Vitaliy

Many reviews on diet plans often have people saying that “You’re only losing water weight” and that often “implies” that it’s a bad thing but what does it really mean?

Well there is a substance in the body called “glycogen”. What this does is it holds carbs and when a person begins dieting, these are released and within them, there is also liquid there which means when glycogen is released, the liquid is too and that usually carries a lot of weight with it when you add up all the glycogen that gets used up, that can carry a lot of pounds of…water.

In my weight loss experiences, this can also be when you just start drinking more and this leads to you using the bathroom more often. So if you drink a gallon a day which weights over 8 pounds, you can essentially be gaining that much and losing that much everyday which would lead someone to believe that you’re not actually losing any weight, but I have a good argument for why you are and it’s not just a matter of how much you drink and excretion.

Specifically, liquid weight arguments come when people do these things:

• They diet in a less or restrictive way by cutting calories and eating “healthy”. Again, we know that this releases the glycogen.

• They do cleanses which often encourage eating very little food or often times nothing as a way to detox the body. Having done cleanses which are more difficult, I have lost more than 10 pounds in a matter of a few days and then gained it all back over about a month but that wasn’t because of water weight, it was because I just went back to eating poorly.

• They exercise which also releases the same glycogen. But ask people who are skeptics of water weight loss if exercise is good and 100% of them will probably say yes. But if the same glycogen is released, then why is eating less calories bad (sometimes) and exercise isn’t?

Here is a weight loss experiment I have started:

I have recently begun drinking at least a gallon everyday. Now drinking a lot and losing water weight is really not the same thing because we’re talking about consuming liquid vs liquid that is stored in the body and yes they are linked in that drinking more leads to more storage accumulating in glycogen.

Here are 5 reasons drinking more is good for weight loss:

• If you consume a lot of salt, it can lead to hypertension and other conditions which hurt the health of your body. While eating a lot of salt does lead to more drinking due to retention, because salt can hurt your health, it is important to get rid of it and you can do that by just drinking more water. I personally love salt and the older I get, the worse it’ll get if I don’t balance it out in my body so when I drink more, it flushes it out and by doing so, I am able to improve my body’s health. A healthier body leads to less problems.

• Drinking more improves metabolism. With a cleaner body, there is more improvement to the functions in your system, including metabolism.

• Water is clean and there are no ingredients to hurt your health. It is a filter for the body. A more filtered body is a healthier body!

• I once spoke with Steve Maxwell who recommended I do a liquid cleanse for 7 days because I once had lyme disease. Steve is one of the leading health fitness coaches in the world. If he recommends drinking more, then obviously it’s healthy. Now I do not advise that anyone who has never cleansed do this because it’s far too extreme. Just drink less of the other things with sugar and other ingredients and supplement it with clean liquid.

• No one discredits that drinking more water is good for you!

Now if you start drinking more, YES you will start losing the liquid that is in glycogen, but it won’t change the fact that you are still cleaning out your body from the inside and that is always going to be a good thing.

And I also want to talk about skin health here too: I find that my skin sometimes has acne, blackhats and sometimes I feel a lot more tired than I should. I have linked this to my love of salt and believe it’s because I consume so much of that it puts too much extra pressure on my body.

This is why I decided to drink more and even though I am only on day 2 of drinking a gallon everyday, I have found that I feel much more fresh and there has already been an improvement in my acne in that the ones which were red have become more pinkish.

I am also starting to see less breakouts and more energy. Anytime something like fatigue, breakouts, weight gain happens, it means not only am I not eating right, but I am also not cleaning my body out correctly.

So rather than doing another cleanse (which works), I have found that water is the best way to cleanse the body.

If you are still eating the same way you were before which led to you having weight problems, then drinking more liquid will provide a slight improvement in the weight loss area, but it will provide a great improvement in other areas of health because it will help cleanse the body of excess toxins and ingredients the bad dieting led to and with less of that, you are already going to have some kind of improvement.

If you cut calories and drink more however, you will lose a lot more weight in the process. At the very least, adding more liquid to your diet is not going to add to the problem so it’s worth adding.

