Juice Diet for Weight Loss?

Posted on November 16, 2011 by admin

There is what seems to be a never ending variety of diets that you can choose from to try and lose weight. There are dieting aids, like pills, in addition to a number of dieting programs. That is after all, why we started this particular site on diets that work, and maybe diets that don’t work as well. A great way to enhance your diet though is to do a little bit of juicing. Is a juice diet the way to go for weight loss? In the short term it can be pretty darn effective, but it probably isn’t going to be much of a long term strategy. Without further ado…

One of the benefits that a lot of people are after when they start juicing is that they are aiming for a bit of a cleansing effect for the digestive system. The idea that toxins build up in the digestive tract, and then sabotage weight loss and general health seems to make sense. Do we have any serious science to back it up? No, we don’t. Based off of intuition, it would seem that short term juicing may be effective to at least some extent. Don’t take our word for it though.

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If we are to assume that juicing does help to rid or reduce the number of toxins in the body, then how would it do that? For starters, there is a school of thought that we eat too many processed carbohydrates, and far too much meat that has been raised in dirty environments and pumped full of antibiotics. Over time, these substances build in the body of whoever, or whatever, eats these foods. Juicing, since the fruits and vegetables are coming from a point lower on the food chain, is thought to help cut the amount of toxins being taken in. Additionally, the extra fluid may help to flush the body, further increasing the detoxifying effect.

Juicing should not be considered a way to achieve a balanced meal though. There are going to be nutritional gaps. In the short term, it may not be a serious issue, but with time, a lack of protein and fat may result in other health issues. For that reason, we don’t really recommend a long term approach to juicing. Really, we’re not huge fans of it, because even in a shorter term approach, it may amount to a crash diet, which could very well be effective, but is not a great practice to get in to.

Juicing can be pretty nice to curb hunger though. A steady intake of fluid as well as any residual fiber left over from the juicing process can help many people feel a bit fuller for a bit longer. Is it the same as eating a quarter pound of broccoli? No, but it is a lot easier.

If you choose to juice vegetables, you may get some benefits that may not be easily achieved through other means. You can juice a massive quantity of produce that would be almost impossible to ingest should you try and eat all of that. It is not a one stop solution to getting your fruits and vegetables in, but it may be a good way to supplement your intake. After all, while you could get a tremendous hit of micro-nutrients, you won’t get as much fiber. This may be better for some since fiber does have a pretty heft dose of fiber that could make for a gastronomic adventure in some cases.

Hopefully, in this relatively short article, we covered a few points about how juicing could be an effective supplement to a diet. We don’t really think that juicing should be considered a diet unto itself. There are bound to be some who will take a few shots in the comments, but we stand by the assertion that it isn’t a complete approach to dieting and shouldn’t really be used as such for most people.

Posted in Weight Loss | Tagged detox diets, diet plan, diets that work, juice diet, juicing, weight loss | Leave a comment

What About The Green Tea Diet?

Posted on November 3, 2011 by admin

It is no secret that green tea has gotten quite a bit of positive publicity in recent years, all the way to the point that some may even reference a green tea diet of sorts. There are a lot of people who will swear that green tea has benefits reaching from health (with its high antioxidant count) to weight loss that is unmatched through other methods. There is no doubt that green tea may be effective for weight loss, but how effective can it really be?

That is going to be dependant on a number of factors. Like we have pointed out numerous times on this site, the diets that work are the diets that are going to get a person to eat less, and may be accompanied by a sensible exercise program. There aren’t a ton of secrets, but some approaches and little “tricks” can make one dieting approach vastly more effective for certain people. Can a green tea diet, or diet supplemented in green tea be one of those tricks?

First off, let us go into the general benefits of green tea. We’ll start with some of the common uses, and then focus a bit on how a green tea diet sort of approach may make other dietary practices a bit more effective.

