The Mayo Clinic diet is a hypocaloric-based diet that, in addition to leading you to lose weight, has as its main objective the change of lifestyle habits and the acquisition of healthy habits, going from learning to eat to learning to take care of yourself. This official Mayo Clinic diet should not be confused with one that, using the same name, focuses only on very low-calorie menus. Find out what the authentic Mayo Clinic diet consists of.
The basics of the official Mayo Clinic diet
It was created by experts from the Mayo Clinic, a prestigious medical center with more than 150 years of history in the United States. And it was designed precisely to counteract diets not created by experts from the aforementioned center (but that use their name) and that, in addition, pose hypocaloric nutritional aspects with a high protein load and focus on menus, without going further.
In fact, although we know it as the Mayo Clinic diet, in its official version we are facing a weight loss method designed to reorganize the lifestyle that leads to obesity giving tools to generate healthy habits.
For all this, the Mayo Clinic diet proposes its own food pyramid around which its menus rotate. This pyramid, at its base, integrates daily exercise with fruits, vegetables and vegetables, unlike the classic food pyramid (see here), which in its basic step includes carbohydrates such as cereals. In fact, in the food pyramid of the Mayo Clinic diet, these carbohydrates, with a predominance of whole grains, occupy the second rung. From here, as you can see in the graph, proteins, fats and sweets come, without distinguishing, in the case of proteins, between white and red meats or dairy, and proposing their daily consumption of them.
Altogether, then, the Mayo Clinic diet proposes losing weight by increasing the volume of vegetables, which it does not limit, and proposes moderate ingestion of the rest of the groups based on the nutrients they provide, without eliminating any group. This implies, in the end, enriching the nutrients that are ingested by reducing calories (see here).
The phases of the official Mayo Clinic diet
With these bases, the Mayo Clinic diet proposes a plan in two phases:
Phase 1. Call by the clinic itself “Lose it”. Its duration is two weeks with a hypocaloric diet (see here what are the hypocaloric diets) based on menus centered on the pyramid raised above. But it also contemplates the redirection of habits, especially dietary ones, focused on weight loss. To do this, it equips the dieter to banish five unhealthy habits and replace them with five healthy habits. With the set of actions, in its first phase, the Mayo Clinic diet proposes the loss of between 2.7 and 4.5 kilos in two weeks according to the ideal weight or target weight that the person who makes the diet has set.
Phase 2. Call by the clinic itself “Vívelo”. Here there is still weight loss to reach the target weight, but at a maximum rate of 1 kg per week. And in turn, upon reaching the ideal weight, this is the phase that leads the dieter to acquire the tools to maintain it. How? Learning to eat. This phase involves learning to choose foods and portions, to plan menus and to integrate a minimum of half an hour of physical activity and other healthy habits such as not eating while watching television, etc. (see here).