Does The Rice Diet help Lose Weight

Rice has a long tradition and is good for the health of people. However, it is essential to make a conscious and controlled consumption to get the best benefits from this cereal.

This is why the rice diet was designed mainly to lose weight quickly. The name says it all: rice is the main dish! But you don’t have to eat only cereals. There are some foods to avoid, while others are allowed. Obviously, rice is one of the latter. It is considered a functional food with nutraceutical properties, as if it were a pharmaceutical alternative that has physiological benefits. In fact, it possesses numerous beneficial properties for your metabolism.

In this post we present information about this diet, what it is, how it works, what to eat and benefits.

Rice diet: what is it?

This is a low-calorie, low-fat diet plan, which is carried out with the aim of losing weight quickly. The diet promises a weight loss of up to 10 kg in fifteen days.

Actually, this diet was not created for aesthetic purposes. It was an American doctor who devised it, around 1939: Dr. Walter Kempner, a physician and professor at Duke University. She proposed this rice diet as part of the treatment of hypertensive and renal failure patients. This is because the addition of rice to a low sodium diet improved diuresis.

But over time, caloric restriction derived from diet was found to be beneficial for obese patients or those with metabolic syndrome, which led to a focus on weight loss.

In 2006 the book The Rice Diet Solution by physicians Kitty Gurkin Rosati and Robert Rosati, made this diet popular. Years later, in 2014, an article published in a prestigious journal exposed that the rice diet helped in the treatment of malignant hypertension and other disorders. Because of all this literature, this diet has been popularized to this day.

Benefits of the rice diet

It is beneficial for different aspects. One of them is the feeling of having more energy and lucidity when following this diet.

When we follow a healthy diet, which also creates a caloric deficit, it is normal to feel more energy and lucidity, whether it is the rice diet or any other. Low calorie intake, according to our needs, is one of the golden rules for anti-aging.

For weight loss, the authors of diet describe that being a low-salt diet decreases the retention of liquids that this substance creates. It also helps satiety by avoiding ultra-processed products, using instead carbohydrates rich in fiber, while decreasing the calories ingested.

In this respect the authors are right, but the Mediterranean diet or any other healthy diet achieves the same objective with a wider variety of foods.

However, what the rice diet does give is portion control and increased consumption of fruits and vegetables. People who need to eat a low sodium and low fat diet also benefit greatly.

Diet rice also helps in the fight against the “carbohydrates are bad” myth. Rice is one of the main sources of carbohydrates, as well as fruits and vegetables.

In the link https://successrice.com/recipes/spanish-rice/ you will get an easy and delicious recipe of Spanish rice appropriate for diet rice. Also other important facts about the recipe, the seasoning and tips are given.

How it works  

In this diet there are three phases that should be properly followed: detoxification, weight loss and weight loss maintenance.

The diet consists of ingesting between 1,000 and 1,200 calories per day without monitoring the calories, but controlling the size of the portions. In addition to these calories, fruit or vegetables can be added, but no extra fat can be added to the meals.

What to eat  

The foods to be consumed in the diet are:

  • Starches such as rice, beans, pasta, bread or other grains and cereals.
  • Dairy products without fat.
  • Fruits and vegetables ad libitum, that is, at will. If we have to choose between the two groups, vegetables should be more present than fruits, but both should be included. The rice diet includes them in every meal, and that is what we should do in our routine.
  • Seasonings that do not include salt.

For the diet to have the expected success, it is important that it fits little by little in our lifestyle. Otherwise, if you abandon it, you will return to your old habits and, with a high probability, you will gain weight again and even more.