The Zone Diet is all about balance. Nothing is eliminated from the diet. Carbohydrates are enjoyed as are proteins and fats. The thing is they are the right proportion to each other and calories do matter in The Zone Diet.

The Zone Diet was invented by Dr. Sears. There is a website on The Zone Diet which explains the principles of this way of eating. They explain that The Zone Diet is not actually a diet but rather it should be a lifestyle. The key to the Zone Diet is getting the right proportions of fat, protein and carbohydrate into your diet. They promote that your diet consists of 40% carbohydrate, 30% fat and 30% protein. They do not prohibit any foods.

When you read about The Zone Diet you can not help but notice the common sense approach of this diet. When people go on low carbohydrate diets such as The Atkins Diet they often complain of fatigue. They are encouraged to eat as much fat and protein as they want to at the beginning. Dr. Atkins believed that this would undo what had been done psychologically by having constantly deprived yourself of much needed fats. He believed that fats were an important part of a diet and once people rejected the idea that fats were bad for you, they would enjoy fats again and eventually the body would take care of regulating how much you actually needed.

People soon found out as they ate as much steak and chicken skin as they wanted to that they had no energy to even climb a flight of stairs let alone try to exercise. As The Atkins Diet swept the nation, many newspaper articles began to surface on how The Atkins Diet was the perfect diet for sedentary couch potatoes. But for people who wanted to begin exercising and living a healthier lifestyle, it did not appear to be a smart choice. In contrast, people on The Zone Diet claim to have a lot of energy because they are eating in a sensible well balanced way right from the start.

The Zone Diet also puts an emphasis on a sensible old fashioned concept: counting calories. Many of the new fad diets of the eighties and nineties continued along the path of Dr. Atkins and promoted forgetting all about calories. Their claim was that counting calories made people begin to obsess about food. Many diets encouraged the idea that when eating well, the body will regulate appetite and the dieter will naturally be eating the right amounts especially since the idea of deprivation has been taken away.

The fact is that this approach has not worked for many people. Many people continue to overeat and simply don't lose any weight. The Zone Diet has re-introduced common sense. Dr. Sears states that to achieve hormonal balance it is important to eat the right foods in the right proportion but also in the right quantity. His diet encourages eating snacks but the total daily caloric intake must be kept under a certain number. The Zone Diet spells out that to "stay in the zone" each meal must consist of 500 calories or less and each snack must be under 100 calories.

For people who have not had success with the latest diets and eating fads, it might be worthwhile to try a new fad which actually brings back age old tried and true concepts.