Choosing the right diet for you

Everyone is searching for the ONE diet that will finally work. Many people a big mistake when it comes to diets: They think that a diet that worked for a good friend, for instance, will also work for themselves.

losing weight with veggies
Watch out! Our bodies and our lives are different and therefore a specific diet is usually only suitable for a specific kind of person. There are already some diet books that acknowledge that people are different and that there are special diets of different types of people like Eat right 4 your type by Peter D’Adamo.  Even without a special book you can find out which diets suit you better and which don’t.

What to consider:

  • Short term vs. Long term. Do you just want to shed ten pounds, or are you looking for a lifestyle change?

  • High maintenance vs. Low maintenance. How much extra preparation does the diet need?

  • Regimented vs. Personalized. Regimented diets are very strict, and actually dictate the types of foods, total calorie count, etc. The key to its success is to follow everything to the letter. Personalized diets set the framework but let you choose how you’ll execute it. For example, it’ll give you the percentages of fat, carb and protein you can have for a day, but you can choose the food you’ll cook.

  • Body vs. Mind. Some diets are very scientific in the approach, and consider things like metabolic processes and measure the calories per gram. Others are more spiritual in approach. These diets focus less on what you eat and more on your attitude towards food.

In the following weeks I will post reviews of many popular diets along with some feedback that I got from friends and readers of my blog.

Feel free to comment with your personal experience!

So far the diets I have collected information on are:

1 – The Atkins Diet
2 – Bob Greene’s Total Body Makeover
3 – The Weight Watchers Program
4 – The Cabbage Soup Diet
5 – Russian Airforce Diet
6 – The Scarsdale Diet
7 – The Zone Diet
8 – The Mediterranean Diet
9 – The Chicken Soup Diet
10 – The Metabolism Diet
11 – The Negative Calorie Diet
12 – The Pritikin Diet
13 – The Sugar Busters Diet
14 – The South Beach Diet
15 – Dieting Pills


Photo Credits / @ Knipsermann www.pixelio.de

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Comments Ahead
  1. by Brian NeroNo Gravatar February 27th, 2009 8:45 pm

    Hey Dietingdelilah!

    We follow each other on twitter. We are a new diet company to the internet, although we’ve been practicing and tweeking this diet for a few years.

    the Devotion Diet Plan started as a way to get clients (we are personal trainers) to be held accountable for what they eat. Without going into details, we discovered that people, either on their own or on other diet plans, were either not eating enough, or often enough, or setting themselves up for future failure with “temporary weight-loss fixes”.

    The Devotion Diet plan revolves around the glycemic index, and carb timing, with a proprietary method of food ratings.

    The client chooses the foods (carbs) that they like to eat and are given a “GOAL” (a magnet of their food choices that they stick on the fridge, with the food choices color-coded) and color-coded strips that they match up at each meal to the food in the same colored category on the GOAL.

    They add a protein and the recommended serving size of the carb choice (according to their current colored block on the GOAL strip) and eat every 2-4 hrs.

    So far, the results have been tremendous. This also works as a long-term compliment to some other diet plans.

    Someday, we’d love to chat with you, and be rated by you. Please feel free to visit our website (reminding you we are still new, and have some changes planned shortly) and /or email or call us.

    Thanks so much for your time,

    Brian Nero
    The Devotion Diet Plan

  2. by JohnnyNo Gravatar March 1st, 2009 3:25 pm

    Hey Delilah –
    Great blog you’ve got here. I’ve been reading a bunch of articles today about weight loss over the past few days. There was a recent article in Time as well as a harvard study recently released that all just claim that weight loss, in the end, is simple overall calorie reduction. 100% true. but there’s more to the puzzle than what works and what doesn’t, and one important topic left off your bulleted list above-health and fitness goals!

    It’s one thing to be slim and at a weight you’re comfortable with, and quite another to be physically fit and healthy. There’s more to a diet than weight loss – things like inflammation, insulin response, hormone levels, cancer growth, alzheimer’s development, and many more, are all effected by what we eat.

  3. by cuteangel79 (Lorrie )No Gravatar March 6th, 2009 9:10 am

    RT @dietingdelilah: Let me help you to choose the right diet for you http://is.gd/ioro

  4. by pcomeauNo Gravatar March 8th, 2009 4:34 pm

    2 more to look at… Both try for long term habit fixing.
    Hacker’s Diet (http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/www/hackdiet.html) – done by a software engineer. Straightforward calorie counting, but using a running average to track weight can be a good feed back mechanism

    No S Diet (http://www.nosdiet.com) – kinda fad like, but the rules are simple and it tries to introducing habit changes with little impact (e.g. no seconds, no sugar, etc.)

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