Which Diet Plan Works Best?

If you wonder what diet works for you, there is a simple answer tailored to your needs.

The Diet That Works

Atkins, Weight Watchers, Zone, Jenny Craig, LEARN, Nutrisystem, Ornish, Volumetrics, Rosemary Conley, Slimming World and, let’s not forget, the South Beach diet.

Those are the most popular diets out there and they promise easy weight loss with minimum fuss and to be superior to the others.

Is one of them really the best?

Scientiests Goes And Examine Diets

Researchers from Canada’s University of Alberta went to find out and checked medical databases for studies that had people follow one of the above programs.

Altogether this resulted in looking at the data of 48 studies and examining the diet results of 7,200 people who were overweight or obese (having a BMI of 25 or greater).

Was there a clear winner? I think the study’s conclusion speaks for itself:

Significant weight loss was observed with any low-carbohydrate or low-fat diet. Weight loss differences between individual named diets were small. This supports the practice of recommending any diet that a patient will adhere to in order to lose weight.

Those on a low-carb diet, for example, after six months maintained a weight loss of approximately 8.75 kg, which another six months later was reduced to 7.25 kg. People following a low-fat diet were at 7.9  kg at six months and at 7.2 kg at twelve months.

Do What Works For You!

That won’t make me many new friends in the low carb community, which only a little while ago got into a fit over me criticizing this faulty study.

For me there is no near-religious dogma involved. I counted calories to lose weight, you may be better off with low carb or Weight Watchers. Do what works for you, but don’t claim it’s the only weight loss method that works.

Picture courtesy of Arnold Gatilao.