies, fruits, lean meats, eggs, low fat dairy and some grains.

Some foods recommended are 17 day diet foods (surprise, surprise), but you don’t have to eat them if you don’t want to; they can be replaced.

Administration, Diet and Exercise

By following the phase meal plans in the 17 day e-book, you are supposed to burn a lot of weight in the first 17 days, level off in the second and then spend the last two phases slowly integrating more calorie rich foods and learning a healthier lifestyle. You are supposed to follow the meal plans as closely as possible, though there is still plenty of flexibility to be had.

The seventeen day diet also encourages exercise, again 17! For an extra $15.00, you can purchase an exercise DVD which takes you through a daily 17 minute workout to accelerate your weight loss. Just like any diet plan, it’s always a good idea to exercise as well as cut calories and eat better because your muscles won’t grow without exercise and you can’t burn as much fat without muscle.

Conclusion

So is the 17 day diet right for you? Certainly talkshow hosts like Dr. Phil think so and Dr. Mike Moreno definitely has his supporters. Others though say that there is absolutely no scientific basis on the idea of calorie and carbohydrate cycling and thus no evidence that it will actually work.

The 17 day diet does stand out in its easy to follow meal plans and encouragement of exercise, but then, anyone who really wants to lose weight will tend to exercise more and eat better!
At $25-$40 though, it may well be worth trying out and you could learn something about eating better in the process!

So, if you want to lose weight or maintain your current weight, give the 17 day diet book a shot and see what it can do for you. There are certainly far worse diet plans out there to lose money on and you never know-the 17 day diet could be just what you need to kick-start your weight loss goals.

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