So forget glycogen of the “myth” that goes along with water weight. It is still a healthy thing to consume and anything healthy is always a benefit, including weight loss.

Currently, I am weighing in somewhere between 173-176 pounds daily. I will be doing my gallon experiment for a month and will update you all.

Around 3 months ago, I met with my mother who introduced me to Iaso Tea. She found out about it through her dentist who was selling her a pack of it for 1 month. Her main interest in it was losing weight and seeing if it’s other claims were true. She ended up trying it for 2 1/2 months and still drinks it.

This will be a review of Iaso tea, how much pounds she lost and if the other health benefits claimed by this product were true or not. If there is any question you have about this drink, it will be found here.

What is Iaso Tea?

It is a mixture of different herbal products in a bag. Each of those ingredients is supposed to be very health to drink. 

• You can get 8 bags of this in 1 pack. 
• 1 pack is enough to last for 1 month and each bag is meant to be mixed with hot water to create the beverage and then mixed with cold water to be used for drinking.
• Each bag can make 3 liters so in total you get 24 liters when this product is ready to use, for 1 month.
• My mother drank 2-3 cups a day, during breakfast, lunch and usually before dinner. I’ll explain how much pounds she lost below.

What are the ingredients in Iaso tea and what are their health benefits?

There’s 9 ingredients inside this product. You can see a long description of their health benefits and uses from the official pdf but the general benefits are:

• This product works like a cleanse and detox. 

• It provides your body with more energy. 

• There are anti aging benefits and you may have clearer skin.

• There is finally the weight loss benefit. The product my mother got said she would be able to lose about 5 pounds in about 5 days. 

Basically by drinking this, you are supposed to get healthier. 

What does it taste like? 

It almost tastes like a lighter version of green tea. The more you mix it with water, the lighter it’ll taste. 

So what were my mother’s results with this product. Did she lose any pounds?

Here is what my mother experienced while drinking this product compared to the claims:

• She did feel like she was detoxing because she ran to the bathroom a lot more often. This product does have an ingredient that works like a laxative. 

• Energy-wise, she did feel more of it, especially after drinking it during breakfast.

• For anti aging, she did claim to feel and see smoother skin (she’s over 50). Some of the herbs inside the bag are supposed to help circulate and freshen the blood. 

But did she lose any pounds!? 

Unfortunately no. This is the one major area that didn’t meet the demand for her.

From the moment she told me about this product to her consistently drinking it everyday for over 2 months, I did not notice any difference in the way she looked. She also confirmed that nothing changed and the scale said the same thing.

Usually detox products like this one are supposed to help you drop several pounds. If there’s better digestion and better circulation, there’s supposed to be better metabolism, and that in theory is supposed to make you lose weight, but it did not happen here.

I also went to see if other people experienced the same thing. On Amazon, a lot of people who tried the Iaso beverage also confirmed the benefits my mother had, but also said that there was very little and even no weight loss after trying it.

From doing detox diets and trying different products like the Almighty Cleanse, Mag07 and even a regular cleanse, you can never get maximum results or even minor ones from just taking the product and eating normally.

Maybe there was an ingredient missing in Iaso Tea. Oh I know…actual dieting!

You always have to diet in some way, otherwise the product isn’t going to help. Everyone wants to eat the way they love and expect that some magic pill or drink is going to make the extra pounds go away, it won’t!

I have said with other products that are supposed to be used with a diet like Garcinia Cambogia Extract that it makes no sense to try the product when a regular diet alone is enough.

• If you diet with the product, you’ll lose weight.
• If you diet without it, you’ll still lose some pounds. 
• If you just try the product without dieting, you probably may not lose a lot of weight.

 

Final Score: Iaso Tea.

3 stars out of 5. For general health, this beverage is good as well as being a substitute for regular tea. But it’s not a weight loss solution. 

Conclusions on Iaso Tea:

There are definitely some healthy herbs within each bag and if you drink them long term, you may probably feel better and look better. For my mother, most of the benefits this beverage claimed to have were true, except the pounds she was supposed to lose.

