As its name suggests, the milk diet involves consuming milk for weight loss purposes. As a food source, milk cannot brag about it’s reputation as an effective weight-loss product because of its high calorie and fat content. Just simply including dairy to your regular meal plan will hardly help you slim down. To use the milk diet for weight loss, you would need to increase your daily dairy intake while cutting down on other foods (4). The light version of the diet involves having a glass of milk before each meal. This will help you curb your appetite and decrease your overall food intake. The extreme version of milk diet for weight loss consists of consuming only dairy products and nothing else for a certain period of time. Those who want to benefit from the diet to the fullest tend to choose its radical form, in which you have to drink about 2 liters of milk a day. However, the radical milk diet for weight loss can harm your body a lot if you have particular health problems or start dieting without proper preparation. Scientific information on the milk diet for weight loss is scarce. Theoretically, milk being high in calcium, could potentially help you shed some pounds. Some experts claim that calcium ingestion burns fat in the human body, particularly in the abdominal area, which is an area notorious for being extremely difficult to get rid of. Increased levels of vitamin D and calcium in dairy have shown a positive impact on weight loss . In addition, milk can help you cut down on your energy intake, and at the same time be a valuable source of protein, vitamin D, casein, and other nutrients. In fact, one study has shown that casein could decrease triglyceride levels the excess of which is known to cause severe problems with cardiovascular health .
However, you should not get too excited about this weight-loss method. To see a scale change, you will have to change your eating habits and meal plan drastically by substituting all of the foods in it with dairy. Experts agree that this type of diet, as well as other weight-loss methods which require you to eat only one food for a lengthy period, are unhealthy on a number of levels. Furthermore, the chances that you will fail to keep weight off is rather high.
Apart from substituting solid foods in your meal plan with dairy, you are restricted in the choice of milk. Ideally, you are expected to drink semi-skimmed milk, which contains 1.5-1.8% of fat, enough to be deemed low-fat . 100 ml of semi-skimmed milk contains about 50 kcal. As for the macros, this type of milk contains approximately 5 g of carbs, 2 g of fat, and 3.5 g of protein.
