How the volumetric diet works and why it makes you lose weight

It’s about filling your plate with foods that are healthy, low in calories, and nutritionally rich. You can lose up to a kilo per week

Many people make the mistake of thinking that they will lose weight by eating less. And they are in error: it is not so much the how much but the what. Eating a lot of food will cause you to lose weight without starving at all. It’s about filling your plate with foods that are healthy, low in calories, and nutritionally rich. This is the premise of the volumetric diet, created by Barbara Rolls, Professor of Nutritional Sciences and obesity researcher at Penn State University. The main focus of this diet is to fill the plate with foods that are naturally low in calories and high in fiber or water, such as fruits, vegetables, and soups. Since carbohydrates and protein provide four calories per gram and fat provides nine calories per gram, you can eat more carbohydrates and protein without over-calorie.
In addition to being healthy, this regimen will help you lose weight, as you can lose up to one kilo per week without even realizing it. Next, we collect the bases of the volumetric diet.

The volumetric diet menu
If diets with strict rules and restrictions drive you crazy, this is your regimen. You don’t have to count calories, measure foods, or record diet points. “

In the volumetric diet, the food is divided into four groups. The goal is to eat primarily foods from groups one and two, consider portion sizes for foods from three, and minimize food choices from group four.
– Group 1: Non-starchy fruits and vegetables, skim milk, and broth-based soup.
– Group 2: starchy fruits and vegetables, breakfast cereals, low-fat meat, legumes, low-fat mixed dishes such as chili and spaghetti.
– Group 3: meat, cheese, pizza, French fries, salad dressing, bread, ice cream, and cake.
– Group 4: crackers, chips, chocolate candies, cookies, nuts, butter, and oil.

This is what you could eat a normal day on this diet:
– Breakfast: vegetable omelets with whole wheat toast.
– Lunch: low-fat Greek yogurt with fruit.
– Food: lean chili meat with beans and vegetables.
– Snack: popcorn without butter, with a glass of milk.
– Dinner: fish, steamed vegetables, quinoa.

Does it help you lose weight?
What you are surely wondering now is … “Will it help me lose weight?” Well, my friend, in theory yes. At least that is what various scientific studies claim, which found a link between low calorie density foods with weight loss. “One of the main reasons people break their diet is because they are hungry,” says Julie Upton, nutritionist and co-founder of ‘Appetite for Health’. As a large volume of food is consumed on this diet, you will avoid the hunger that diets usually give.

Another 2007 study, published in the ‘American Journal of Clinical Nutrition’, also proved that this regimen helped with weight loss. The researchers randomly assigned 97 obese women two types of diets: some, a low-fat one, and others, a low-calorie but rich in fruits and vegetables. After a year, both groups lost weight, but the fruit and vegetable eaters lost even more: 6 kilos compared to 4.5 in the other group. Researchers viewed low-calorie diets as an efficient way to lose weight. Also, a 2005 investigation, published in ‘Obesity Research’, showed that a diet high in foods and low calorie soups (one of the pillars of this regimen) leads to substantial weight loss.