Popular Diets: What's the Best Approach?

Obesity is a major public health problem in this country, and maybe the most important health problem that we're facing today. Two-thirds of adult Americans, are overweight or obese.

If the diet is promising them that they'll lose seven pounds a week, it's probably not a real safe diet. Most people that start a weight loss diet will lose anywhere from like one to three pounds a week, maybe a little but more the first couple weeks as they're body fluid status kind of adjusts to the diet. And after that, between one and three pounds a week is a good, safe way to weight loss and, if that's what the diet promises, it's probably a pretty sound diet.

Most of mainstream diets fall into four categories. The conventional, traditional approach is consuming a low-fat diet, and also now, more recently, a low-energy-dense diet, which means you have lower amounts of calories per weight of food.

Fruits and vegetables, for example, have a lot of water content, are low-energy-dense foods, whereas foods that are very dry, like pretzels and crackers, or foods that have a lot of fat, like cheese, are high-energy-dense foods.

And then there's the recent popularity of the low-carbohydrate diet approaches. And then we also have diets that might be very low in fat that have extreme restrictions on dietary fat intake.

Many claims have been made recently that the low-carbohydrate diets can outperform traditional low fat diets.

So the high-protein diets that are popular right now, high-protein with either low-carb or moderate-carb. One of the reasons those are probably popular is, by increasing your protein, for a lot of people, that helps with satiety or a sense of fullness, so that you're not as hungry all day long.

What does the research show? It depends on the timeframe of the study.

There have been recent, well-done research studies that have demonstrated that the Atkins diet generates greater weight loss at six months than a more conventional, traditional low-fat dietary approach.

But longer-term data shows different results.

But these have been short-term studies, six months long, and one study that went on for one year suggests that both groups have the same amount of weight loss at the end of one year because of the marked weight regain in the Atkins diet subjects.

So what's a heavy person to do?

They should stick to the conventional, traditional diet, which we have a lot of years of experience and data on, and that's a low-fat, high-carbohydrate, high-protein diet that we recommend for people now until we have finished our more detailed, longer studies with the low-carbohydrate approach.

Many dieters find good success, at least initially, on whatever diet they try.

Anything works for a little while, because most of the fad diets that you have basically what they do is they cut your calories in one way or another. Whether you're eating a bunch of grapefruit every day and that's it or just having cabbage soup or eating just a hamburger every day with no bread.

Whatever you do, basically all they do is they're cutting back on your calories. And people can do anything for a few days, but you burn out on those, because it's not realistic that you could do that the rest of your life. It doesn't lead you to make wise lifestyle changes.

Only with lifestyle changes can most people keep off, long term, the weight they lost through dieting. Experts say the key is a four-part strategy.

There are data to suggest there are certain cardinal features that are associated with people losing weight and keeping their weight off long term. And those features include:

• self-monitoring,
• where you check your body weight on a regular basis;
• eating a low-fat diet;
• embarking or participating in serious physical activity of an hour to an hour and a half a day, and
• eating breakfast every day.

And finally, those people who have also been associated with significant long-term weight management success are those that had some triggering factor that caused them to go on a weight loss diet. So something happened in their lives that made the desire to lose weight really click or stick out or become important. Those are people that had long-term success.

Most people can lose weight. What's difficult is keeping the pounds off. But doctors say making the necessary lifestyle changes to maintain a proper weight is one of the most important things people can do for their long-term health.