When our healthy eating and exercise routine is in a rut, some of us are often looking for a restart. There's actually a diet that hopes to do just that. Meet the body reset diet.
What Is the Body Reset Diet?
The theory of the body reset diet is that you'll be able to reset your metabolism and kick it into high gear. It was created by celebrity personal trainer Harley Pasternak.
How Does the Body Reset Diet Work?
"The diet is accomplished by consuming a plant-based, low-calorie diet made up mostly of smoothies for 15 days," says Caleb Backe, health and wellness expert for Maple Holistics [2]. The difference between this diet and others is that after the diet, you're supposed to continue losing weight. A common drawback of a diet is that after an extended period of dieting, you return to your old habits and gain all the weight back.
What Will You Eat?
Like many other diets, body reset works via a series of phases, of which there are three in this diet. Phase one is five days. "This is essentially the smoothie-drinking phase," says Ryan Raman, a registered dietitian. Here, you're only allowed to drink smoothies for your meals. "These smoothies are color coordinated by meal," explains Raman. For example: breakfast smoothies are white smoothies. "These are typically banana-based smoothies (hence white) that are protein based and contain milk or Greek yogurt," says Raman.
Lunch smoothies (red smoothies) are berry based and contain a variety of fruits, and dinner smoothies are green (vegetables!). "These are spinach based and contain many vegetables, meant to keep you full before bed," says Raman. You're also allowed to consume two snacks that have between 100 to 180 calories. These snacks are "crunchy" for example — an apple or 1/4 cup of edamame beans.
Phase two is five days as well. "This phase involves replacing one of the smoothie meals with a solid healthy meal like a stir-fry or a salad," says Raman. Phase three, the final stage, is also five days. This stage involves swapping two of the three meals for a healthy meal, as a way of easing back into a moderate lifestyle. "The diet advocates regular exercise (three times a week) to maintain results, which passes the smell test of too good to be true," says Backe. As far as losing weight is concerned, the math of calorie intake and output checks out. "The only concern is that with a liquid, or in this case mostly liquid, diet, hunger becomes a huge factor. The argument is, that since it's mostly high fiber and nutrition, satisfaction isn't as big of a concern," says Backe.
Exercise on the Body Reset Diet
The body reset diet recommends strength training, which requires exactly that — strength! If you hit the gym low on fuel (food), you can really be putting yourself in danger. "I recommend always listening to your body and scaling back your workouts or the intensity of them when starting a new diet until you have a handle on how your body is reacting," says Jeana Anderson Cohen, founder of SweatWorking [4] fitness app and trainer.
Does It Work?
In the long scheme, this is another diet where we're starkly limiting our diet in hopes of quick weight loss. Can it work for long-term, weight-loss success? "The legitimacy of the diet is still up for debate since it hasn't be looked at by way of medical study sufficiently, but all indications say that it should work," says Backe.