For excess weight reduction domestic medicine offers so-called Pevsner diet. Pevsner is a nutritionist who offered a choice of diets as a tool for disease treatment. Diets are named as ratios. Ratio # 1 is recommended for patients with stomach ulcer, ratio # 4 – for intestinal diseases, #7 – kidney diseases, #9 – diabetes, etc…
Ratio ?8 is a diet with reduced daily consumption of calories (up to 1500 kilocalories). Mainly, this reduction is related to easily digestible carbohydrates (scientific term for flour and sweets and fat to the least extent. 180 - 200 g of carbohydrates is allowed daily with vegetables, fruit, buckwheat, pearl barley and brown bread, 45-50 g vegetable fat and 70-75 g protein, being in compliance with daily need. Sugar and sugar containing products (sweets, honey, jam) as well as pasta, rice, semolina, wheat bread, fat, fatty meat. The list of forbidden products is rather large, much larger than the list of products that are allowed. Only leaf vegetables and cucumbers are unlimited. Consumption of other products is strictly limited. As a rule, the diet is made as a weekly ratio. Relief days are used once week for effect amplification. Recipes for such days are quite simple and some are given below:
Apple day – 1.5 kg sour apples per day.
Cottage cheese day– 400 g low fat cottage cheese per day.
Vegetable day– two kilograms of vegetables per day (no potatoes allowed).
This diet is safe as far as it keeps the required amount of protein, vitamins and edible fibers. This is the advantage of this diet. What are the disadvantages? First, it is rather monotonous, one type of food during a long period of time. Food caloricity is also monotonous – 1500 kilocalories each day, which also makes the body loose its energy release getting used to the loss of only 1500 kilocalories. It is clear that as soon as it happens, weight loss will stop in spite of continuous attempts to keep the diet. Second, too many “not allowed” products. It is hard to expect that a man will refuse from sweets, wheat bread and cakes forever. Diet is the most probable to be rejected. And this is what happens in reality. The majority of patient quit the diet in the first month or two. How many kilograms could be lost during this time? Not more than five, as a rule. Therefore, it is hard to say that this diet is effective. It also has other two disadvantages. First, all patients have different opinion about fatty meat when they make wrong considerations about the meager meat, while extra 10g of fat add 100 calories to daily caloricity. To my opinion even 45-50 g of fat a day allowed by this diet are excess, as far as until the body burns up fat from meal no body fat is burnt. As far as this diet contains detailed description of all products needed patients must have scales for weighing. Or one could not find the products he needs at the moment. Or one is ready to eat a products that is not supposed at the moment of time. As far as the majority of patients are not educated in diet and rules related to substitution of courses and products, difficulties appear which may result in failures in dieat of makes a person quit. In other words, diet #8 is difficult to reproduce and, therefore, it is another reason to quit.
Also, there is another disadvantage. The diet does not develop skills for safe nutrition and when the diet is terminated the patient begins gaining weight. It is clear that for weight reduction restrictions in food are used, therefore when one needs to maintain (keep) his weight the same type of restrictions (may be not that strict) is used. Though it is true to say that it is impossible to refuse from some products for one’s entire life or to spend one’s life counting calories.
