This program is not a diet. It aims to improve your metabolism through managing what you eat and how you eat it. The experts behind this idea include Jillian Michaels of Biggest Loser fame.

The doctors that support this idea attribute weight gain to stress and eating (the way you eat and what you eat). They think that with better food choices, less stress and exercise, you can train your metabolism to right itself. The goal is not to have a faster metabolism, but to normalize it.

The regimen itself is nothing too rigorous. It requires people to eat small meals every four hours (three meals and a snack), no carbs before bedtime, eat only until you're full. The meals can even include fats, carbs and proteins.

Where is the diet here? Technically, you're dealing with a balanced calorie diet, so even if the meals include all the necessary nutrients, you eat only what you need, and not all that you want. The principle behind the program is simple: eat less processed food, eat more naturally occurring food. Nutritionists and medical practitioners have been saying this since time immemorial.

Master Your Metabolism thinks that people gain weight not solely because of the amount of food they eat, or that they lack exercise. Sometimes their own bodies allow them to be fat, because of faulty metabolism. There's a hormone secreted by fat cells in your body called leptin, which lowers appetite. Ideally, a person with more body fat will be secreting more leptin, lessening one's desire to eat. A person with normal metabolism will feel that way. Someone with a faulty metabolism will not even be feeling the effects of leptin in his system. The program hopes that managing the food you eat and the frequency of its intake, coupled with exercise, will allow the body to fall into its normal metabolic state, making weight loss possible.

Part of normalizing your metabolism is eating negative calorie food, or food that contains less caloric content than what you expend in your effort to eat it. Some of these foods are asparagus, broccoli, watermelon, cabbage, zucchini, oranges and papaya.

Another aspect of mastering your metabolism is limiting the body's exposure to toxic substances, which is all around us, in the products we use around the home or office, the food we eat, the water we drink, even the air we breathe. They attribute these toxins with wreaking havoc on the metabolism of everyone exposed to it. Processed food is one known culprit, with its additives affecting the health of the persons eating it. This is one of the no-nos of the Master your Metabolism program: ingesting processed food. This includes artificial flavorings like MSG.

A relaxing physical activity like yoga will not only aid the program participant as exercise, but contribute to lessening of stress levels as well. By eating right, working out and lessening stress, we allow our bodies to expel toxins and we encourage the normalization of our metabolic processes.

The process sounds very astute, what with the technical knowhow on toxins and hormones studded in all the reading materials on Master Your Metabolism. Not all is as cut and dried as it seems, though, as not all medical practitioners are sold on the idea. Sure, they think that avoiding stress, exercising and eating right will lead to a better life, but take the technical mumbo-jumbo with a grain of salt. The people who developed the program might have gotten some assistance from doctors to formulate their conclusions, but unless you're not a doctor yourself, you might get lost in the terms and not be able to separate fact from fiction.