Welcome back to The Diet Oracle! Now that I’ve finished up my week-long crack at The Mediterranean Diet Weight Loss Solution: The 28 Day Kick-Start Plan for Lasting Weight Loss by Julene Stassou, MS, RD, it’s time to take a closer look at what this diet brings to the table and–perhaps most importantly–see whether it delivered on its promises and claims.

Now that I’ve got a week’s worth of food logs, let’s crunch some numbers and see where the numbers landed. Across the seven days I followed Stassou’s meal plan, I averaged 1308 calories per day with 47% from carbohydrate, 32% from fat, 21% from protein (or 69 grams per day), and 22 grams from fiber. Based on all typical calculations, that calorie level should have definitely produced some weight loss given my particular height, weight, age, gender and activity level. More specifically, I should have created an average daily deficit of 500-700 calories per day, or 3500-4900 calories for the week. Assuming that 1 pound of body weight has roughly 3500 calories, I should have lost 1-1.5 pounds this week. So how did I fare?

After a week of following The Mediterranean Diet Weight Loss Solution, I lost precisely 1.5 pounds, or a little over 1% of my starting weight.

Though 1.5 pounds might not seem like a lot–especially if you watch any of those crash diet shows on the boob tube–let’s put this into perspective. Based on my personal results, if I were to follow this diet for the suggested 28 days (or 4 weeks) recommended by Stassou, I would lose about 6 pounds in a month. If I kept at it for three months, I’d be close to hitting 20 pounds. Twenty. Pounds. Given that significant health benefits can be reaped by losing just 5-10% of one’s body weight (assuming there’s extra weight to lose), even a person weighing in at 400 pounds would benefit from a 20 pound weight loss!

Though this diet plan certainly has both its pro’s and con’s, I would say one of its biggest advantages is the fact that I rarely felt hungry between meals. I think only twice over the course of the entire week did I feel some hunger pangs and even then, I simply added an extra snack as Stassou recommends. My friends, this is kind of a big deal, since hunger is perhaps *the* number one reason dieters give up and call it quits. To create a meal plan that chalks up a daily 500-700 calorie deficit without undue suffering is really an accomplishment. After all, if you’re not constantly dealing with a growling stomach, you will be that much more likely to stick with your plan and get the results you’re after.

So did The Mediterranean Diet Weight Loss Solution deliver on its claims and promises? I think so. If you are willing to truly commit to this 28-day kick-start plan and follow Stassou’s recommendations, you will likely lose weight. Does that mean this is the right diet for you? Maybe. Over the next series of posts, I’ll continue to share with you my thoughts and insights to help you answer that very question and decide whether a little dietary trip to the Mediterranean might just be your weight loss solution! Thanks for reading!

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Welcome back to The Diet Oracle! It has been quite the week! If you are new here, we have been taking an up-close-and-personal look at June’s Diet of the Month, The Complete Guide to Fasting: Heal Your Body Through Intermittent, Alternate-Day, and Extended Fasting by Jason Fung, MD and Jimmy Moore and I have just wrapped up my own week-long immersion into the world of intermittent fasting. (If you’d like more information about the fasting schedule I followed, check out this post.) Today I’m excited to be sharing with you nutrition highlights for the week and my personal intermittent fasting weight loss results!

I definitely learned a lot, both about fasting as well as myself, and am looking forward to sharing with you the good, the bad, and the hungry. In upcoming posts, I’ll be serving up my best tips for success, from grocery shopping and meal prep to dealing with hunger and the foods/beverages I could NOT do without. Hopefully, my experience will shed a light on what intermittent fasting is really like and give you the tools you need for success, should you decide intermittent fasting might be a good fit for you.

But! Before we get to all of that, I want to do a little math and see how my week of intermittent fasting looks on paper. Plus, let’s chat about my results on the scale! It’s time to crunch some numbers and see where we stand.

My Weight Loss Results!

For the week, my average caloric intake was approximately 1253 calories with about 55% from fat, 25% from carbohydrate, and 20% from protein. For reference, I would typically need about 1700-1900 calories to maintain my weight, given my gender, height, weight, age, and a light activity level. Knowing that 1 pound of body weight contains roughly 3500 calories worth of energy, this would mean that over the course of the last week (well, EIGHT days, if we’re being precise), I have been in the hole approximately 3570-5200 calories, an amount which should create a 1-1.5 pound weight loss.

In reality, I lost just shy of 3 pounds!

(Granted, one must assume that part of this weight loss is water weight. It will be interesting to see in a few days from now–once I have returned to a more normal eating pattern–to what extent the scale goes back up.)

My Fasting Macros

Looking at my macronutrient breakdown, you’ll quickly see that my numbers don’t exactly measure up to what is typically recommended to Americans. Because I wanted to adhere to Fung’s recommendations as closely as possible, not only did I follow one of the provided fasting schedules but I also endeavored to consume a diet high in natural fats with an emphasis on whole, unprocessed foods and very limited refined grains and sugars.

Fasting & Ketosis

Given this very low intake of carbohydrate, one could argue that not only was I fasting, but I was also following something close to a ketogenic diet. This is a diet in which carbohydrate intake is so low that the body is forced into ketosis, a series of metabolic changes that triggers the body to more heavily utilize its own fat stores. Each day, I ended up getting in an average of 76 grams of carbohydrate; ketosis typically occurs at levels just under 50 grams per day. Both low-carbohydrate and ketogenic diets have been shown to be very effective for weight loss.

So a very obvious question here is, does fasting offer any particular benefits that simple calorie cutting cannot provide? And, would fasting be as effective if the meals eaten were not so low in carbohydrate? We’ve got several confounding variables going on: fasting combined with a caloric deficit, high fat intake, and limited carbs. Does one of these factors deserve the greater share of credit for delivering results? Or do they all work together, the whole being greater than the sum of its parts?

Fasting Claims

In The Complete Guide to Fasting: Heal Your Body Through Intermittent, Alternate-Day, and Extended Fasting, Dr. Jason Fung would argue, of course, that the advantages of fasting cannot be minimized or brushed aside. He claims several benefits, including:

• Reduced circulating insulin levels and increased insulin sensitivity
• Improved health and well-being
• Enhanced workouts and anti-aging benefits
• Successful weight loss without hunger or complicated diet plans to follow
• Flexible options that can work for anyone
• and more.

Find the right plan for you!

Every diet claims to have the key to fast and lasting weight loss. The truth is, a diet that’s incredibly effective for one person might be a no-go for somebody else. In my experience, the trick to weight loss success is finding the plan that’s just right for you. That might take some trial-and-error, but figuring out your best strategy is worth it. Is intermittent fasting your answer? My upcoming posts can help you decide!

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