Every so often, a diet comes along that seems to capture the imagination of the public. It’s happened before with such widespread diets as the Atkins Revolution, the South Beach Diet, and Nutrisystem™. A new diet has joined the ranks of these popular, yet often criticized diet plans. It’s called the 5 Factor diet, and it comes in the form of a new book by fitness guru Harley Pasternak. She has appeared all over national television promoting the book, including such outlets as the Oprah show and Tyra Banks’s morning program. She claims as clients such celebrities as John Mayer and Halle Berry (and who wouldn’t want a body like Halle Berry, after all?). Of course, all of this is incidental to the central question: what is the 5 Factor diet all about, and does it really work?
The 5 Factor Diet: A Brief Overview
Obviously, any diet book worth its salt cannot be adequately summarized in just a few lines. In fact, it is this very type of summary that has given other diets a bit of a bad name in the general public. Take the Atkins diet, for instance. Because of oversimplification, the vast majority of the uninitiated public (as in, those who have not taken the time to read the book), believe that the Atkins diet is about cutting out carbs completely, for the rest of your life. This is the furthest thing from the truth, and even a cursory reading of the book would show you otherwise. For this reason, we hesitate to simplify any diet, when the book itself would be so much more enlightening. Then again, it would hardly serve the purposes of this report to say: go read it for yourself. So let’s take a look at the 5 Factor Diet with the understanding that no synopsis can do any book (diet or otherwise) much justice.
The 5 Factor diet is built around the glycemic index. If you’re unfamiliar with the glycemic index, it is basically a way for us to tell which foods have the most damaging effect on our blood sugar when we consume them. Scientists and nutritionists believe that foods with a severe impact on the GI cause us to gain weight more rapidly, due to changing spikes in our hunger levels and slower metabolization of the calories themselves. The diet advocates a daily plan of five meals per day, with each meal made up of five components (the “5" in the 5 Factor Diet). These components are a lean protein, a complex carbohydrate, fiber, a good fat, and a sugar free drink.
