On a Diet? How to Pair the Right Supplements With Each of the Latest Diet Trends

At some time or other, most of us have felt the need to lose a few pounds–whether it is a quick fix in time for a vacation, for health reasons or just because we want to get in shape.
There are diet fads that come and go and those that seem to remain popular. Diets fall into three broad categories: low calorie, low fat and low carbohydrate. Currently, variations on the low carb diet are the most popular. Keto, Atkins, Paleo, South Beach and Mediterranean diets are some of the most popular. Which one should you choose, and how can you make sure you stay healthy while trying to lose weight? Let’s look at some of the more popular diets and why you might consider them.

For any diet plan, what needs to change? Well, that is a good question! Depending on the type of diet, food choices and portion size become an essential part of a successful plan. Dieters today do not want to be constantly hungry, either. So, how do we fill you up and still help you lose weight? Many of the diets popular today offer meal replacement shakes. These are nutritious, filling and relatively low in calories. Who wouldn’t want to have a shake every day. Meal replacement shakes have fewer calories than a normal meal. As a result, total calorie intake is reduced for the day. This, combined with reasonable exercise, should result in weight loss. Some of the meal replacement plans offer shakes, soups and cereal or energy bars as meal alternatives. There are ready-to-drink versions or sachets of powder for you to mix with water, juice or milk. Most plans allow you to have one or two normal meals each day as long as you replace the other meals with a meal replacement shake. There are a few diet plans that rely on liquids only. Scientists have found that meal replacement plans are a practical method for weight loss. However, doctors only regard them as safe in the short term.

How does the plan work?

Meal replacements are scientifically formulated to provide your body with the protein that it needs. The most commonly used protein is soy.However, today several other kinds of protein are popular including whey, pea, and egg white. Most replacement shakes, apart from ready-to-drink versions, require that you mix them with milk, juice or water to make them nutritionally complete. Meal replacement shakes typically boast low carbohydrate and fat content, and they contain all the vitamins and minerals that you require. They aim to replace a balanced and healthy meal, but with far fewer calories.

Which plan should you choose?

A problem for consumers is selecting a suitable meal replacement product. Some shakes are high in sugar content. Clearly, they are unsuitable for a low-calorie diet. A quality product will have 12 grams or more of protein per serving and very low net carbs. Fat content is typically very low as well. It should have vitamins and minerals at or near the Daily Value. That is what you should look for. Carefully read the labels of replacement products to see that you are getting what you want. Remember, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration does not define the term “meal replacement.” In some countries, such as Canada and Australia, there are strict regulations regarding the labeling of meal replacement products. There is a requirement for manufacturers to meet minimum calorie, protein and vitamin levels.

How do you keep healthy on the plan?

Healthy digestion is important regardless of which diet plan you choose. Maintaining good digestion is key to losing weight and feeling good. A blend of enzymes is an excellent way to support your body through this process, especially if the blend you use is tailored specifically for people using a meal replacement plan.

The Ketogenic Diet

You may have heard this diet referred to as “keto” for short. It is a low-carbohydrate and high-fat diet. Many people think of it as a high-protein diet, but this is not the case. Your protein intake should be no higher than your body needs it to be. By this definition, it is an adequate-protein diet. Studies have shown that the ketogenic diet is a highly successful way to lose weight, especially in people who have a significant amount of weight to lose. The importance of healthy body weight cannot be emphasized enough, particularly when considering the impact excess weight can have on cardiovascular health, type 2 diabetes and quality of life.

How does it work?

The ketogenic diet requires you to eat very low amounts of carbohydrates by replacing the lost carbohydrates with fat. Your body normally burns carbohydrates for fuel. Since little or no carbohydrates might be left to burn, your body turns to fat for fuel instead. Your metabolism changes and your body enters a metabolic state called ketosis. Ketosis is a very efficient fat-burning state. Your body oxidizes fatty acids into the ketones, acetoacetic acid, beta-hydroxybutyric acid and acetone. These supply energy to organs and especially the brain. For Keto diets typically, the recommended ratio is 70% fat, 25% protein and 5% net carbohydrates. Loosely defined, net carbs mean all carbohydrates minus fiber.

What are the benefits?

This diet vastly reduces your blood sugar, so it, in turn, reduces your insulin levels. Your cholesterol levels change for the better and, of course, you lose weight.

Supporting your digestion

The keto diet is low in carbohydrates, which means that many so called high glycemic fruits and vegetables are on the list to avoid. That can mean reduced intake of fiber and a lower intake of healthy vegetables that many other healthy diets include. To keep your digestive system working and healthy, adding probiotics to your daily routine can help support digestion while you follow the ketogenic diet. An excellent choice would be a blend of enzymes and probiotics including Lactobacillus acidophilus, Lactobacillus plantarum, Bifidobacterium lactis/longum and SEBiotic™, our trademark name for the stable, spore-forming probiotic bacteria Bacillus coagulans. ClenzSEB PB would be an excellent choice. It supports healthy digestion, reduces bloating and increases nutrient absorption while helping restore and maintain healthy microflora balance in the intestines.

Atkins

This is another low-carbohydrate diet that is highly recommended for losing weight. Dr. Robert Atkins, a cardiologist, originally designed it in the 1970s. The Atkins diet involves no calorie counting, and you can eat as much protein and fat as you like. The only requirement is to limit carbohydrates.

What is the difference between Atkins and the ketogenic diet?

