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The Top 5 Best and Worst Diets of 2015
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Was losing weight a part of your 2015 New Year’s resolution plans? How did that work out for you? Don’t feel too bad if you didn’t meet your goals- many people want to lose weight and really have sincere plans to do so but aren’t successful.
Did you have an actual plan or did you just try to “eat healthy”? One of the problems with that type of general statement is that it lacks any real structure for you to mark progress. Especially in the beginning. Many diet plans or “I’m going to stop eating junk food” resolutions will work short term, but sticking to a diet plan or making real, healthy changes you can live with is another story. After a few weeks, many people simply become frustrated or bored and they just give up.
We are going to look at 5 of the best and 5 of the worst diets that are currently making the rounds. The original list includes 35 diets, but for this article, we will simply look at the top 5 of each. For this list, health experts considered how safe, nutritious, and effective the diet was, as well as how easy it was to follow, and how effective it was at preventing two major problems in the US; heart disease and diabetes.
Keep reading and find out which diet might be the best for you and which ones you should never even consider trying.
The Top 5 Best Diets
1. The DASH Diet
DASH is the Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension diet, but you don’t have to have high blood pressure to be one this diet. This dietary approach got high marks for safety, nutritional completeness, ability to prevent (or control) diabetes, and for its ability to support a healthy heart. This diet is not well known, most likely because it was not written by a celebrity, but this diet beat out all others in every area.
2. The Mayo Clinic Diet
One of the things that the experts loved about the Mayo Clinic Diet was that this diet could be maintained for a lifetime. It earned very high ratings from the experts for being a great tool against diabetes, as well as for its nutritional completeness and safety. This diet is moderately effective for weight loss, but is a healthy eating plan you can follow for life.
3. The TLC Diet
The TLC Diet (Therapeutic Lifestyle Changes) was created by the National Institutes of Health and it’s a super solid diet plan. It concentrates on cardiovascular health while being considered that a completely safe, very healthful, easy to follow diet, according to the experts. This diet is a sort of “do it yourself” diet, but experts agreed that this diet was something many people could easily stick to.
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4. The Flexitarian Diet
This little known diet outperformed many other more popular diets, with rather high scores in the areas of easiness to follow, long term weight loss, and nutritional completeness. Some of those on the panel of experts described this diet as a good approach for the entire family and as a very good plan that almost anyone can stick to.
5. The Mediterranean Diet
This diet has an emphasis on fruits and vegetables, fish, olive oil, and other types of healthy foods. This diet is exceedingly simple and eminently sensible. All the experts listed this diet as being very healthy and very simple to follow, which gave it a huge edge over many of the other more popular diets on the market today.
Everyone thinks that they recognize “bad” or “unhealthy” diets, but if this is true, why do so many people follow them? As Yale University’s Dr. David Katz points out, many of these unhealthy and super restrictive diets do work, at least in the short term, which is what makes them so popular. Of course anyone will lose weight on an “All You Can Eat Cabbage Soup” diet, but, exactly how long can someone stay on a diet like that and not lose interest? What usually follows is a food binge and then a return to your former eating habits.
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Top 5 Worst Diets
1. The Dukan Diet
This panel of experts put together by US News put this diet at dead last, giving it terrible ratings in every single category. It was described as being too restrictive and having too many rules, no evidence that it works at all, and being unsafe. One expert on this panel went as far as to describe the Dukan diet as “idiotic.”
2. The Atkins Diet
This super popular low-carb diet, although effective short term, leaves a great deal to be desired as a long term eating plan. Although all the experts agreed that this diet would most likely lead to the most weight loss short term, it got very low marks in every other category, including nutrition, safety, and heart health. This diet is quite restrictive and most people grow bored with it rather quickly.
3. The Body Reset Diet
This is another very popular diet that is touted by several celebrities, but this diet left the experts cold. They gave this diet mediocre scores in all categories with particularly low marks in the areas of easiness to follow and long term weight loss. This panel seemed to feel that this diet was nothing more than a “gimmick” and that no one should consider this to be a means of sustainable eating.
SEE ALSO: Top Reasons to Go Off Your Diet Today!
4. The Macrobiotic Diet
A best-selling diet book that experts discredited as “bunk.” They believed that this plan was an extreme change from the way most Americans are accustomed to eating and that it was terribly strict and difficult to follow. A few of the experts described this diet as a hodge podge of folklore, nonsense, dietary guidance, and mysticism that should appeal to no one.
5. The Supercharged Hormone Diet
This is another diet that received less than stellar marks in all categories. It was marked especially low in the easiness to follow, nutrition, effectiveness against heart disease and diabetes, and long term weight loss categories. These health experts stated emphatically that the basis of this diet was preposterous, that it wouldn’t improve overall eating behavior, and that it would not produce long term weight loss.
Perhaps the best diet of all is really no diet at all. Many people find that when they eliminate fast foods and junk foods, remove as much sugar as possible, and eat a mainly fresh, organic plant based diet with plenty of seeds, nuts, and healthy fats, they lose weight without trying and maintain that weight easily and naturally.
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