Volumetrics: The Diet that Lets You Eat More, Weigh Less and Get Healthy

Volumetrics has created a lot of buzz lately because it is the newest diet plan on the block. This method, developed by Dr. Barbara Rolls a nutrition researcher at Penn State, co-author of 'The Volumetrics Weight Control Plan and author of The Volumetrics Eating Plan, is a revolutionary new way to lose weight without eating less.

Rolls discovered that many individuals, in order to satisfy hunger, will eat about the same amount or weight of food on any given day. Volumetrics takes the foods we eat and assigns a calorie or energy density to each item. The purpose of the Volumetrics diet is to eat foods with fewer calories (yet equal the same or more weight as what we are used to eating) so that you can still satisfy hunger by eating the same amount of food, but you are ingesting less calories, thus...weight loss!

There is a very simple method to Dr. Roll's madness...or should we say pure genius! Each item of food we eat contains a certain number of calories per grams and by dividing the calories per serving by the grams per serving you can discover the energy density. For instance, a single serving of Cheerios cereal has 100 calories and weighs 28 grams. Divide the calories (100) by the grams (28) and you have your energy density (3.5) Formula: 100/28 = 3.5. Now that you have the formula, you can do some research and discover the energy density for all of your favorite foods.

Dr. Rolls created a Volumetrics scale on which to measure each food item for energy density, they are separated into four different categories:

1. very low energy density: 0 - 0.5
2. low energy density: 0.6 -1.5
3. medium energy density: 1.5 - 4.0
4. high energy density: 4.0 - 9.0