The Atkins diet has different stages, so what you eat changes over time as your weight loss progresses. There are four stages beginning with the induction phase, which is when your carbohydrate intake is severely limited. The diet allows you 20 grams of net carbs, which is the total carbohydrate intake minus fiber. The later stages allow you greater levels of carbohydrate intake. The ketogenic diet counts total carbohydrates. This means that, in general, your intake of carbohydrates is much lower. The level allowed also does not change over time.

Balancing your diet

With the Atkins diet, you do not have to limit your consumption of protein, as you do on the ketogenic diet. As a result, most people have a higher intake of protein compared to their normal daily diet or a ketogenic diet. It can be stressful for your body to digest high levels of protein. It is a good idea to support this process with enzymes designed specifically to help with the digestion of protein. A protein-digesting enzyme can help you to avoid any of the digestive discomforts that can occur on a high-protein diet.

Whole30

As the name implies, this is a diet that focuses on whole foods. This means that processed foods–alcohol and foods with sugars and artificial sweeteners–are off the menu for a month. Further, the Whole30 forbids other foods, such as dairy, soy grains and legumes. The theory behind Whole30 is that modern eating can cause health problems such as inflammation and food allergies. This diet aims to change your relationship with food and helps you to eliminate foods that might be responsible for certain health issues After 30 days, you gradually introduce processed foods back into your diet. With this diet you can eat all the fruits and vegetables you want. Cutting out dairy might leave you lacking in calcium and other minerals. You may want to add a good vitamin mineral supplement at this point. The great thing about this diet is that most individuals can manage to stick to something for 30 days, which makes Whole30 seem less like an impossibility than other diets.

How will it benefit me?

This diet is not so much about losing weight; rather it aims to redirect your focus away from foods that can damage your body toward foods that restore you to a healthy state. Losing weight is simply a side effect of following the diet. On the Whole30 diet, you might start to notice how many chemicals you have been consuming and how you really do not need these bad foods in your diet. You should feel healthier at the end of the month and be past the stage of sugar cravings and thoughts about junk food at that point.

Whole30 recommends probiotics

On the list of acceptable things to eat are a variety of fermented foods and drinks, such as sauerkraut and kombucha. The fermentation increases their digestibility. However, nothing containing dairy is allowed on this plan, so yogurt and kefir are not approved. This lack of dairy means you need to ensure that your calcium and vitamin D intake are sufficient. ProbioSEB Duo is the ideal shelf-stable probiotic to use on this plan because it supports the digestive system returning to a healthy state following the day-to-day onslaught of harmful foods. It helps your gut re-establish the healthy microflora needed for good digestion.

Paleo

You might have heard it called the caveman diet. The Paleolithic diet aims to turn back time and encourage us eat what our ancestors ate. Nowadays, obesity and cardiovascular disease are on the rise, and experts are blaming this phenomenon on our armchair lifestyles and our love of junk food rich in fat and sugar. A solution to this epidemic is to go back to how our hunter-gatherer ancestors lived and ate. Studies have found the paleo diet to be highly effective because the diet only allows you to eat foods that, in theory, you could hunt or gather. This means a healthy diet combined with exercise.

What can you eat?

There are different kinds of paleo diets ranging from the very strict to the more inclusive. Some advocates of this diet only eat foods that cavemen would have eaten eons ago. With the strict paleo diet you are limited to lean meat, fish and vegetables. You are also not allowed vegetables from the nightshade family, which includes tomatoes and potatoes. Sugar, cereal grains and legumes are also banned on the strict paleo diet. In normal paleo and primal paleo, you are allowed more food choices, including chocolate, rice and fermented dairy.

Is the paleo diet healthy?

The great thing about paleo is that you stop eating low-value foods that bring little goodness into your body. Your sugar and processed-food intake should reach virtually zero as a result. The emphasis on this plan is health, so you may eat a lot of fruit and vegetables to ensure you are getting enough fiber, vitamins and minerals. The fiber keeps you satiated, which in turn means that you should want to eat less. High-fiber intake leads to weight loss.

Meeting your body’s nutritional needs

To get the most out of your diet, proper digestion is essential. The assumption with any diet is that your body should be able to use all the nutrients that you provide. Sadly, this is not always the case and, even with a healthy diet, your body could use a little extra help.

Your digestive system breaks down the food you eat into individual nutrient blocks. The second stage is the absorption of these nutrients. However, some people poorly absorb nutrients due to an inability to sufficiently break down their food. This leads to nutrient deficiencies and problems such as gut dysbiosis, which is an imbalance in the level of good microbes in the gut. Supplementing your diet with an enzyme blend such as DigeSEB makes it much easier for your body to digest protein, fat and carbohydrates, maximizing the nutritional value of your food. Enzymes make digestion possible. Your body naturally makes enzymes, but often the production can be insufficient. Supplemental enzymes can complement the body’s natural enzyme production, improving digestion and increasing energy needed for the body to properly function. There are so many diets to choose from nowadays. Especially with an enzyme supplement to support your digestion, it should not be too much of a problem to find one that suits your lifestyle and food choices and gets you back to a healthy weight.

Prohydroxy P™ is an enzyme blend formulated by Specialty Enzymes & Probiotics to specifically complement meal replacement shake products. For protein powder products, Specialty Enzymes & Probiotics created Pepzyme AG™, a powerful enzyme blend with potent proteolytic enzyme activity to maximize protein digestion.