According to U.S. News and World Reports top diet rankings, your health resolutions should focus on a healthy balanced diet that blends well with your lifestyle as opposed to attempting over-the-top restrictive fads. Two diet plans that tied as the best strategy for weight loss include the DASH Diet and Mediterranean diet focusing on flexible guidelines and real food.
“It’s tasty, it’s sensible, nutritionally sound, and there’s great research that it can help ward off or control a whole host of chronic diseases,” explained Angela Haupt, U.S. News & World Report’s assistant managing editor when describing the Mediterranean plan.
Crash Diets And Trends In addition, avoiding crash diets and trends when aiming to lose weight is key for the long run, with the Keto Diet voted last by the U.S. News’ experts. This diet suggests a strict no carb policy whilst consuming foods with high fats. The diet was described as not sustainable by Haupt.
“It really is the diet of the moment, but it can be a pretty extreme plan. There’s a very strict carb limit. Our experts say it’s not necessary to be so extreme or restrictive,” Haupt explained.
“One expert said if a diet recommends snacking on bacon, you can’t take it seriously as a health-promoting way to eat,” Haupt stated.
Diets are ranked by a panel of experts that make up the nation’s top nutritionists and physicians who evaluate and rank 40 diets divided into 9 categories which include a likelihood of long and short-term results, ease of fulfillment, and overall effectiveness when battling health issues such as diabetes or heart problems.
Both the Mediterranean and DASH diets facilitate the flexibility to select meals to form a wide variety of nutritious foods, stated Kelly Hogan, Mount Sinai Hospital’s Dublin Breast Center’s wellness and nutrition manager based in New York.
Hogan also stated the similarities between the two dietary options as they both offer an abundance of vegetable and fruits, healthy fats, grains, lean proteins, and dairy with a particular avoidance of processed foods and saturated fats.
“The DASH and Mediterranean diets are not excluding any foods or food groups or restricting anything,” Hogan noted. “I think that’s really important when it comes to how a normal person eats in general.”
In addition, both diets are backed by scientific research and data showing they promote weight loss and reduce the risks of health problems and conditions.
“There’s a lack of good solid research on nutrition and diets in general, so it says something when a plan like the Mediterranean Diet is backed up with good solid research,” stated Haupt.
The programme Weight Watchers received a high score among the rankings labeled as first among commercial diet plans.
“Weight Watchers offers the flexibility to shape your own diet,” Haupt described. “You have to stick to guidelines about how much you’re consuming every day, but what does that look like? You can eat what you want. There are no foods that are off-limits.”
Weight Watchers
According to Haupt, the plan benefits form a large amount of support and responsibility Weight Watchers offers its members.
However, she does believe that those who aim to achieve long-term results need to discover a path that works for them once they’ve understood the most important points form this commercial plan.
“What I don’t like about any commercial diet is that the focus is not on your actual food choices,” Hogan explained. “It’s about calories or points or numbers, and that really takes away from your ability to be in tune with your hunger cues and your fullness cues and what you’re really craving. If we become more in tune with those things, we naturally consume how much the body needs. Paying too much attention to numbers takes away from that.”
Dieters who aim to succeed on a long-term basis must understand what’s important and suitable to their own lifestyle fist stressed Hogan and Haupt.