What’s a Healthy Diet that Works?

What’s a healthy diet that works?

There are plenty of diets that different experts consider “healthy” — whether or not a diet works is mostly up to you.

Here’s a short list of “healthy diets” that people have success losing weight with.

Glycemic Index

Foods: certain fruits and vegetables; whole grains such as oats, barley, and bran; basmati rice; some pasta; quinoa; chick peas; plain yogurt; and skim milk

Macrobiotic Diet

Foods: brown rice; soy-bean products; local fruits and vegetables; beans, seeds and nuts in moderation; fish in moderation.

Organic

Foods: pesticide-free fruits and vegetables; whole grains; free-range eggs, chicken and beef; hormone-free milk

Raw Food

Foods: sushi, fruits and vegetables, nuts, seared fish and meat

Sonoma Diet

Foods: lean protein, feta cheese, almonds, bell peppers, blueberries, broccoli, grapes, olive oil, spinach, strawberries, tomatoes, whole grains and wine

Jenny Craig

Foods: cereal with skim milk, Jenny Craig-style chicken fettuccine, fruit, vegetables, Jenny Craig-style Pumpkin soup

NutriSystem

Foods: Nutrisystem-style apple-cinnamon oatmeal, cream of broccoli soup, beef tacos, whipped sweet potatoes with cheese

South Beach Diet

Foods: Phase 1: vegetables, eggs, cheese, nuts, beef, fish; Phase 2: reintroduce bread, cereal and potatoes

The Zone

Foods: Meals based ratio of carbohydrates (40%), fat (30%) and proteins (30%).

Weight Watchers

Foods: Depends which plan you use

If you want to lose a lot of weight and do it in a healthy way, the only diet that fits the bill completely is simple Caloric Reduction.

What is Caloric Reduction?

A study published in the Journal of Nutrition as well as the New York Times indicates that the Caloric Reduction diet increases the lifespan of test primates by about 1/8th.

This diet is based on a simple principle — that eating fewer calories while maintaining adequate nutrition and an active lifestyle will increase the quality and length of your life.

How do you go about eating healthy while reducing calories? Here’s a few tips.

Before worrying about how many calories you’re eating, make sure that the foods in your diet provide sufficient nutrition to avoid malnutrition once you begin to restrict them.

Avoid simple sugars and flours.

Sugars and flours generally are basically useless nutritionally, containing very little “good stuff” for their high calorie content. Besides high calories, these foods have a high glycemic index, meaning your body absorbs them quickly. This makes you hungry for more soon.

Eat both green leafy (salad) and other vegetables.

Vegetables — both the green leafy variety and many non-leaf vegetables — contain a super high amount of nutrients for their calorie cost. Vegetables are the major component of many calorie restricted but not nutrient deficient diets, meaning you can eat less calories but stay well nourished.

Carefully choose your proteins and fats

It is true that protein and fat are required macronutrients, but the form they take can have a seious impact on a person’s risk factors for diseases like high blood pressure, heart disease, stroke, and other serious life threatening illnesses.

Make sure your protein intake is good enough, but not overdone

Doctor’s recommendations for total protein intake are between 0.6 to 0.8 grams per kilogram of body weight. While this is probably a minimum for active humans, a minimum may be all you need to stay nourished while avoiding high calorie counts.

Eat complete and balanced proteins.

What is a complete protein? It is a gathering of all nine essential amino acids. A balanced protein contains all those amino acids in the proper ratios to power our human physiology. Many animal proteins are both complete and well-balanced, making small amounts of these proteins ideal for caloric reduction.

Non-animal proteins can become balanced by combining them in the right “food families”

The basic idea here is to combine certain beans with certain grains to produce a nourishing and balanced protein — and protein from rice can work together with protein content in veggies like broccoli or spinach. Be aware, that grains and rices have a high glycemic index much like white flour and offer very little in the way of food density. Long grain brown rice is best to avoid this high glycemic index problem.

Eat more monounsaturated fats and Omega-3 fats

Foods containing monounsaturated fats are olive oil, hazelnuts, almonds, avocados, and other delicious treats.. The majority of your fat intake should be from foods like these. You should also eat an amount of fat in the form of Omega-3 fatty acids, which are found in delicious and fatty fish like salmon as well as the supplement flax oil.

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