This product costs $45 for a 1 month supply. If you want to try it but can’t afford it, there’s general, money saving substitutes you can use to try and get it’s results:

For general cleansing, without having to worry about dieting, drink less stuff with sugar and try to drink more water. Water is the best ingredient for cleansing the body.

You can also buy the ingredients inside Iaso tea separately and just make your own beverage from them. I for example, love to make a ginger beverage.

While there are definitely people who probably do lose weight drinking Iaso tea, there’s also people who don’t, including my mother. If you want to lose weight and don’t want to risk $45 trying this tea, you should just try a diet, but one that works very well.

I don’t like any normal diets (too many yo-yo possibilities) and always recommend one that is really fast, minimally difficult and drops a lot of pounds. In this case, I have an actual alternative that is also a tea, but one that works incredibly well:

 

The Iaso beverage itself is not a bad product to try, but I don’t think it’s suitable for weight loss. For better skin, more energy, yes.

I’ll admit, originally I though the Whole30 wasn’t just a diet, but something that had to do with eating or not eating grains, yet after reading the book, it turned out this plan was something completely different and really more, it was a plan to help people get healthier.

Well if it’s not a diet, then I don’t need it…right?

If this is how you feel when you hear that the Whole30 isn’t a diet, you should read the whole review because if you do follow this plan, you will lose weight, however, there is not a single thing in the book that encourages or talks about doing things such as weighing yourself or counting calories. They even made rules against that.

So how can you then lose weight? Well that’s where we have to learn how this thing works…

How does Whole30 really work?

The concept is this: Basically, if you’re eating healthy, you don’t have to worry so much about what the scale says or how many calories a food has, all of these things will regulate themselves and your body will react to it by working better and naturally losing the weight and that’s basically how the Whole30 works. 

But there’s 2 parts to the Whole30 which make it work:

1. You eat healthy from a list of approved foods they have. 
2. You eliminate 5 groups of foods from your diet for 30 days.

Now while I was reading this book, I couldn’t help but feel I heard this concept of elimination of foods somewhere and I did eventually remember, it was from the Virgin Diet which had a more condensed approach to this. In fact, based on what I remember, out of the 7 foods the Virgin Diet tells you to eliminate from your diet,  of them are actually mentioned in the Whole30 as well, with the one food that isn’t being eggs. 

But anyway the 2 parts of the diet I explained work together for 30 days. You eat healthy, but don’t eat certain things that aren’t healthy (5 food groups). 

The 5 food group restrictions:

Not all of them are actually foods, but the book provides a lot of evidence on why you should not eat those things and frankly, I agree with a lot those things.

• No alcohol. 
• No dairy (most of it is not allowed).
• No legumes. 
• No artificial sweeteners and even sugar.
• No whole grains. 

Any foods or drinks that fall into those 5 are not allowed to be eaten or drank during the 30 days you are on the plan. Your goal is to eliminate those foods for those 30 days and then start to eat/drink them again, one by one to find out IF they affect your health in a bad way.

Why these groups are actually restricted… 

A lot of health problems people face today can be traced to their eating habits and many of those BAD eating habits can be traced to those 5 food groups.

Drink too much alcohol? Well you’re going to have hangovers, do foolish things, kill brain cells and not really help your health.

Eat/drink too much dairy? You may have constipation, bloating and other problems arise, especially if they aren’t organic.

Eat too many legumes? Well this is the one where I wasn’t in agreement with because I know in certain proportions, they can be beneficial, but they do say it causes gas and bloating which is true if you eat too much of them.

Eat too much sugar? I have no problem eliminating 4 of these groups from my diet, but sugar is easily the hardest! I was recently sick and was on antibiotics and was drinking A LOT of tea, but instead of sugar, was using raw honey, but a lot of it. I ended up breaking out in more zits around the body. Too much sugar even if it is from an organic source is bad for the body.

