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Monday, June 1, 2009

The Watermelon Diet

What Is the Watermelon Diet?
There is no official Watermelon Diet, but any diet that includes a lot of watermelon will qualify. And any particular watermelon diet will help you lose weight for the same reason any other watermelon diet will: because it replaces part of the volume of your food with water, which contains no calories and yet makes you feel full. (There's a whole new science devoted to this principle; it's called volumetrics.)
How much watermelon is "a lot?" That depends on how fast you want to lose weight. The average American diet contains 150 calories per ounce. Replace three ounces with watermelon at 8 calories per ounce and you save about 426 calories a day—enough to lose 3.7 pounds a month or 44 pounds a year. Double that to six ounces and you'll lose weight at twice the speed.
(For help with the Watermelon Diet, you might try DietPower's award-winning weight-loss and nutrition software. It turns your PC into a "coach" that can guarantee reaching your goal weight on your target date. It also gives you real-time knowledge of your intake of 33 nutrients in 11,000 foodsincluding watermelon. You can download a free no-strings trial of the complete program by
clicking here.)
The Watermelon Diet sounds amazingly simple and effective, doesn't it? But wait—it gets even better.


A Super Food
Besides being a wonderful choice for dieters, watermelon is unusually nutritious. Its delectable flesh has no cholesterol and virtually no fat (almost none of which is saturated)—a stellar accomplishment for a food often served as a dessert at picnics.
Your watermelon diet will also give you a lot of potassium and vitamins A, C, and B6. And because watermelon is 92-percent water, it goes a long way toward satisfying your daily H2O requirement.


Move Over, Tomatoes!
Recent research shows yet another marvelous characteristic: Watermelon contains more lycopene than any other fresh fruit or vegetable. Lycopene, besides being the red pigment that gives the flesh its color, is an antioxidant known to prevent cancer. Studies have shown that people who get lots of lycopene have a lower risk of prostate, uterine, and esophageal tumors.
Tomatoes have received the lion's share of attention when it comes to lycopene, even though a one-cup serving contains far less (4 milligrams vs. 9) than a one-cup serving of watermelon does.
Watermelon is also listed by the American Heart Association as a top food for cardiovascular health.
"Watermelon is practically a multivitamin unto itself," says Samantha Winters, a spokeswoman for the National Watermelon Promotion Board.
For all of these reasons—and because it's a rare individual who doesn't love a ripe, red, juicy wedge of watermelon—DietPower long ago declared this miracle fruit one of "The 10 Best Foods."

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