Friday, March 22, 2013

Coconut Oil Diet - Is It Healthy?

Thousands of people are getting wonderful results just by including coconut oil into their diets. It has been acknowledged as an exceptional medium helping people loose weight. Furthermore its qualities improve the immune functions of the body, prevent heart disease, diabetes, cancer and much more. It contains a large quantity of medium chained triglycerides (mcts), a saturated fat with unique qualities and is carried directly to the liver after eating. Other types of fat first enter the bloodstream and are circulated in the body before reaching the liver. This gives the fats more opportunity to be stored as fat. Mcts are immediately burned for energy and do not store as body fat.



Because coconut oil has a large percentage of saturated fats, it has been shunned for years as a part of any diet. Nutritionists were taught to believe that, as a saturated fat, it was bad for your cholesterol, which was really sad as it was eventually proved to be a very healthy type of oil.

Various studies during recent years have also proven that coconut oil is among the safest and most stable oils for cooking and that it is a neutral oil filled with omega 3 fatty acids.

 Dieting, Per Se Does Not Work.
Fashion diets with extremely low calorie counts, will cause quick weight loss, burning muscle and getting rid of lots of water quickly. However, once your body realizes what is happening to it, it will start storing fat and the craving will start! You will start eating a lot of sugar and (unhealthy) high-carbohydrate foods. You know it is wrong, but you cannot help it as it is the body's natural defense mechanism to keep it from starving and you will start gaining weight again. You are now in the so-called yo-yo diet cycle.

 The coconut oil diet was inspired from cultures where people's eating habits were formed over hundreds of years without any concern about sugar, carbohydrate or protein content.

Because of the abundance of coconut oil in these countries, coconut oil formed a large part of their diet, which also included some dairy products, fish, meat and vegetables. The coconut was used in many forms such as; cooking oil, fresh grated coconut to make sauces, curries and pastes.


As the coconut oil diet is very similar to a very well-known low-carbohydrate diet, with some coconut oil variations added as the main source of fat, it follows that it will be very effective in loosing weight while enhancing the function of the thyroid.

While this diet is also a low-carbohydrate, no sugar type of diet, it emphasizes foods rich in protein like red meat, pork, chicken, eggs, cheese and nuts. The diet starts with a very strict induction phase to help change your body's carbohydrate burning metabolism over to a fat burning (your body fat!) metabolism. This will stabilize your blood sugar level and halt a myriad other symptoms indicative of unstable blood sugar such as fatigue, mood swings, etc. This induction phase lasts a maximum of fourteen days, after which you will already notice a significant loss in weight.

There are much more to the induction phase than this simplified version demonstrates, but suffice it to say this is an exceptionally important part of the diet. It primarily changes your body chemistry, teaching it to obtain its energy mainly from the fats you ingest.

Furthermore, the coconut oil diet induction phase allows no deviation from the recommended foods. It stresses low carbohydrate content with two to three spoons of coconut oil added to all meals. The next phase, over a period of four to five weeks, focuses on detoxification of the colon and other organs of the body. The last two phases are for slow reintroduction of carbohydrates and weight maintenance.