Eat too many whole grains? They also point to this being a problem, especially if it isn’t organic. You’re talking a lot of starches, carbs and other ingredients that are NOT good for the body in high amounts.

Basically what Whole30 has done has taken any foods which cause inflammation, diarrhea, bloating and any negative reactions from the body and put it into those 5 groups.

Eliminating those 5 groups eliminates you getting those problems again which is why there is a tremendous list of health benefits of being on this type of plan.

Isn’t Whole30 just a paleo style of eating?

If you read the food/shopping list of this plan, you’ll notice a lot of foods fit into the same category as those you would eat if you were doing a paleo diet. This plan even admits it’s very similar to it, but there are a number of foods and recipes they have which aren’t that way, plus legumes are technically included in a paleo diet but they aren’t allowed in the Whole30 plan.

The specific rules of doing Whole 30:

The interesting thing about a plan like this one is that there really aren’t any rules other than eating 3 meals or so a day from their approved list of foods and just NOT eating from those 5 food groups.

That’s really it. They DO have a sample 7 day meal plan available.

But all you’re doing is examining how your body reacts when it isn’t given those “bad” foods/drinks. When you don’t have them for a month and then start eating/drinking them again, you will know if they help you or not by how you feel.

The brilliant deduction strategy of reintroducing foods:

If by introducing a food from one or more of those food groups made you feel bad, then you need to eliminate it completely from your life and if it doesn’t make you feel bad, then you can keep eating/drinking it.

This plan does have a stage known as the reintroduction stage where AFTER the 30 days of eating the way they asked you to, you eat a food/s from one of the groups for 1-4 days, then go back to the Whole30 plan for 2 to see how the body reacts, then the next 1-4 days, eat from another bad food group and go back to the same diet for another 2 and all the way until you go through all 5 groups, separately. This is how you examine what’s good and what isn’t. 

Many areas of this book don’t talk about the plan, they talk about other stuff:

So from the Kindle version of the book, it looked like about 20% of the book was about the plan itself, while the other 80% was about preparing for every possible situation you can run into when doing this plan. They really cover everything….

Then there is also a HUGE chunk of this book which is devoted to recipes and they explain everything about preparing it to when to eat it, to even when to eat before/after workouts. There is an incredible level of detail to this.

Whole30 Diet Score:

3 out of 5 stars. Great health plan with very detailed options. While weight loss can come from this plan and it probably will if you’re unhealthy/overweight.

Conclusions:

Look at Whole30 as a health plan, not a diet. If your goal is health improvement with weight loss being secondary, Whole30 is a wonderful plan, though not a simple one.

It isn’t just 30 days either, the 30 days are just the period without the certain foods, then there’s 10 days of reintroducing the bad ones, but that’s a speedier version. There is also a more long term approach where you decide how long you will need to be reintroducing the foods. I recommend the 10 day one because there is structure. 

 

But Whole30 isn’t just 30 days long, it’s a lot more if you really want to get it’s greatest benefits. The first 30 days “cleanses you” of the bad things, then the next 10 and all the days-months and possibly a lifetime after that is all about continuing to stick to it so if you followed this plan, felt great, keep sticking to it. 

The Day Off Diet Plan was created by Dr.Oz and brought to the public in early 2016. Today you will learn what you need to know about it and how much weight it can help you lose and if this plan has any flaws.

How does the Day Off Diet Work?

6 days out of the week, you will be dieting according to the rules set up by this plan, while on the 7th, you will be “taking the day off”. The day you select to “cheat” can be any day out of the week and this plan’s rules suggest you pick days when you have special occasions such as birthdays, holidays, long weekends. ect… and anytime where you feel like you may slip on your diet routine.

Most of this diet is very paleo in that you only eat real foods that are produced by mother nature. Nothing artificial like cakes, cookies, pizzas or any juices, sodas, ect…

In some ways, the Day Off Diet is a very specific style of paleo because you will be eating from a limited food list and the foods themselves will be very low in calories. Some of them have high satiety.

