The Zone, by Berry Sears
4/26/07
The Zone is, nutritionally, when your body is at its peak performance. From an athletic stand point, it is where you have the best access to fat stores as a source of energy. The way to get there is simple in concept. Instead of eating a high carbohydrate or high protein diet, eat a balanced diet (with respect to macronutrients) following a 40%-30%-30%, carbohydrate to protein to fat ratio. It is shown throughout the book that this is how the body was designed to eat. Several studies that showed how eating in the Zone boosted college athletes (Stanford Swimmers) to the Olympic class by simply balancing their diets are proof enough for me to buy The Zone.
The challenge of entering the zone is learning how much macronutrient is in different types of food. The following is the program:
Firs, Calculate Lean Body Weight, which is weight minus weight of fat (body weight times % body fat). Percent body fat can be determined by tape, skin fold, or emersion. Lean body weight is the multiplied by a “fitness factor” that ranges from 0.5 to 1, with 0.5 representing limited exercise to 1 being two a days with weight training, etc.
This number should be the grams of protein you eat daily. To simplify things this is broken into blocks, 1 block is 7 grams of protein. Now, say that divides out to 20 blocks for you a day. You should eat 20 blocks of each protein, carbohydrate, and fat (carbs multiply out to 9 grams a block and fat at 1.5 grams a block). To convert all this to real food, you can use a table at the following link.
http://web.rollins.edu/~gvaliante/zoneblocks.htm
Spread those blocks out across the day and you’re in the Zone. I asked my doctor about it, and his response was, “Why would you not eat like this, the body needs it all, and it needs it balanced.”
