The 3-Hour Diet

If you want a diet that includes Reese’s peanut butter cups and has no “bad” foods, the three-hour diet is the plan for you.

Jorge Cruise, fitness journalist and author of The 3-Hour Diet: How Low-Carb Diets Make You Fat and Timing Makes You Thin, believes so strongly in his plan that he actually encourages readers to enjoy candy. Daily.

But the true keys to Cruise’s diet — other than portion control (he recommends chocolate minis, not whole bars) — involve a trinity of timing:

• Eat breakfast within one hour of rising
• Eat every three hours thereafter
• Stop eating three hours before bedtime

Cruise is a passionate believer that eating this way increases BMR (baseline metabolic rate — how fast your body burns calories), increases energy, and decreases appetite.

However, while people do report successfully losing on this plan, there isn’t yet agreement on whether it’s a metabolic improvement to spread three meals out into five or six smaller meals.

What You Can Eat

Portions are very important, as well as timing. So the author doesn’t really advise what to eat — more how to visualize what you’re eating.

Start with the image of a 9 inch plate. On this plate you’ll “see” four items:

• A Rubik’s cube, representing your carbohydrate portion at breakfast, lunch and dinner.
• A deck of playing cards, symbolizing your protein serving at each meal; this is approximately 3 ounces, and Cruise says it can be anything you like — from chicken to cheese, eggs, and fish.
• A water bottle cap represents the amount of fat on your plate — a little more than one teaspoon. This can be salad dressing, butter, olive oil — any fat you favor.
• Visually stack three DVD cases; this represents how much fruit or vegetables to eat at each meal.

Cruise believes there are no bad foods, just bad portions. Using this “visual timing” method, he says you’ll find that all meals are balanced at about 400 calories each. Learn to eat the right portion, at the right time, he maintains, and you will lose weight.

How It Works

As the name of the diet implies, timing is everything.

Breakfast is at 7 a.m. Three hours later, at 10 a.m., there’s a 100-calorie snack; Cruise favors Nabisco Snack Packs, which are prepackaged in 100-calorie portions. Three hours after your snack comes lunch. Then three hours later another 100-calorie snack, followed in three hours by dinner.

During or soon after dinner you enjoy a small 50-calorie treat. Here’s where Cruise is partial to recommending Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup minis. Your timing here should have you nibbling this last item three hours before bed. No eating after that.

“When you eat every three hours,” Cruise says, “it teaches your body to constantly reset its metabolism. It is almost like a workout for the body every time you eat these meals.”

By eating every three hours you lower belly fat, says Cruise, burning 2 pounds a week, without muscle loss. Then, because you always eat every three hours, you repeatedly reset your metabolism so you’re constantly burning fat.

This gives your body an eating workout, Cruise says, so that it consumes fat and juices up your baseline metabolic rate. “And that’s a great thing.”

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