Review of the Dukan Diet

While the typical American style diet may be attractive and tasty to eat, it won't win too any awards for being among the healthiest in the world. In fact, you only need to take a walk down any busy street to have it figured out that as a nation, we are gradually eating ourselves larger and larger, forcing our bloated bodies to fit into ever expanding clothes sizes!

Dukan Diet reviewsHowever, when we take a look across the Atlantic Ocean to Europe and in particular those countries that border the Mediterranean Sea such as France, Spain, Italy, Greece etc, we can't help but notice that the bodies we see walking around the streets there are much slimmer. How can this be, when they get just as much exposure and access to our fast food style restaurants including our own big name burger joints as the American public do?

It has to do with what they're eating most of the time compared with what we're eating most of the time.

French Cuisine

We know that French cuisine is highly regarded as some of the best food in the world. But a lot of it is laced with high calorie ingredients like cream, sugar, bread etc and their pastries are adorable but hugely high fat. So how do they stay slim while we're busting out of our clothes?

Part of the answer has to come from the way their food is cooked and what they eat most of the time, as already mentioned. They don't eat those high calories foods all the time, only as treats. We, on the other hand, load up on high calorie stuff every single day.

Dr Dukan

Dr Pierre DukanFrench nutrition expert Dr Pierre Dukan took the best from his country's regular menu and formulated his now famous weight loss program, the Dukan Diet.

Let's take a look at the Dukan Diet, which is rapidly growing in popularity among the no-carbs dieting set in an effort to reverse the growing trend of obesity and ill health.

He realized that the area where the Atkins Diet scored highly was in using high protein foods in order to force the body to burn fat for energy. Unfortunately, that program fell down because it restricted the menu, excluding essentially healthy ingredients the body needs such as fiber, vegetables and fruit.

To improve on that formula, he put together a far better version that had all the many benefits of eating a high protein, low carbohydrate diet but that added the health and nutritional value of selected vegetables to make sure the body was not deprived of those important ingredients.

The Success of The Dukan Diet

Dukan's innovative diet became a runaway success in France with over 1.5 million dieters using his methods to lose weight. Not that the nation was in dire need of such diets, but there were still a fair number of people who needed to lose a few pounds or more. The program spread to other European countries and was equally successful, especially in the UK, which has a similar weight problem to the US.

Now it's here and as explosively popular as it was in Europe. How does it work? Well, it's broken down into four main phases with some powerful weight busting strategies to each.

Dukan Diet Phases

Dukan Diet Phase 1You get to lose weight fast in the first phase, where for around two weeks you are restricted to eating high protein foods only. This is similar to Atkins where you can eat as much of the foods you like such as juicy steaks, chicken breast and dairy, just no bread or wheat products, fruit or vegetables. This forces your body to burn fat for energy and causes it to use up its stored supply of fat pretty fast. This results in a fairly fast loss of weight, but not so fast as to be risky.

The next phase re-introduces some carbohydrates on a day on, day off basis. So one day you only eat proteins, then the next day you eat proteins plus vegetables to keep up your body's nutrient needs.

The third phase lasts longer and this is where you learn to eat healthily, in the right quantities of healthy foods, both proteins and carbs as well as fats and fiber. The method back of this is to get you into the habit of eating healthful food in smaller portions and to keep an eye on your calorie intake. It sets you up for your return to a regular diet.

Phase four is that continuation into eating a regular diet, but not one where you go back to your old, weight-gaining ways. You continue to eat healthfully because you have become so used to it, it's like you always ate this way and enjoy it.

Does it Work?

Oh boy, does it! As long as you stick to the strategy and don't fall off that particular wagon, you'll become so habitually used to eating right that the very idea of going back and eating all that unhealthy junk you were eating before will feel so wrong to you.

That's the way it should be! You get to stay at your idea weight for the rest of your life as long as you keep up with the sensible way of eating. Its actually pretty easy to do once you have educated your body to get used to eating right. For more information on dieting for better health, please take a look at this article: Fad Diets and Diabetes: Sifting Through the Myths for Better Health and learn all you can about it. In the end, the Dukan Diet could just turn out to be the right one for you!