Bread for Life Diet

Can you really lose weight on a high carbohydrate diet?

Review of the Bread for Life diet. If you’re a bread lover like I am, this diet sounds like heaven. After all, how many diets allow you to eat twelve pieces of bread a day? Of course, since you have to eat light bread, so that equates to only six slices of regular bread, but it’s still more than most diets allow you to consume.

The Bread for Life diet is high carbohydrate, low protein, so it may not be right for everyone. Butter, margarine and sweet spreads are forbidden, but sugar free jelly and a few other spreads are permitted but must be spread thin with only one permitted per meal.

Most vegetables are permitted in unlimited quantities on the Bread for Life diet, but proteins such as meat, chicken or fish are only permitted three times weekly. Fruit is also restricted because of the fructose it contains yet the glycemic index of fruit is actually lower than the bread on the diet. There is also no medical or scientific evidence that increasing carbohydrates will decrease your appetite.

On the other hand, most of us know from personal experience that if the carbohydrate level is too low we will become exhausted even if we consume a reasonable number of calories per day.

Though I am not a big fan of bread aside from a sandwich for lunch and the occasional roll for dinner, I tended to eat more of the oats, brown rice and pasta that is permissible instead of bread. I also liked the fact that vegetables were unlimited, so between the breads and the vegetables, I was never hungry.

On the other hand, I am a meat lover, so it was extremely difficult for me to adjust to only have meat three times a week. I felt very deprived because of that, which may have affected my success with the diet. The book proclaims you can lose twenty pounds in two months, but I came no where near that amount. In fact, it took me nearly three months to lose fifteen pounds.

I had always been taught that the a proper balance of protein and carbohydrates energize the fat burning process, so to me this seems that there is too much of a balance imbalance in existent. It does not seem feasible to me that a diet so high in carbohydrates (as the Bread for Life diet is) can help with weight loss, and it certainly didn’t help me very much.

Certainly I lost weight but very slowly and at the potential cost to my health. The lack of protein was beginning to take its toll on my health by the time I had lost the weight, and even my somewhat success did not make up for that.

In my opinion the Bread for Life diet is good if you only have a small amount of weight to lose, but if you have more than twenty pounds to lose, you may want to look to something that has more balance in the choices. Anything that restricts food groups as much as this one is not likely to be healthy for the long term according to my doctor.

Review by Sherry Thompson