How healthy is The Korean Weight Loss Diet also known as the K-pop Diet and is it safe?
Is it effective in losing weight?
The Korean weight-loss diet has been promoted as an effective way to lose weight and sounds like the stars of K-pop, a music genre that originated in South Korea, according to a report in Healthline.
What is the korean diet for weight loss?
The Korean Diet for Weight Loss is inspired by traditional Korean cuisine.
It relies mainly on minimally processed whole foods, and reduces the intake of processed, high-fat or sugary foods.
The diet promises to help you lose weight by adjusting your diet and exercise habits, all without giving up your favorite foods.
What are the components of the korean weight loss diet?
Minimally processed whole foods.
Reduce your intake of processed foods.
Eat meals that contain a variety of vegetables, rice and some meat, fish or seafood.
You can eat kimchi, a dish of fermented cabbage that is a staple of Korean cuisine.
Eat soup.
Eat less fat, limit fatty foods and avoid sauces, oils and spices whenever possible.
Reduce eating out.
Reduce added sugars.
Replace soda with water.
Replace biscuits, sweets, ice cream and other baked goods with fresh fruit.
Avoid snacks.
Reduce the intake of wheat and dairy products.
Can the Korean diet help you lose weight?
The Korean diet can potentially help you lose weight. Traditional Korean meals are naturally rich in vegetables, which contain a lot of fiber, which helps reduce hunger while promoting feelings of fullness, thus eating less and losing weight.
The Korean diet limits your intake of snacks, fatty foods, and those containing added sugars, wheat, or dairy products, thus reducing your total calorie intake.
It also encourages regular exercise, which helps increase the number of calories you burn.
What are the downsides of the Korean diet?
There are downsides and risks to the Korean diet, such as:
Unnecessary focus on physical appearance, this diet focuses heavily on losing weight to look like your favorite K-pop celebrities.
Using social and cultural appearance standards as a motivation for weight loss may place certain groups of people, such as young adolescents, at an increased risk of developing disordered eating behaviors.
There are no clear guidelines, and no calorie counting.
Unscientific and contradictory guidelines, for example, the Korean weight-loss diet recommends avoiding snacks, despite research showing that some people lose more weight when they include healthy snacks in their diet.
The South Korean diet recommends avoiding dairy products, although they are useful and provide the body with calcium and protein.
This can be especially dangerous for women and girls, who need to build strong bones.
Summary about the Korean diet:
There is no strong scientific basis to support the Korean system.
If you want to follow it, we advise you to:
Consult a doctor first.
Don't stop eating wheat, eat whole wheat products like wholemeal bread.
Do not stop eating dairy products, eat low-fat products.
Do not focus on appearance, the important thing is to be healthy.
Eat healthy snacks, such as unsalted vegetables and nuts.
South Korean cuisine tour
You cannot help but notice, as you walk in the streets of Seoul, that the bodies of South Koreans are slender, and eyes rarely fall on a fat man or woman, which some attribute to the nature of Korean cuisine based on vegetables, rice and seafood, according to a previous report in Al Jazeera Net.
Among the most prominent of these vegetables is cabbage, and one of the most important national dishes for them is “kimchi”, which is prepared from pickled cabbage with ginger and garlic, and comes in several forms, including hot, which is red in color, and the regular, which comes in the color of white cabbage.
Korean cuisine is characterized by its heavy reliance on fermented (pickled) foods, something that dates back to 40 years ago when it was not available for Koreans to eat vegetables in all seasons of the year, so they used to pickle them in the summer to suffice them with winter supplies.
One of the Korean dishes is rice with pumpkin, and its texture is thick like a pudding, but it is delicious and light in taste.
There are also cabbage-based salads that have a sweet taste, which is not caused by the addition of sugar, but rather by the presence of different types of fruits with the salad.
One way to serve rice is to put it in green leaves.
As for the soup, it is a vegetable soup prepared with “tofu” cubes, which is soy milk that has been curdled.
Soy and its products are popular in Korea as well as East Asia.
As for the national dish in South Korea, it is called "galbi" and is made of boiled meat with vegetables.