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Diets

The 2-Day a Week Diet Can Help You Lose Stubborn Weight

If you want to lose weight but don’t want to worry about counting calories, you might consider the 2-Day Diet as a possible option. An alternative eating plan that takes away the stress and inconvenience of dieting every day, the 2-Day Diet can help you lose weight and feel great — if you do it right, that is.

What is the 2-Day Diet?

In a world full of complicated diets with ultra-specific restrictions, the 2-Day Diet is surprisingly easy to understand and follow. It involves two basic rules: You eat a low-carb and high-protein diet two days per week, and then you follow the classic Mediterranean diet — rich in fruits, vegetables, fish, and whole grains — for the other five days. With your doctor’s OK, you could potentially get major benefits from following this healthy eating plan.

Research has shown that a low-carb and high-protein diet can be beneficial for weight loss. Furthermore, there’s tons of evidence that a Mediterranean diet can help fend off serious health issues such as heart disease. Combining two clinically-backed eating plans certainly sounds like a good idea, but this begs the question: Why those two diets specifically? 

According to The 2-Day Diet (Amazon, $15) co-author Michelle Harvie, PhD, this eating plan is designed to be naturally low enough in calories to help you lose weight without making you feel hungry — and also easy enough to fit into a busy lifestyle. Furthermore, she claims the two days of dieting can actually retrain your eating habits on the days you aren’t dieting so that the weight not only comes off, but also stays off. (No binge-eating here!) While the 2-Day Diet can be thought of as an intermittent diet, don’t mistake it for intermittent fasting, which involves going several hours per day without food.

“You don’t have to fast,” Dr. Harvie writes on The 2-Day Diet website. “In fact, the diet’s designed to help you stay full —  it’s easier to stick with it because you don’t feel hungry. It’s nutritionally balanced and there’s no calorie counting, so it’s easy to do, and there’s loads of choice, so you won’t get bored.”

How to Do the 2-Day Diet Right

Harvie and fellow co-author Tony Howell, BSc, recommend that you follow the two days of dieting in a row, as they report many 2-Day dieters find it easier to get in the habit of doing the more restrictive eating consecutively. But if you’re concerned about the 2-Day Diet fitting in with your packed schedule, keep in mind that the book has a variety of different meal plans that you can adapt to fit your specific lifestyle — including your big upcoming events and important occasions.

If you’re so busy that you don’t have the time to read every last detail about the 2-Day Diet, you might consider purchasing the condensed version, The 2-Day Diet: The Quick & Easy Edition ($16.87, Amazon), instead. That way, you can cut to the chase about the most crucial aspects of the plan without trying to figure out which of its features are the most relevant to you. 

Then, you just need to find some tasty 2-Day Diet recipes. The easiest way to do this is by checking out The 2-Day Diet Cookbook ($9, Amazon), which includes 65 delicious recipes for every day of the week. For example, for the first two days, you might eat meals such as blackberry frozen yogurt for breakfast and Thai beef salad for dinner. On the other five days of the week, heart-healthy salmon and veggies and snacks of nuts and fruits might be right up your alley. From breakfast to dinner, you can find loads of ideas for your dieting days and your non-dieting days. Who knows? Maybe you’ll even get inspired to create a 2-Day Diet recipe all your own!

Next, learn about the tastiest superfoods that can help you live longer in the video below:

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