The rules of this plan:

You will be required to drink hot water with lemon before breakfast. A tea cup is fine. If you have allergies or can’t eat/drink lemon juice, you can either squeeze less juice and add more water for dilution or just not add it at all. If you aren’t allergic, squeeze enough lemon so that the drink is mildly sour. Lemon water does help clear out your digestive system before you start eating and it does help the body digest foods better and absorb nutrients. 

For meals, you will be eating 4 times a day: Breakfast, snack time, lunch and dinner. The rule book didn’t mention when you should eat each meal. I would suggest you eat before work, snack about 1-2 hours before lunch time, then have lunch and finally dinner which I suggest you eat a few hours before bed so you are hungry when you go to sleep.

• For breakfast: You can either eat your breakfast or drink a shake. For eating: You are allowed 1 egg with a serving of fruit and greek yogurt. For shakes, it’s a combination of banana and other ingredients. You can get the entire plan on the official site of this diet. 
• For snacks, you are allowed to eat foods with healthy fatty acids such as avocado, nuts, walnuts and other foods with healthy fatty acids. 
• For lunch, you are allowed to eat foods such as fish, chicken, eggs and even tofu, anything with protein with additional foods such as sweet potatoes, quinoa and green beans. 
• Dinner is the same thing as lunch.

Since that is your last meal of the day, if you do need to eat more of the portions aren’t big enough, you are allowed to add and eat as many extra vegetables as you like, but only during each meal. The vegetables must not have starch. 

Pros:

• Only very healthy foods are required to be eaten 6 days a week.
• Since it is a low calorie diet, you can lose about 2-5 pounds a week although there are no average weight loss results provided. The 2-5 pounds are an estimate based on the small portions.
• The shopping list isn’t big and since you’re not eating a lot, the cost for the foods isn’t big either.

Cons:

• Very low calorie consumption may be good for people who have little weight to lose, but generally the portions allowed in this diet won’t be enough for a lot of people. Although you can eat more vegetables to make up for extra calories, it still isn’t easy.

• No specific long term plan provided. I doubt people will be able to continue this diet after several weeks. It’s just way too little in calorie intake. 

• With the food list provided, there aren’t that many choices in delicacy foods, the only place you get more diversity is in the snacks. 

The Day Off Diet Score:

3.5 out of 5 stars. For short term weight loss, this diet isn’t bad and it is very healthy to try. But this plan does NOT adjust to people of all ages and sizes. Some may need to eat more than the recommended food amounts to stay active and feel good.

How well will the Day Off Diet work for you?

There is no way this diet won’t work. It has to because you’re eating so much less and the foods themselves are too low in calories and healthy for it not to work. Most of this diet’s consumption is vegetables even though there are small portions of meats and eggs allowed and even some fruits (a little yogurt too).

But this diet is hard to stick to. Based on the food lists provided, each meal may carry less than 500 calories which means your daily consumption might be less than 1,500 calories. Eating more vegetables, which is allowed may make up for deficits in hunger, but it’s not going to be easy. 

This diet is going to be easier to do for people who need to lose 10 pounds or less. There will be people for whom eating around 1,500 or less calories a day may be too difficult. I recommend that you stop eating at night and just substitute bad foods for healthy ones until you reach a weight where you can manage the Day Off Diet. 

Need to lose 10 pounds or more faster?

Try the 3 week diet. In it’s first 7 days, you would be eating around the same way as you would with the Day Off Diet, but after day 7, it changes things up and these changes cause even more weight loss. After day 8, you can eat more flexibly. 

With the 3 week diet, there will be more food choices, there will be more weight loss (20+ pounds) and there is a long term plan available that any person can follow that you would not get with the Day Off Diet.

I had been a slave to my food cravings for many years until I started really disciplining myself. Like many, I had always tried to force myself to eat healthy, prepare my own meals, only to feel that hunger coming on and finding reasons to say yes to it and I did end up doing that a lot and felt incredibly guilty afterward.

Everyone who has food cravings knows that feeling when they are dieting right or preparing to eat healthy, only to find that 1 craving is so easy to cave into.

