Three Healthy Diets that Work

I hate to tell you this, but dieting never works. If you’re a big tub of lard, like me, and you hook up with one fad diet plan or another, you are bound to lose weight and—like Oprah—you’re also destined to gain it all back, possibly with another spare tire to boot. The only way to lose weight and keep it off is to change your lifestyle radically with a fitness-oriented exercise regimen (that you stick to, forever and ever amen) and limiting what you eat (keep it healthy), and how much of it you eat. Sure, you can point at Valerie Bertinelli and say, “See, Jenny Craig worked for her!” By all appearances, that would be a true statement, but don’t believe it. Valerie may have lost the flab using the Jenny Craig System, but she’s kept it off by changing her lifestyle; nothing less will do it.

With that said, I will try to sell you snake oil labeled as Healthy Diets that Work.

After much research on the subject, I have found that virtually everyone who has an opinion of the “best” diets have very different lists. The best guess is that they listed the fad diets in the order of their success among their friends, and let’s face it: some groups of fat friends are different from other groups of blubber-butts. The results are purely subjective and depend on the individual’s metabolism as well as on how much effort the participants gave the particular system.

 In my personal opinion, vegetarian diets work best at eliminating flab and keeping it off, provided you are able to keep with the diet. As evidence of this, I use a couple friends of mine who follow strict vegan diets. They are all skin and bones, pale, emaciated, not particularly healthy despite their claims to the contrary and suffer remarkable lapses of memory and judgment as meat proteins are responsible for the development and overall health of neural cells, namely the ones in the brain. However, the point to remember is that they’re skinny, so if you don’t mind lowering your IQ a couple dozen points, try these diets:

Glycemic Index Diet Includes certain fruits and vegetables; whole grains such as oats, barley, and bran; basmati rice; some pasta; quinoa; chick peas; very small servings of extremely lean meats, particularly fish and poultry (without the skin, of course); plain yogurt and skim milk.

Lacto Vegetarian Diet Comprised of various fruits and vegetables, grains, legumes plus some dairy products (very similar to the Glycemic Index minus the scant servings of lean meat).

Vegan Diet       Consists of fruits, vegetables, grains, legumes and excludes all meat and animal products; your basic grazer diet.

One thing you can look forward to if you adopt a vegetarian diet (a thing I would never do in a million years, but it’s your body) is eating five meals a day, perhaps more—though be advised that if you make them all feasts, it may defeat your purpose: eat small meals! As everyone knows, grazers have to eat almost constantly because of the low protein content of the food (and yes, your vegan friends will point out that beans and many other non-meat foods contain proteins, and they’re right, though it’s a  fraction of what you’d get from a nice, juicy steak, and they aren’t the complex protiens found in meats). Learning to moo or bleat like a sheep is not required, but it doesn’t hurt.