Green tea is a tea that has grown in popularity here in the “West” for the last several years. It is a nice alternative to those who do not enjoy black tea, or who prefer something with a stronger flavor than most white teas have to offer. Because of the process of cultivation as well as processing for consumption, green tea retains a high level of polyphenols and antioxidants. This leads many to believe the green tea may have powerful benefits related to health. Some research on polyphenols suggests that they may have a role in longevity. Antioxidants are, as their name implies, good to offset the damage that oxygen can do to cells in the body. It is rather odd that oxygen is vital to life, but it can have a bit of an effect in the process of aging and the degradation of cells.

Regardless, one of the important points that has led to attempts at formulating a green tea diet is the presence of an antioxidant known as EGCG. EGCG has a long scientific name that we won’t try and get into here, but you can read plenty about it on Wikipedia. It is believed to have strong therapeutic effects for a number of conditions, and may also aid in weight loss.

Given that many people do not eat enough vegetables and fruits, getting antioxidants can be problematic. It has been said by some that coffee is the number one source of antioxidants in most Americans’ diets. Should an antioxidant such as EGCG be found to have both health benefits as well as fat loss benefits, it would be difficult to dispute its effectiveness.

Should you begin drinking gallons of green tea, or going to the store to take capsules filled with green tea extracts though? That’s a good question, but there are a few points to consider.

First off, it is important to make sure that the rest of the diet is in order. A poor diet that already supplies too many calories won’t be offset by a few caps or cups of green tea. A green tea diet is, by no means, an approach that should include burgers, fries and loads of green tea. It really isn’t a diet on its own anyway, but a supplement plan in addition to a strong diet.

The second point is that there are potential health downsides to taking in large amounts of green tea, namely EGCG. As with anything, too much of a good thing can exist.

Should you decide to go with a green tea supplement, it is important to find a good supplement that is reliable and clean. Given that the supplement industry is largely unregulated, it is important to do a bit of research. One popular one is known as Green Tea Extreme, which gets good reviews. Another is simply from NOW Foods and is their line of Green Tea Extract. NOW is a reputable company that offers a range of well reviewed products ranging from protein powders to vitamins and, of course, Green Tea Extract.

Have you tried to implement a green tea diet? If you have, please leave us a comment to let us know what worked, what didn’t, and what may be of use to our readers.

Posted in Weight Loss | Tagged benefits of green tea, diets that work, green tea diet, polyphenols, teas, weight loss | Leave a comment

Is There One Best Diet Plan?

Posted on October 22, 2011 by admin

How Can You Find The Best Diet Plan?

Dieters often spend a lot of time looking for the best diet plan out there when they could actually get down to the nitty gritty of the actual dieting and start making progress. That sounds like a harsh introduction, and it kind of is, but the point is that for many people, there is not a single best diet plan. There are a lot of different ways to drop the weight and to get into better shape. That means that the best diet plan is the plan that works best for you in order to lower calories and get the weight off.

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With that said, we can probably go through a few of the points that should be considered before choosing a plan. Certain people are going to do far better with certain approaches to dieting than other will.

For instance, a diabetic is going to need a far different diet plan than someone who is free of any metabolic abnormalities. As well, an athlete that is doing a high volume of training is going to need far different nutritional proportions than someone who walks a few days per week, may take a spin class but is otherwise fairly sedentary in comparison to the athlete example.

So, to begin with, we can narrow different diets down to low carbohydrate diets and nearly any other diet plan out there. The athletes and others who have extremely high activity levels probably won’t do well with a low carb approach. Those with less time to workout, injuries and other restrictions on time or activity levels may do quite well by using carbohydrate restriction to help them drop body weight.

With the issue of higher or lower carb diets at least touched on, what are a cople of the other key points that any worthwhile diet plan should encompass? In short, they should be built around solid dieting principles. That means proper hydration, a balanced approach, a minimization or even complete elimination of processed foods, and an actual caloric deficit.

No diet plan worth its salt will work if you don’t eat less than you do now. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of ways to lose weight. The key point that each and every one of them has in common is that the dieter will eat less than they need in order to maintain their current body weight. There are no ifs ands or buts about it. losing weight is first and foremost a question of energy balance. Some diets do a better job of helping to initiate a deficit, but they all have a deficit included as the “key” to their efficacy.