• What’s the harm of eating that extra burger?
• That ice cream looks so GOOD. 
• I’m too tired to prepare anything so I’ll give myself a break today.
• Today I’ll add another cheat day to my diet even though I only said it would be once a week.
• Well I’ve been dieting for a few days so I think I’ll reward myself with a bad meal. 

But we all know that all of those excuses always lead to you feeling well while you’re eating it, but SO unhappy after. And if you try to diet again, you’re going to bounce back into that excuse, ruin your diet again, blame yourself again, ect…

I never really had major weight issues. I just had a belly I was trying to get rid of and pushing 30, I knew it wouldn’t be easier to get rid of it. But the older I got, the more excuses I made and the more I kept breaking my own dieting rules.

So if I kept trying to do the same things that kept pushing me back like this, I had to change how I looked at dieting. So I started dieting differently and have followed very simple eating rules that have helped me lose weight, but also not completely give up the foods I loved to eat, but hated myself for eating after. I have lost about 10 pounds and kept the weight off. 

For me 10 pounds is major, but for people who need to lose more than that, the same dieting rules will also help, but help you lose even more weight. They do require discipline, but they are much easier to get results with than forcing yourself to stop eating anything bad cold turkey.

1: Go to bed hungry, always.

I started going to bed hungry about 2 months ago after hearing from my grandfather how much better it would affect my weight and after trying it, I lost 4 pounds in about 1-2 weeks. 

I was also trying to eat more healthy at the time, but I wasn’t giving up any pounds, but until I started going to bed hungry, I didn’t start losing weight. It was as though I broke a plateau.

2: Follow the rule of “2”. 

I made this dieting rule up, but it’s easy to use: Whatever you think you can eat when you’re hungry, divide it by 2. Then eat that much instead.

How many times have you felt hungry, made or bought food that you though you could eat, were not able to eat it all, and then felt bloated and horrible, but still had leftovers which you weren’t going to finish? I always had that! 

I had noticed that whenever I felt I could eat a lot, I always ate about half of that before I couldn’t eat anymore, so instead of eating what I though I could eat, I started eating half. 

If I though I could eat 2 big macs, I ate 1. If I think I can eat a whole pizza pie, I eat half a pie.

When I did that, I started saving money. But what about calories? Aren’t I still eating the same? Not always! When you eat half of what you think you can, if you ever feel like you could eat more, you won’t be able to because there won’t be anymore food.

But before you can go back out to order more food, your mind and stomach are going to feel satisfied so you’re either going to spend less on food OR you’re going to eat less and feel full before you can eat more so you’ll eat less calories.

You can also curb your food cravings by just eating something healthy that’s low in calories like walnuts or scrambled eggs (also in emergencies when you feel like you can’t sleep without eating something, then eat something very small like 1 walnut, no more). You may feel like you can eat a whole pizza pie, but eat that 1 scrambled egg or 2, give yourself about 15 minutes and then you’ll see you’ll feel better.

Your stomach and mind will always make you think you can eat more than you really can. If you let them control you, you’re never going to lose weight. If you understand how they trick you and don’t listen to them, you will lose weight!

 3: Transitional eating is the way to your ideal weight.

Compare how much of your diet is bad foods vs good, put it into a ratio. If you eat completely bad, that number will be 0/100 (0 good foods). Start off your first week eating 10% of good foods so now your ratio will become 10/90, then every weeks, make your good food ratio increase by 10%. 

You will want to be at 100/0 eventually, but it’s very hard to eat completely healthy. But when you transitionally eat, your body more easily becomes adjusted to your changes and it will crave it. It’s very hard to go from eating completely bad to completely good, unless you cleanse, or do some kind of fast diet, like the 3 week diet, but doing it transitionally is very healthy and as you eat more healthy, you will gain less weight and lose more.

Simple weight loss ideas to solve the weight loss problem:

When you eat less than you think you can, go to sleep hungry and discipline yourself to change how you eat from bad to good, you are going to lose weight, but you also will not feel so horrible from doing regular crash diets or always failing them. These diet tips are very comfortable to do!