One of the most important goals any healthy eating plan can help you achieve is to reduce your amount of visceral fat. Fat by itself doesn’t pose a significant health risk, but if you have extra fat clumping around your internal organs you have a much larger risk of heart disease, diabetes, and dementia.

The Mediterranean diet has come to be accepted as one of the healthiest eating strategies you can adopt. Briefly, the Mediterranean diet means lots of vegetables, fruits, beans, nuts and seeds, olive oil as the major form of fat, a moderate amount of whole grains, liberal use of spices and herbs, and relying on fish and eggs (with modest amount of dairy products and meat) as sources of animal protein.

If you consistently organize your eating around these guidelines, it’s likely you’ll shed abdominal fat. It’s hard to improve on that.

But there are tweaks to the Mediterranean diet that will make it even more effective. An international group of researchers (centered at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev) created the “green Mediterranean diet,” and showed that it’s twice as effective as the Mediterranean diet in helping you lose abdominal fat.

In addition to the general guidelines listed above. with the green Mediterranean diet your daily food consumption also includes:

• walnuts
• 3-4 cups of green tea
• a “green shake” (In their study the main ingredient of the green shake was duckweed, an aquatic plant. That’s hard to find, but there are alternatives that are equivalent)

Need help to get organized to implement this dietary change? Call me!

Dr. Lavine has been an innovator in the use of movement and touch to promote health since 1981. He practices in New York City and Princeton, NJ.

_________________________________________________

Deepen your body of knowledge

Intermittent fasting – another strategy to lose weight and improve your health