With the new year upon us, you may be considering a wide array of diets to help accomplish the healthy living resolution you will soon be setting. Although it seems like endless diet possibilities exist, most are built around similar principles. Some involve strict, automatic changes to your current way of eating while others involve a progression of stages. Although diets that work in stages might seem like a better option than a one-step plan, they too often result in only short term weight loss success.

For example, take the newly launched PINK Method. This diet is a phase diet – one that involves multiple stages of eating behavior. Those who embark on this diet will find that they must first start with the PINK Reset – a short term detox diet that is meant to jump-start your metabolism. This stage of the diet is then followed by the PINK Primary stage where participants are given a little more leniency, but still must follow a fat-fighting diet that reintroduces the body to high-energy foods. After this stage is complete, dieters will then move on to the last stage of the diet where weight management becomes key. As you can see, this progression hopefully leads to a lifetime of dietary changes after a rebooting of the system takes place.

Other diets are similar. Both the 17 Day Diet and the South Beach diet work in much the same way. Although each of these diets has the potential to result in successful weight loss, more often than not, this success is short lived because of how hard  it is to move beyond the strict early phases. Failure to comply with these stages often results in feelings of discouragement, guilt, shame, and failure. Instead, individuals who attempt to utlize these types of meal plans should focus on what they can do in the early stages instead of what they can’t do. Even if an individual is unable to comply to all the rules, many of the small changes they are able to make will have positive long-lasting effects on overall health.
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Don’t miss October’s Prevention Magazine, featuring Dr. Mehmet Oz helping people get their body in the best shape of their lives.

If Dr. Oz’s prescription for a better bod doesn’t speak to you, one of the other featured health stories surely will. Dr. Arthur Agatston, creator of the South Beach Diet, offers his tips for having a healthier heart. And with breast cancer awareness month right around the corner, Prevention shares new information about a potential cure for this deadly disease. There’s also a guide for a four-week belly flattening workout. If nothing else makes you pick up this month’s Prevention, surely a guilt-free mac and cheese recipe will do it, just in time for fall.

Grab this copy of Prevention Magazine from your newsstand, or subscribe to Prevention Magazine and never miss an issue.

The Atkins Diet, introduced nearly forty years ago, has been credited for beginning the now popular low-carb revolution. Though buzz about low-carb diets had quieted over the past several years,  the Atkins Diet remains a popular way for people to lose weight by eating fewer high carbohydrate foods and more high fiber vegetables.

Newer to the scene is the South Beach Diet, which is less prohibitive than the Atkins Diet and restricts saturated fats, which have been associated with health problems such as heart disease and high cholesterol.

For the purposes of this comparison I am using Dr. Atkin’s New Diet Revolution, the last book actually written by Dr. Robert Atkins before his death and The South Beach Diet Supercharged: Faster Weight Loss and Better Health For Life.

Cost

Both of these books are available online and in stores for less than $20.00. Both the Atkins Diet and South Beach Diet have websites that offer free tools to help dieters count carbohydrates, set goals and encourage other members of the diet community. Both diets offer various packaged foods you can buy at the grocery store that help users stay on track which can increase the cost of the diet for individuals.

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With the first day of school already taking place in some parts of the country, and plans starting to be made for Labor Day weekend, it’s clear that summer is about to give way to fall. Checking in with yourself at the start of fall can be a good idea. As active as summer can be, summers like this where the heat seems to break a new record each day can leave us sitting inside just trying to stay cool, never mind working out. With the kids back in school and you back in control of your schedule, there’s no time like the present to re-start your weight loss efforts.

We’ve identified seven programs that, so far this year, really stand-out as leaders, offering their customers healthful, balanced approaches to weight loss and healthful living. Consider these for your fall weight loss resolution.

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U.S. News and World Report is famous (and in some cases infamous) for ranking products, institutions and services of all kinds, be it cars, colleges or diets. Yesterday, they released diet rankings in a number of categories, most notably the best commercial diets and the best diets for weight loss. They also created a list for both the best diabetic diets and the best heart-healthy diets, and a list of best overall diets.

U.S. News reports that they spent six month researching diets, and then had a panel of 22 health experts score the diet on seven different criteria. The diet was judged on its nutritional completeness, its safety, its ability to prevent or manage diabetes, its ability to prevent or manage heart disease, short-term weight loss, long-term weight loss and how easy it is to follow.

It’s little surprise to us that Weight Watchers and Jenny Craig topped both lists, as multiple studies have shown these two diets to be effective. Below are the top eight diets from the best commercial diets and the best diets for weight loss.

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