Is there a way to tell which diet plan is best for you? That is really a personal question in a lot of ways. It often will take a bit of experimentation, an honest self assessment, the need to speak with your doctor to make sure you don’t have any underlying issues that could be made worse by the diet, and a determination of whether you’ve got the discipline to stick with it.

This all really is a long winded way of saying what we said in the very first paragraph, that the best diet plan for you is going to be the one that you can stick to while maintaining lasting progress.

Posted in Weight Loss | Tagged diet plan, diets that work, weight, weight loss | 1 Comment

Detox Diets For Weight Loss?

Posted on October 19, 2011 by admin

Should You Follow Detox Diets to Lose Weight?

There are a lot of crazy ideas out there, from intense crash diets, diets that forbid quite a few foods without restricting intake, as well as the recent rise in popularity of detox diets to help people lose weight. There may be something to these diets, but there has to be some basic fundamentals in place before anyone can remotely call them a good idea. One of these big points that we will dance around in this article is the notion of whether people need to be cleansed, which is supposed to be the main purpose of detox diets anyway.

First off, detox diets come in all forms and can range from sensible and possibly quite effective to pretty “out there”. There are some that are focused around little food, plenty of watever, lots of cruciferous vegetables and some other foods that may be reasonably decent. Others will allow you very little in terms of actual food, but will let you eat all the spice you can handle in what would seem to be an effort to force you to sweat for the duration of the diet. That may be okay on the surface, but considering that detox diets don’t just end in a day or two, many detox diets with the craziest recommendations are anywhere between harmful and unsustainable.

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The first real point to consider as to whether people should be following detox diets to lose weight is whether the particular diet is even safe. We touched on this a bit in the previous paragraph, but some people cannot handle the diets that are supposed to cleanse your body of toxins. Some people have conditions that could make following any of the various detox diets dangerous or even life threatening. Since we always advise that a person consult with a p

hysician before they begin any new diet or exercise program, it would be especially true in the case of detox diets.

The next point of consideration is what kind of weight loss could you expect from such an approach. Some people choose to follow detox diets in an effort to shed excess weight because they figure that they are going to get a double benefit. Get some toxins pushed out of their bodies, while also drastically cutting back on their food and forcing the weight to come off. The thing is, how much of that weight is the initial water weight associated with nearly any diet plan, and how much is the type of weight you want to be losing? Once the diet is over, can you keep the weight off with what you were doing before? The answer is that it probably is not going to be possible. This raises the situation where someone may just cycle on and off of detox diets for an extended period of time, which isn’t usually considered healthy by anyone’s standards.

Finally, there is the issue of whether detox diets are even necessary to cleanse the body of toxins. It may be true that we are full of toxins compared to previous generations, but the idea that if we just follow a super secret approach for a few days, or weeks, or even months, will fix all of this is difficult to fathom. There are some very smart detox diets out there that cover the nutritional bases, while also doing a fairly decent job of at least resetting dietary habits, which would probably do quite a bit for getting a detoxing effect anyway.

Should you decide to follow any of these diets, it is important to look at what the diet actually entails. Do you have to eat nothing but hot peppers, drink vodka and swill vinegar for three days straight (which would be insane and we DO NOT recommend people even dare one another to do this), of are there sensible recommendations that you can follow to get the weight off and perhaps feel a bit better? Not all detox diets are bad, so long as you know what to look for.

Posted in Detox Diets, Diets That Work | Tagged detox diets, diets, weight, weight loss | 1 Comment

Detox Diets For Weight Loss?

Posted on October 19, 2011 by admin

Should You Follow Detox Diets to Lose Weight?

Image via Wikipedia

hysician before they begin any new diet or exercise program, it would be especially true in the case of detox diets.

Posted in Detox Diets, Diets That Work | Tagged detox diets, diets, weight, weight loss | 1 Comment

Low Calorie Diets are Diets That Work

Posted on October 18, 2011 by admin

Do All Diets That Work Have Lower Calories?

People have gotten a lot of misinformation about which diets are diets that work, and which ones are complete wastes of time. Unfortunately, people have begun thinking that low calories diets are going to be in the latter category, and that every other approach is going to land in the former. This is unfortunate because people are unknowingly sabotaging their own weight loss efforts while they chase down the next big approach that can work. Does that mean that the other approaches such as a reasonable time on a crash diet or a low carb diet or some other method won’t work then? Of course not, what all of these diets have in common is that they lower calories, and sometimes they do so without the dieter realizing they are eating less.

