Diet Types You Should (and Should Never) Follow for Healthy Weight Control

Have you noticed how many diets have been making headlines promising healthy weight control over the past few years? As each month goes by, there is another option added to the top of the pile, promising that it will give the best results. They promise long term, fast and easy management of those excess pounds.

However, very few of them actually provide the healthy weight control they promise. Alternately, many of them offer great results over the short-term but without any possibility to maintain them over the long-term. To help you keep up with the latest, we’ve compiled this list of the best and the worst according to recent research (or lack thereof).

The Best Healthy Weight Control Options

The Mediterranean Diet

For many years, the Mediterranean Diet has been applauded as the best healthy weight control strategy. It is also praised for the nutrition it provides and for being good for heart health and keeping other common medical risks down. It involves eating a diet rich in fresh fruits and veggies, fatty fish, whole grains, nuts, olive oil, legumes, and a touch of dairy and red wine. The balance in this way of eating is its key.

WW (previously known as Weight Watchers)

That tried and true program everyone has heard of, WW, is also often praised as one of the best healthy weight control strategies. This program has evolved substantially over time and has a considerable focus on overall wellness, not just weight loss. It promotes nutrition, physical activity, sleep and mental health as opposed to starvation dieting and carb counting.

Intermittent Fasting

This diet hasn’t quite made it into science’s top healthy weight control strategies because research remains preliminary, but certain versions that don’t require lengthy fasts have seen positive results, particularly in terms of dieters’ abilities to stick to it over time.

Strategies You Shouldn’t Consider Healthy Weight Control

• The Carnivore Diet – This diet is considered to be neither healthy nor sustainable. There are far better healthy weight control strategies to remove the weight and to keep it off and promote wellness at the same time.
• Whole30 – This well-marketed strategy promotes the consumption of very healthful foods. It also encourages people to make the nutrition-friendly step of leaving processed and packaged foods behind. However, it also only 30 days long and it prohibits foods that people simply cannot cut out on a permanent basis.
• Keto Diet – Designed to help children with epilepsy control their symptoms, it can certainly promote rapid weight loss. However, the safety of this high-fat, very-low-carb, moderate-protein ratio strategy promotes is far too untested to be recognized as a healthy weight control option. Furthermore, unless this plan is continued long-term, the weight usually balloons back quite quickly.