Best Diet to Lose Weight
When looking for the best diet to lose weight, take into consideration your current lifestyle needs as well as the amount of weight you need to lose and your timeframe.
While crash diets like master cleanse and the cabbage soup diet are not advisable — and to say the least you couldn’t pick a single one that you could swear by as the best diet to lose weight — there are some strategies that can either jump-start your weight loss efforts or enable you to maintain a diet over the long term while learning some new behaviors, including making selections of healthy foods and appropriate portion sizes. This does not mean you are condemned to eating off of saucer sized plates and feeling hunger till your next meal.
Quite the contrary, diets that are the most successful allow you to satisfy your hunger by eating the nutrient dense, low calorie foods that are high in water content and fiber and naturally enable you to eat to satisfy your appetite.
Unfortunately, we have collectively gotten away from the whole, natural foods that sustain life and we are inundated with fast food and processed foods that are extremely high in calories, fat, sugar and salt. If we crave these foods, there is a reason, as former FDA commissioner Dr. David Kessler outlined so eloquently in his book The End of Overeating.
3 Foods You Must Stop Eating Immediately (yes, today!)
The most realistic strategy towards picking the best diet to lose weight is to choose one that enables you to move away from the unhealthy foods. At the same time diets that are trendy for their approach which may be very restrictive of carbohydrates and at the same time allow a liberal amount of animal protein, fats and even saturated fats are not sustainable. Yes, you can lose a lot of weight with Atkins, Dukan diet, South Beach diet, Zone Diet, 17 Day Diet and others but maintenance is difficult unless you eat that way thereafter. This does not fit the critera for the best diet to lose weight if you can’t keep of the weight you lost! You may find yourself craving foods that are actually good for you, like complex carbohydrates including whole grains such as rolled oats, steel cut oats, barley and brown rice, as well as starchy vegetables such as yams and potatoes and winter squash. With these programs, you are generally required to curtail them or even eliminate.
Would it be more palatable to pick a diet that allows you to eat a variety of foods that are healthy and rich in fiber and enable you to have a blueprint for future success in weight management once you have reached your goal. Processed foods, as mentioned, should be eliminated. Through substitutions in recipes, if you enjoy cooking, you can make some healthy versions of comfort foods and this is quite popular.
A BIG List (50+) of Foods to Eat for Weight Loss
If you are looking for a plan that spells it all out for you, there are some options. You can check out what US News and World Reports has to say about the best diets for weight loss. They name their top 5, with Weight Watchers winning out, although they note with caution that the popular and well known diet is “moderately effective” in helping people maintain a long-term weight loss. That is something to keep in mind.
Ranking second was Jenny Craig, with the main drawback being its relative high cost and questions over long-term sustainability once you have reached your goal weight and you are not eating the portion control meals which are a cornerstone of the plan.
You can pick some of the key components of these diets that make them so effective. Volumetrics Diet, created by Dr. Barbara J. Rolls, Chair in Nutritional Sciences at Pennsylvania State University. works because it addresses hunger and satiety issues by encouraging the dieter to eat foods that are high in water and fiber content — just as mentioned a few paragraphs ago. In fact, it works so well that both Weight Watchers and Jenny Craig diet plans use these principles in the meal plans, giving you foods you can eat with unlimited portions — namely the nonstarchy vegetables and salad greens.
If you are not inclined to sign up for a meal plan diet, you can still get these same effects on your own. The next two top rated diets do not require a meal plan. The raw food diet actually ties with Jenny Craig, for effectiveness in weight loss.
Again, not surprising as it’s a diet offering you a wide variety of choices, a literal harvest of fresh vegetables and fruits the majority of which will be raw — some 75 percent or so. Cooked foods where appropriate such as whole grains and legumes which otherwise are nearly impossible to consume and absorb the nutrients properly. There are many raw food Web sites and forums on the Internet as well as books that can help you, notably Yuri Elkaim’s Eating for Energy program. It’s a comprehensive, user-friendly guide.
Similarly, the Volumetrics Diet is not a meal plan diet. You can get all the guidance you need by purchase Barbara J. Rolls’ book The Volumetrics Eating Plan: Techniques and Recipes for Feeling Full on Fewer Calories as well as The Volumetrics Weight-Control Plan which she cowrote with Robert A. Barnett. It’s available at Amazon.com and other online retailers. You can also find some information at the official Volumetrics Web site. While drinking water does help curb appetite, as studies confirm, consuming foods that are high in water and fiber works even better. A low calorie tomato soup as your first course will work wonderfully to curb appetite.
More helpful ideas in the video below.
For a diet that combines all of these elements and offers online assistance, you can also check out the Diet Solution Program. You will get not just a diet of delicious healthy foods including the comforting carbohydrates that actually help us lose weight. Created by certified nutritionist and fitness expert Isabel De Los Rios, the program has had growing popularity and a great deal of positive feedback from dieters. That’s the hallmark of a successful program, hearing and seeing independent reviews from real people in the real world who have actually used the diet as, opposed to those impossible-to-believe before and after snapshots!
Check out the official Diet Solution Program Web site for more details. Much success in finding your own best diet to lose weight…and keep it off forever!