The surefire guide to find the best diet for weight loss |
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Is there a best diet for losing weight? This is question on the lips (and the hips) of a whole nation and the magazines, the popular press and television bombard us with new or rehashed diets almost every day of the week. We can be forgiven for being a little confused. So what is the key to losing weight and what is the best diet to achieve this. All successful weight loss diets and programs share common features that we can identify and find the one most suitable for us. Most diets fall into several categories. One that is very popular over the past 15 - 20 years has been the low fat diets. The argument goes this way. A gram of fat contains 10 calories of energy. A gram of protein contains 4 calories and a gram of carbohydrate also contains 4 calories. Therefore if we reduce our fat intake we are sure to lose weight. This is false logic. The argument is that a cat has four legs and a dog has four legs. Therefore a cat is a dog! Using the same logic with regard to the bodys use of fats, proteins and carbohydrates is equally false. But supposedly educated dieticians and nutritionists have been plugging this line for many years. It is not only wrong. It is also unhealthy. The problem is that it assumes all calories are equal and the body treats all calories the same, and it doesn't. Protein is digested and broken down into amino acids used to rebuild muscles and skin. The four calories does not contribute one iota to your overall body fat content. Likewise fat is used to absorb vitamins and minerals and the excess is simply flushed out of the system via the liver and gall bladder. Too much fat may contribute to heart disease but there is clear evidence that this only happens in the presence of far too many carbohydrates. Carbohydrates are the dietary evil making us fat and I will explain a little later why. Another category of diet is the famous food-combining diets so often favored by Hollywood stars (who can afford the luxury of finding the right foods and combining them to lose weight). The argument is that the different foods act in concert to produce unusual weight loss because they enhance each others effects. It is really questionable and no true dietician advocates them. They fall into the fad diet category. Remember many of the Hollywood stars are stars because they are tough determined people who worked hard to get where they are today. Their determination makes us for the inefficiency of these diets and their success shouldn't automatically be taken as a guide. The most famous low fat diet is the Pritikin Diet. This is a super low fat diet designed by Nathan Pritikin when he was diagnosed with cancer. The diet removed all saturated fats and most unsaturated fats from the diet and restricted food to a very limited diet of sprouts, greens, nuts in small quantities. It essentially reduced eating to a necessary evil with little enjoyment for me when I tried it. Certainly Pritikin advocates healed themselves of advanced heart disease in the process but the dropout rate was enormous. This is a type of super restrictive diet that just doesn't work in the long term for the vast majority of people. I found it very limiting and even more boring. I mentioned the Pritikin Diet previously that was a super low fat diet designed by Nathan Pritikin. It was undoubtedly successful for some but it restricted the eater to a very limited diet of sprouts, greens, nuts in small quantities. It essentially reduced eating to a necessary evil with little enjoyment. The other end of the scale is the low carbohydrate diet proposed by Dr Robert Atkins and this comes with some excellent science attached. Finally we come to the popular low carbohydrate diets popularized by the Atkins Diet. Dr Robert Atkins worked on existing research of doctors who had studied the insulin response of the body to carbohydrate intake. Through the research he discovered that when we digest carbohydrates our blood sugar levels rise. The more quickly we digest carbohydrates, the quicker the rise in blood sugar. The body reacts to this rise in blood sugar by releasing insulin which binds with the blood sugar and converts it into glycogen to be stored in the liver. If the liver's glycogen store is full the body stores it as adipose tissue, more commonly known as fat. High blood sugar is bad for the body so maintaining a steady blood sugar is vital for good health. Unfortunately when we eat highly processed carbohydrates such as sugar, our blood sugar levels spike and we overproduce insulin to correct the problem. Our blood sugar levels plummet and we are immediately hungry again. So we eat again and so the cycle perpetuates itself. Atkins proposed that severely restricting carbohydrate intake would force the body to go to its own store of energy, its stored fat reserves. And the Atkins Diet was born. He also deduced from research that high sugar levels in the bloodstream contributed to heart disease far more than fats in the diet. This information was proven in research many years before the mistakes that led to the low fat diet. Many people found in the Atkins Diet a savior and they have adopted the diet as a long term lifestyle. For them this was the best diet. As effective as the Atkins diet was, many found the first month just too hard to get through. For these people an alternative diet was needed that would help them lose the weight without the strict self discipline the Atkins Diet required in the beginning. For most, which is the majority of us, a diet that worked in the real world was needed. An effective diet should include food, exercise and a meal planner to help make life easier. Food can be our greatest ally in losing weight because some foods are better at helping us lose weight than others. We need to be educated as to which foods to avoid and which to include, correct portion size and eating habits. The best diet will provide information on an exercise program that gets us moving and kickstarts the fat burning. Sensible and regular exercise is central to any effective and successful diet. When combined with sensible eating and dietary information it put us on the road to successful weight loss. To qualify as the best diet program it must include a meal planner which gives you meal suggestions and prepares a shopping list for the week's food. Using the meal planner you don't have to spend the day worrying about what you are going to eat that day. Weight loss and worrying about what you are going to eat at every meal is mutually exclusive. The meal planner lets you get on with life and stop thinking about food. So if you are looking for the best diet look at the programs that include a good balance of foods, from the different food groups and not unbalanced on their avoidance of any one group. Also look for a good exercise program included that will work for you and a meal planner is a must. Good luck is just a matter of research, commitment and dedication. The more committed you are, I bet the luckier you become. More Information Author Lyle Neander has studied and assessed the most popular weight loss programs and found the 3 best ones. You can download FREE weight loss reports at best diet . Lyle offers a great home page where the best sites are compared at great comparison website. Successful weight loss is possible and painless. Life is so much better when you are slim and healthy. Add this page to your favorite Social Bookmarking websites           |
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