Review of Some of the Best (and Most Popular) Diet Plans
Happy New Year! The time has again come for us to make resolutions that will hopefully help us to live a better life. According to the latest Marist Poll, 44% of Americans are anticipated to make New Years Resolutions and a whopping 38% of them will resolve to lose weight, exercise more, improve their health or improve their diet. With so many resolutions centered on lifestyle changes, we thought it would be appropriate to review some of the best (and most common) diets that are out there.
US News and World Report recently did a ranking on the best diets available. They ranked them according to weight loss, ease of following and health concerns (nutrition, safety, diabetes and cardiovascular health). We combined that list with the best diets for weight loss and picked out the best ones to get you long term weight loss while being easy to follow and healthy.
The top performers were 2 commercial diets: Weight Watchers and Jenny Craig with overall scores of 3.9 and 3.8 out of five when evaluating for long term weight loss, ease of following, nutrition and safety. If you don’t want to go the commercial route, the “Flexatarian Diet” is the best home method, scoring 3.8 as well. The full list comprised 35 diets and included Slim-Fast, Nutrisystem, South Beach, the Zone, Atkins and Paleo diets. You can see all of the details of the rankings on the overall diets here and the diets for weight loss here.
The Flexatarian Diet doesn’t necessarily restrict what you eat, but rather adds in fruits and veggies and alternative protein sources. You gradually decrease the amount of meat that you eat in a week. Good things about the diet include the flexibility and gradual change (which is certainly easier to get used to than the drastic lifestyle changes required by many diets, making it easier to stick to it). You will need to do some cooking and you’ll be eating a lot of fresh produce, but if you can handle that then the Flexatarian Diet may be something that could help you shed those extra pounds this year!
Jennifer Tighe de Soto, MD is a cosmetic surgeon who is board certified through the American Academy of Aesthetic Medicine. For more advice from Dr. de Soto on body sculpting and other aesthetic treatments please visit www.omahaliposuction.com where you can read her blog and see before and after photos of actual patients.
