Dukan Diet Review (2024 Update)

Are you overweight but want to get back in shape with an easy diet that you can actually enjoy eating? The Dukan Diet may be your answer as this review uncovers, to tasty meals without the fat-producing sugars.

It depends on what's made you overweight in the first place, but for many people it's simply not realizing you're eating too much processed food in which lurks hidden calories in the form of sugars that are doing you more harm than good. Sometimes it pays to take control over what you're eating and stop being lazy and eating ready made stuff from the store.

The tough part for a lot of people is in knowing what to cook for themselves that will be tasty and interesting to eat while not being loaded with the things that put those extra inches of fat on your waist!

The US vs Europe Obesity Gap

While in the US, the average family diet tends to be heavy on the calories, large portions and all round fat making food, in Europe things are very different. Sure they have been invaded by all the usual fast food restaurants and tricked into eating addictive processed junk, but they don't do it all the time and when they do, its regarded as something of a "treat" instead of a daily habit.

Even so, they get fat in Europe especially in the UK and some northern European countries. But a good many of the people living in southern Mediterranean countries avoid the obesity trap that junk food creates by eating a much healthier diet on a regular basis.

It's better known as the Mediterranean diet, but that's not what I'm looking specifically at here.

Dr Dukan and his Diet

In France, a certain doctor Pierre Dukan had been working with overweight patients. He started by using a derivative of the older and one-time popular Atkins diet to help them lose weight through a high protein, low carbohydrate diet.

However, he realized that there was a lot of merit to Atkin's formula as long as the dieter didn't exclude other healthy foods that are also essential for good digestive and metabolic health. From that, he devised a program that had all the benefits of Atkin's high protein/low carb strategy.

It came with the added benefit of including certain health-giving foods that enhanced its effectiveness without the problems associated with the exclusion of certain food groups. the Dukan Diet was born and took the population of France by storm.

Why Dukan is Good for Americans Too

The program is centered around a three phase approach that makes it very accessible to our way of life. It works very well as long as the dieter is prepared to take the bull by the horns and be responsible for their own health and their own body.

The meals are easy enough to prepare and cook with readily available ingredients in stores, so there's no need to worry about trying to source unusual ingredients from anyplace. The program provides specific metrics so you don't go over the top with portion size but still get a filling and tasty meal every time.

So what are these phases and why are they important?

Phase 1

You start at the beginning with the first phase of the program. It's devised to force your body into fat-burning mode by restricting where it can get its sugars from to give you the energy you need.

Normally, you'd bet most of your energy from sugars consumed in food (carbohydrates). This is a food group that most overweight folks generally get a big excess of. Hence the body stores the extra as fat.

On this phase, carbs are excluded along with sugar-laden foods so the body is forced to get its energy by processing its fat stores back into a usable form: glucose. This only lasts for two weeks so there's no real danger of you becoming undernourished while you get a high concentration of protein rich food to help build muscle density and increase the body's ability to metabolize fat into energy.

Phase 2

This phase eases off the throttle some with regards to the exclusion of certain foods. It re-introduces some carbohydrates into your meals but little by little so your body gets the nutrients it needs while still burning mostly fat for energy.

While this is going on, your meals are interesting and more varied but they're still keeping the fat burning mechanism in full swing so you systematically burn your way through the bloated fat store and start to see visible results in a slimmer waist and experience a good feeling of having more energy with less tiredness.

The second phase lasts around a month depending on your progress. Each individual will be a little different here, so don't get hung up on specifics.

Phases 3 and 4

As the second phase becomes part of your lifestyle and your body is burning a lot of fat now, the third phase gets underway. Here is where the food restrictions are lifted for the most part and your meals are more balanced but still healthy.

The emphasis is to continue eating healthily and not allow any of the old processed junk back into your life by crowding it out with healthy, home cooked meals that are so good you'll simply never want to ever go back to eating that garbage ever again!

This phase seems to seamlessly drift into the fourth phase where you continue eating in this way for the long term and maintain not only your new weight and body shape, but make sure you keep it and never revert to getting out of shape again through poor food choices.

Does the Dukan Diet Work?

The $64,000 question is: "Does it work?" for which the resounding answer is "YES!"

Of course, there are some provisos here. It works as long as you work with it. You get to choose what you eat and if you choose to eat what the diet tells you to eat, then you'll do well with it. But if you choose to cheat, grab the odd "snack" that falls outside the scope of the program, you risk derailing your own chances of success.

So I guess it's one of those questions that you should not really be asking of the program, but of yourself. Will you work with this program and make it work for you? if you will, then it will give you everything you need to succeed not just in the short term, but also in the long term.

It's a healthy eating plan for fast and permanent weight loss. The Dukan Diet will get you to your True Weight.

You can get that slim, fit looking body back again when you take responsibility for yourself and start eating sensibly. What Dukan can give you is the tools to work (or in this case, cook) with but as the old saying goes, it's up to you to work with those tools to make it happen!

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Posted on 6 Jan 2024 in Diet | 6 Comments



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