Weight Loss Guide

Guides and tips to help you lose weight healthily

Today is Wednesday, September 01st, 2010

The Lemonade Diet

By Weight Loss Consultant • Related • Filed Under

The lemonade diet or what is popularly sold as “The Master Cleanse” and millions of people have used this diet for a variety of reasons. The main reason for the diet is to serve as a “cleanse” to clean out your body but it is really a great way for you to healthily lose weight – up to a pound or two a day even.

The lemonade consists of real lemon juice, cayenne pepper, natural maple sugar (type B) and water. You can adjust the amount of certain ingredients to make it taste better – like adding more maple sugar to make it sweeter. Keep in mind that the more often you drink it and the more maple sugar you include, the less weight you will lose. You will want to make sure that you don’t become starved because you don’t consume enough though. For a lot of people, the first day should go alright but after that, until the 5th to 7th day, they will probably struggle a bit and have hunger pangs but usually by a week or ten days, it’s all easy to keep continuing the diet for up to over a month and some people even go for 40+ days.

This cleanse works great and you could do it a few times a year to keep your body clean of those unhealthy contents and continue to manage a healthy weight as well. When you are finishing the diet, you will have to start off eating light (soup, veggies, etc) and it takes about three full days to actually get off the diet and get back to eating normal foods so when you are having hunger pangs and wishing you could eat something, unlike most diets, this could keep you motivated to not having a slip because eating any food at all during the cleanse can ruin everything. During the cleanse, you could even do a salt water flush and drink laxative tea if you wish but it’s up to you to decide if you are just doing it for the weight loss or for the other health benefits as well – it is suggested that you do everything that is instructed by the book though.

The lemonade diet will clean your system of those toxins that you build up of over the years from eating unhealthily, especially from eating a lot of meat. Your cravings for stuff also stays in toxins (so this probably won’t work if you are a heavy drug user) but it could be an answer to an addiction that you have to a certain food or drink. There are a lot of people that are skeptical of the lemonade diet but it has continued to prove people to be an effective diet and for a long time now has been one of the leading methods of losing weight healthily with assistance.

With the cayenne pepper that gets mixed into the lemonade, there are different spice (hot) levels that you can choose through and the suggested one is around the medium area and is easy to drink still and won’t be that bad for anyone that is sensitive to spicy stuff.

This works great for those who are very much overweight or obese and need that little “head start” to get them motivated. You could go to the gym too but lifting heavy weights is not recommended as a lot of people find that they are running on less energy and you don’ t want to overdo any of your exercises because it could seriously be a problem. You will also have to know that while you are on the lemonade diet, you will probably be on the toilet a lot (but everyone is different) so it may be awkward at the workplace. If you do find that you are running low of energy from the diet, this may also be a problem if you are working a full time job or a similar lifestyle with a lot of movement in it.

With the whole master cleanse (lemonade diet), you really can lose weight from it though and those claims of 1-2lbs a day being lost are very much legit although it is usually just for the first two weeks that much of a weight loss occurs and it is because of what is getting removed. This is a healthy weight loss and is not just water retention like most diets are.

It may be a stressful concept that you have to go through your whole daily schedule without eating but food breaks down into liquid when you digest it so it’s all a mental thing really. Drinking a lot of water throughout the day can keep you from a lot of hunger pangs and chewing gum can keep your taste buds preoccupied so remember those ideas if you choose to go on the lemonade diet.

If you are a weight lifter, you should speak with your doctor prior to getting on the diet because you don’t want to put yourself at a health risk so you will want to find out if you will lose much of a muscle mass (maybe it is okay if you are cutting because minimal muscle mass is lost in a cut too) because you don’t want to lose muscle because you are trying to lose weight. For most people, you need the lemonade diet to lose the weight and the last thing you need to worry about is your muscle mass.

