If you put the words “best diet for weight loss” in any search engine, you’d get over 11,200,000 results. Just about all of them will disagree as to what the best diet for weight loss actually is. There is a difference of opinions. Some diets emphasize low-fat while others will declare that carbs, are the reason that your clothes tighter and tighter every day. Counting calories or points (the Weight Watchers method) is a popular approach. There are also elimination and intermittent fasting diets.
After looking at quite a few programs, you’ll find there are definite health pros program. Many experts and studies agree that diet/nutrition program participants often don’t keep the main thing the main thing! The most important characteristic of any program for weight loss is the that you can actually stick with the program. It needs to become a permanent lifestyle change. A great example of this occurred in 2014, when University of Toronto researchers examined 59 scientific weight-loss articles, including 48 randomized control trials. They concluded that the best diet is the one that “people can adhere to over the long term”. A study conducted by the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) study found that people who were on the Atkins, Ornish, Weight Watchers, and Zone diets for a year all lost similar amounts of weight. What all of those programs had in common were that those who stuck to their diets, no matter the type, lost significantly more weight than those who did not. According to researchers, your ability to follow a diet is the greatest common factor of your weight-loss success, regardless of the diet you choose.
According to obesity researcher Tim Church, chief medical officer of ACAP Health Consulting and professor of preventative medicine at Pennington Biomedical Research Center at Louisiana State University, “People have these unbelievably strong beliefs against fat or carbs. But despite the never-ending list of best-selling books that exist on weight loss, there is no macronutrient that wins the day.”
Despite every diet’s claims or gimmicks, if you are consuming fewer calories than you are burning per day, you are going to lose weight, period. What makes a diet effective is cutting them in a way that’s actually doable.
“If you can’t eat a certain way for the rest of your life, that diet is an exercise in futility,” Church says. “Find a way of eating that becomes your new normal, your new lifestyle. The goal is to find a way of life that happens to improve weight loss. That’s the program that will work.”