My husband and I started the zone around 2.5 weeks ago. We are both really excited about the health benefits of eating in the zone.

We had our trainer measure our body fat percentage before starting the zone and my husbands was at 12%. He is 6'4", 34 years old and was 176 pounds when starting the zone. Our trainer recommended 15 blocks for my husband. We also did the body fat calculator on the zone website and it indicated my husbands body fat was 10% and recommended 16 blocks.

Over the past 2.5 weeks my husband has been using 15 blocks and has lost 7 pounds. His timing for meals has been breakfast 6:30 am 3 blocks, morning snack 10:30 am 3 blocks, lunch 2:30 pm 3 blocks, dinner 6:30 pm 3 blocks and evening snack 10:30 pm 3 blocks. Basically a 3 block meal every 4 hours.

During the 2.5 weeks he has had increased energy and generally has not been hungry between meals. My husbands goal with the zone is the health benefits and not neccessarily weight loss or body fat percentage reduction.

How should he modify the zone diet in order to still get the health benefits, but keep his weight relativly constant?

Any insight would be greatly appreciated.

Melissa and Trent

If your husband does not want to lose any weight, then he should increase the mono-unsaturated fat in his diet. If he starts to notice that he is gaining bodyfat, then decrease the fat a bit.

Hi Melissa and Trent,

It's of the utmost importance that Trent (and everyone eating the Zone diet) eats the appropriate number of protein blocks daily or he will lose muscle mass along with body fat. I'd recommend putting Trent's current stats into the calculator on this site adn go with that block recommendation. In addition he would also increase the monounsaturated fat blocks he adds, as was already mentioned in this thread. He would do so by doubling or tripling the amount of fat blocks he adds (and could even more than triple the fat blocks if he begins to note a decline in energy while eating the appropriate number of protein blocks). A 4 block meal with doubled fat blocks would be 4P, 4C, 8F, with tripled fat blocks 4P, 4C, 12F, and so forth.

Sue, I think your post requires more clarification.

When you say to double or triple the blocks of monounsaturated fat, are you speaking of a 1.5 gram block, or a 3 gram block?

The reason why I ask this is because a block of fat is technically 3 grams of fat. The fats on the food block list are in 1.5 gram portions, because it is assumed that the fat in the protien accounts for the other 1.5 grams of fat in the block.