If you are clinically obese, you may have a major problem with using this diet because it will give a very large shock to your body as you would go from consuming 4, 000 or more calories a day of food to just having some lemonade and water a day which the calorie consumption is not all that much. This large jump down in consumption can pose as a major problem so you will have to speak with your doctor about that.

There are also other health problems that you could run into because if you have diabetes, it could be a large problem for you to go on this diet as there is a whole lot of natural sugar inside the maple syrup so it would be a major no to go on the lemonade diet if you do have diabetes.

If you decide that you want to go onto this diet, then you will be best off to take the diet at a day by day pace instead of looking at the big picture. What was mentioned earlier in regards to how the whole waiting three days to get off the diet works will really kick in if you have a day by day attitude because you are forced to go another day…than another day and it will end up becoming weeks before you really consider getting off of the diet. Usually hunger pangs and cravings come and go even if they are very strong and can last a little while, in most cases they will go.

Moving onto a whole another topic, there is the low carbohydrate diet. The whole low carb diet has become a lot more popular than before over the last little while. This is probably because of the fact that the Atkins diet is based on low carb consumption and that has become so popular so the whole concept of a low carb diet has become very popular as well.

With everyone wanting to start the Atkins diet because it has worked for so many people, you will be asking yourself if it really works or not. Well, a lot of the low carb diets will work very well but you will have to make sure that you follow the instructions that you are given properly to get the proper results. While this won’t mean that making one little mistake will ultimately lead in you not getting the results you wanted, it just means that you keep things balanced out in the long run. You don’t want to make a mistake one day and give up the next because of that but rather push yourself harder to eat healthier and exercise more because of that mistake.

You should make sure that whatever diet you get onto is pretty easy to follow because there are a lot of very complex and strict diets out there. These diets are very difficult to follow because you can’t eat a lot of a certain food and you are usually forced into eating one of the same food forever and this may be okay at first but whenever you eat something repetitively for a long period of time, it really become a very disgusting taste. The main idea of the low carb diet is obviously to have low carb consumption.

This means that foods like bread, potatoes, pasta, and rice are out of the question for consuming on a regular basis because of the high carb contents in them. There is a big difference between simple and complex carbs though so you should know the difference. Simple ones are usually found in rather unhealthy food and processed food but healthier food usually has complex carbs. The complex ones are okay to consume but having too much of will obviously be a major issue so you have to watch your carb intake no matter what the source is for the carbs.

Whenever you compile a list of foods that have a lot of carbs in them, you will want to remove them from your diet and put in low carb foods to replace them immediately. The problem with this diet still is that a lot of these low carb foods are actually pretty high in fat and if you are already overweight or obese, you don’t want to be rushing a lot of fat into your body. A lot of these foods which have a low carb amount are usually meat or dairy products and there is a very large amount of fat inside them as well and this could further progress to you having heart problems or even a high cholesterol level.

No matter what diet you get on really, you should speak with your doctor before going on it. This is no different case. These diets (low carb) are usually filled with a lot of fat intake so you have to make sure that this will be a healthy method of a weight loss or not. If you are thinking about a low carb diet for a long period usage, there could be some very severe health problems that could follow from doing so if you are not careful about it so talking with your doctor is very important.

A major problem that a lot of people will have with this diet (but with most diets really) is that a lot of the foods that they normally enjoy to eat, they can’t eat while on this diet. Pizza, hamburgers, sandwiches, mac and cheese, bread, none of it you can really consume or else you are ruining the whole concept of having low carbohydrate consumption and therefore not actually losing any weight. Alcohol also cannot be consumed while on the diet because there are a lot of calories and carbs in it but most diets (if not all) should not include alcohol being regularly consumed.

However, after you eliminate any high carbohydrate foods from your diet, there are a still a lot of foods that you can eat that are low in carbs. Quite a bit of meat is available that would work perfectly for a low carb diet like chicken, beef, or even tuna. Tuna should be consumed in moderation though because of the mercury content because it can actually lead to major health problems (mental illness, even death) if over consumed for a long period of time.