Review of 'The 3-Hour Diet'
Calling on an advisory board that includes nutritionists, a chef and a physician specializing in integrative medicine, Jorge Cruise has developed a sensible way to shed weight without feeling deprived. If you follow his 3-Hour Diet, he promises that you’ll lose up to two pounds a week, a slow steady weight loss that will burn fat, not muscle.
Cruise’s plan is remarkably simple. No foods are off-limits and exercise is not required. His #1 rule is that you eat every three hours, starting within one hour of waking and ending three hours before bedtime.
The key to the 3-Hour Diet is to know how much to eat, not just when. Although Cruise allows M&M’s and Oreo cookies on his plan, he limits these to small serving sizes. You can have them as snacks twice a day (about 100 calories if you weigh less than 200 pounds) and a 50-calorie treat at the end of the day. His three-a-day meals total 400 calories each. You have the option of eating pre-made meals (a variety of fast-food and frozen-food options) or putting together your own meals using recipes he provides.
If you don’t eat every three hours, Cruise says, your body’s starvation protection mechanism kicks in, which leads to the retention of body fat and the burning of muscle (not a good thing). Although some nutrition experts question the validity of this claim, several clinical studies have found that eating four to six mini-meals a day can help you shed body fat by suppressing hunger and keeping your blood sugar levels stable.
Although Cruise doesn’t require exercise on his 3-Hour Diet, he certainly advocates for fitness and includes a chapter on 8-minute exercise options. These are a series of strength-training moves that don’t require weights, though more detailed plans can be found in his 8 Minutes in the Morning and 8 Minutes in the Morning for Extra-Easy Weight Loss.
How nutritiously you eat on the Three-Hour Diet is largely up to you. You can have a McDonald’s Egg McMuffin for breakfast or a bowl of high-fiber cereal with almonds and one-half of a grapefruit. You can have 20 pieces of candy corn for a snack or 2 cups of baby carrots. With all these options, you won’t feel deprived of your favorite foods. And with the plan’s simplicity, the rules are easy to learn. What’s more, you won’t need to make a huge adjustment to your lifestyle which counts for a lot when you’re stressed or in a time crunch. It also means you’ll be likely to follow the 3-Hour Diet over the long haul which you’ll need to do to keep the weight off permanently.