The best way to make this point would be with the low carb and high fat diets that we have seen grow in popularity in the last decade or so. Diets like the Atkins diet and the South Beach Diet were suddenly the only diets that work because they put the blame on a lot of things other than eating too much. The claim was that a person could eat just about as much as they could handle without having to worry about gaining weight and putting on fat so long s they kept their carbohydrates as low as possible. What this did though, was drop the number of calories that most people were taking in each day. Carbs are easy calories, and all diets that work will cut out the easy calories before anything else. Add in the increased satiety that one gets with a high protein and fat intake and it is easy to see how people could be eating quite a bit less without really recognizing what was going on.

Another recent popular approach is that of intermittent fasting. The approch, with the popular Eat Stop Eat being one of the most well known versions of intermittent fasting, basically says that you don’t eat at all for a certain period of time, then you eat as much as you’d like. Most people feel like they are absolutely stuffed to the gills during this short eating window. Most people though, they end up eating far less each day because their window to eat is more condensed. Intermittent fasting approaches, when they are done correctly, are definitely diets that work because of the lowered calories. Any other benefits are coincidental in a lot of cases, but they still exist.

By now you should be seeing a theme that the diets that work are by and large all lower in calories. It doesn’t really seem to matter where the calories get cut from, so long as a baseline amount of protein is eaten and the calories are not too low. If all of this is in place, then weight loss should happen without too many problems. Who cares whether people realize that they are eating less? After all, the diets that work are also the diets that people can stay on long enough to reach their goals.

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How to Find Diets That Work

Posted on October 17, 2011 by admin

The diets that work quickly are the diets that result in the loss of both fat and water in a short amount of time. Whenever you hear someone say that they lost fifteen pounds in only three weeks on a certain diet, there is really no way that the diet elicited this level of fat loss. It is natural to lose quite a bit of water during the initial stages of a diet. The common lowering of sodium, carbohydrates and fat all have a bit of a water shedding effect in many cases.

Diets that work in the long term will also have a similar effect in a lot of cases, but it may not be as dramatic. The difference is that the first diet is likely to be an ultra restrictive approach on the edge of being a crash diet. Can a crash diet be included in the list of diets that work? Sure, just check out that article for some information. However, they are not the only approaches that can be successful.

The key to making any diet effective is compliance, lifestyle changes if necessary, and a sensible exercise program. This means that for many people, finding a diet that works effectively is an active process that requires a lot of attention and dedication on the part of the dieter.

Here is a simple set of points that you can follow to sift through the diets that work and the diets that don’t work. These are fairly fluid and may change a bit since there is constant research being done, as well as new diets being pitched on what seems like an almost daily basis.

1) The diet shouldn’t claim science while somehow bashing science at the same time. Diets that work are grounded in reality, no matter what the approach is.

2) Diets that work are approaches that don’t make you nervous. If you look at an approach and the thought of following the guidelines makes you wonder if it is a good idea, it usually is not a good idea.

3) There should not be extended periods of restriction for a diet. Some have phases of restriction, but staying in too deep of a deficit, or restricting a certain food group for too long is a great way to burn out and eventually undo all the progress that you have made.

In the end, there is never going to be a set it and forget it type of approach to making a diet work. There will be the need for exercise, if you’re healthy enough, as well as the need to stay dedicated to a plan, and get back on plan if you fall off the wagon for a bit. In the end, all diets are diets that work, so long as you stick to it and don’t do yourself any kind of harm by following the approach.

Posted in Diets That Work | Tagged crash diet, diets, diets that work, weight, weight loss | 1 Comment

Can a Crash Diet Work?

Posted on October 16, 2011 by admin

The phrase crash diet is usually one that is met with a tremendous amount of disdain. A crash diet is usually thought of as being a flat out starvation diet that is bound to end bad. Often, this assumption is reasonably accurate, and the diet does result in a rebound period of eating that undoes whatever progress may have been realized.

