Have you tried a few diets just to be disappointed? Do you see friends lose weight on a diet and a little voice inside your head says: "this is the hardest (strangest, craziest...) diet I ever seen?" Do you have dozens of diet books, cook books, videos and recipe cards that have been sitting around for a few years? (and you don't know what to do with them? or are hoping that one day they will be useful?) You are not alone and most diet experts will tell you that each diet only works for a few percentage of people, sometimes only one or two percent! That gives you a statistical chance of failing 25 to 99 times out of 100. These numbers are hard to take. Nobody wants to start dieting knowing of their chance of failing is so high. Yet we keep on buying these books, even a meal plans, and for most it still doesn't work. Who keeps on writing and publishing more diet and cook books? They are written for diabetes, heart disease and overweight conditions, cholesterol, you name it. Is this a hopeless effort being fueled by false hope and pipe dreams with no reality check?
One of the reasons most diets don't work is simply because they don't fit you. Your specific abilities, needs and style (taste, schedule, budget, etc.) Added to the personal fit problem, most of us simply don't know what a proper diet should be. Our bodies are not simple machines and it is hard to figure out what to do when we are hungry or simply have no time to prepare and sit for a proper meal. Add to this the confusion about calories, nutrients and the ever growing problem of non-nutritious (almost toxic) levels of sugar and fats, no wonder we are completely confused. So diets are created with specific guidelines: recipes, amounts, flavors, cooking styles and schedules. Exact recipes with precise amounts make sure you have the right amount of calories and nutrients without too much of anything that will throw us out of balance. Sometimes diets are so specific they prescribe exact foods and recipes (one grapefruit a day, one cup of yogurt for breakfast, 8 ounces of cereal with 1/2 cup of skim milk.) But specific prescription simply do not fit most people. Not everyone likes yogurt and skim milk for breakfast everyday. If your diet tells you to eat a fresh grapefruits every day, and you live in Augusta Maine or Glasgow Scotland, grapefruits may not be the most popular or available fruit (and what about the summer months?) So what should you substitute? Should you substitute when you don't know why you are eating grapefruit? (what is the nutritional and caloric value and how does it fit with my snack at 10 AM?) Should you make the effort and go to a vegetable store and buy for a week? What if you don't like grapefruit? Can you add sugar or sweetener on top? You get the idea, there are too many possibilities you will not like a diet. If diets are too general, like the Atkins diet, which suggested cutting out most carbohydrates and leaving fats and protein as the diet's nutritional components. In the case of Atkins diet, the most popular diet in the US for years, there are many recipes and menu examples. This is not the case with most other diets.
At Amazon this past week, the best selling diet book is The 17 Day Diet: A Doctor's Plan Designed for Rapid Results seems like a good start if you want to lose weight quickly. Moreno claims quick weight loss early in the diet is more effective in the long run. He is certainly correct when it comes to motivation to stick to a diet. If you see the weight comes off quickly, you are going to stick with what he says. Most of his ideas are not new, eat less, eat healthy and exercise. He give you a bit of tough love by telling you that you need to be focused and do the right things to lose weight. Nothing new here but the overall plan and the packaging. To some of you that will be enough to get started. I am not 100% sure that everyone will stick to the phases Moreno came up with. His 17 days are small discrete section which you do your stuff and end with a result. To keep on going, he came up with three more 17 day sections which make up the whole diet. There is something nice about doing a diet for a few days and having it "done with" until you want to go to the next step. Good luck with the diet if you try it out. Let me know what you think and if it worked for you. Any good tips and success stories help many others who are still sitting in the sidelines (the diet sidelines that is :)
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