These points don’t necessarily mean that a crash diet doesn’t necessarily have the occasional positive use. In some cases, a crash diet can be extremely valuable if it is implemented correctly. In fact, there are a number of people who include the crash diet on the list of diets that work if they are done correctly. Should this form of dieting be the only form of dieting that someone does? No, that would not be a great idea for most people. Too many people end up yo-yo dieting to try and stay with a certain weight range, where they are in a constant state of flux between eating like their life depended on it, and then being as restrictive as humanly possible. In general, it’s not a healthy approach, and nobody would really want to do this if they could avoid it.

A point in time where a crash diet may be a good option is for the disciplined and motivated dieter who wants or feels that they need to boost their efforts and get a big start on their weight loss goals. The only problem here is that if someone has a lot of weight to lose, and needs that kick in the pants to get going, are they going to have the dedication required to adhere to a crash diet for even the shortest amount of time? Further, are they going to be healthy enough to withstand the stress that an extreme diet results in?

For those who have decided that they want to crash diet for whatever reason, we can only point out that a plan needs to be in place. Without a plan for how you are going to enter the diet, stay on the diet, and get off the diet, the chances of a long term success story are minimal. The idea that is often repeated is that using a crash diet to transition to a more moderate plan is a good one.

So, that means doing research and finding the healthiest approach you can find. this should be discussed with your physician as well to be sure there aren’t any underlying issues that could create a very bad and potentially life threatening situation. After that is figured out, getting a moderate plan in place for afterwards is needed.

All of this should be wrapped in a schedule for how things will go. Anyone on a crash diet needs to know that they will not complete their diet, in most cases, just by sticking to the crash plan. A few weeks is all that most people can handle or get a positive effect from.

If you are thinking of doing some sort of dieting program like this, it would be best to carry on with further reading on the subject. Starting with a basic Wikipedia search on the term “crash diet” is a good start. It is definitely not for everyone, but in some cases, the crash diet can be exactly what is needed.

Posted in Diets That Work | Tagged diets, diets that work, weight loss | 1 Comment

What Sets Diets That Work Apart From Those That Don’t?

Posted on October 14, 2011 by admin

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It may be a little bit of an obvious statement, but there are a great number of factors that set the diets that work apart from the diets that do not work. The point though, is that it can be more confusing than you would think. Some people may hear about a new fad diet that sounds great, and then they jump on it. Only, after a few weeks they realize that they do not feel good, or they aren’t losing any weight. Sometimes, in the worst case, they figure out that they are gaining weight by staying on this diet. The diets that work are easier to follow because they will elicit weight loss without driving you insane.

To be more specific, diets that work are the diets that look very, very boring. The diets that work are the ones that recommend natural eating, low calories, calorie free liquids, fewer starches, lower fat, lean protein, no sugar, and plenty of plant foods. There are a lot of diets that all fit this mold, and a lot of them work. If a diet has all of these covered, in one form or another, then there is a good chance that they are going to be effective for you. And we will hopefully have some great reviews, news and information for you on a few of these in just a little while.

However, did you notice what all of these include? Lower calorie counts, fewer “garbage” foods, and more wholesome components for daily meal plans. There were no special gimmicks listed, and nothing alluding to the need to completely eliminate one entire food group for all of eternity.

Note: for more reading, you should check out the US news link on Diets That Work.

In short, the diets that work are straight forward, easy to understand, and will leave you wondering what else you need to do in order to get the weight to come off. They are simple, and that is what makes them effective.

That is not to say that the diets that work are going to be completely boring, or may not have the occasional twist to them to help make them a bit more effective, but for the most part, there is no allusion to magic. We cannot say that enough. Simple diets, elimination of calories not foods, and sustainability is going to be the key for any diet that will actually show results.

Diets that don’t work, pretty much go completely in the face of this, and make little sense once you begin to dig into them.

Be sure to check back soon as we will be rolling out a ton of great content starting in just a couple of days on this whole subject. We won’t be done, ever, in helping our readers find out whatever they want to know. Hopefully, our site will be the last site you need to go to in order to find the diets that work.