This is a diet you have heard about time and again. It's nothing new. In fact, it's thousands of years old.
IT is the Mediterranean diet. A simple approach to eating that has been for millenia. It also recently landed on top of U.S. News and World Report's "Best Diets of 2019" list as the Best Diet Overall.
A recent study conducted by researchers at Spain's University of Barcelona examined the diet's effect on heart disease. The New England Journal of Medicine determined "the Mediterranean diet as the most likely dietary model to provide protection against coronary heart disease." The study says eating this way reduces risk of cardiovascular disease up to 30%.
The results were so overwhelmingly positive that the study ended early because, according to the New York Times, "it was considered unethical to continue."
If you're looking for an overall approach to eating, try the Mediterranean Diet. It's so easy to adopt and a realistic way to eat, not diet, for a lifetime.
To succeed at losing weight, don't diet. What does this mean? First and foremost, studies show that if you do radical changes to lose weight in a short period of time, you're probably going to fail.
Instead, adopt a different approach to eating. Simple as that. A quick change will not result in longterm weight loss. Focus on making smart food decisions that your grandmother told you to do:
Eat more vegetables and fruits
Limit the amount of sugar and processed foods you consume
If you can't pronounce, don't eat it
Don't drink your calories water and herbal tea are your friends
This is all easy to do. You can still enjoy your favorite indulgences (cheese fries, pizza, hamburgers) once or twice a week, not once or twice a day.
In its fourth annual Best Diet rankings, U.S. News & World Report says the DASH Dietis a dashing success because it's healthy and helps prevent diabetes and heart disease. Experts deemed Weight Watchers the best diet for weight loss and determined it's the easiest to follow as well as the best among all the "commercial plans".
Fruits, vegetables as well as fat-free or low-fat dairy products.
Whole grains, fish, poultry, beans, seeds and nuts.
Little sweets, added sugars, sugary beverages and red meat.
The DASH Diet Takeaway
It's a logical, plant-heavy eating plan that has you eating foods you know you're supposed to consume. There's no secret. It's good, solid common "eating" sense.
And here's the thing: those who crash diet and those who adopt the slow and steady approach are all likely to gain their weight back in the long run.
This after experts, for years, said that losing weight slowly is the way to go.
No wonder we're so screwed up when it comes to weight loss.
The Science
An Australian trial recruited 200 adults assigned to a crash diet or gradual weight loss program. The slow and steady group reduced their calorie intake by around 500 calories a day for 36 weeks. The crash dieters ate between 450 and 800 calories a day for just 12 weeks.
Researchers found that those who lost weight rapidly were likelier to reach their target weight. Duh....you see the scale move, you get motivated. Read more here.
What I know
The contradictory findings when it comes to weight loss news is one of the most frustrating for anyone fighting the bulge battle or trying to maintain lifelong weight loss.
Me, circa 1999, close to 200 pounds
Here's the thing: do what works for you. I have lost more than 50 pounds on one occasion (in the early 2000's) and then lost the baby weight after having Jordan. Eating real food, mostly produce while truly savoring indulgent meals works for me. I never feel deprived. Ever.
There are times when restricting calories or doing a juice cleanse to jumpstart weight loss can be effective. It can serve as motivation to keep going. It has worked for me in the past.
At the end of the day, educate yourself and do what works for you. A common sense approach to weight loss and maintenance is truly the best way to go: eat real food, indulge occasionally, enjoy it and exercise regularly. It works.
Promise.
What's the most frustrating thing for you when it comes to weight loss and diet news? Share your thoughts in the comments section.
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I have been there....and am fighting to the good fight every day to avoid going back there.
Eggs and coffee can be part of a healthy diet. Whoo-Hoo!
Coffee and eggs are hip. In a big, fat healthy way.
The U.S. Departments of Agriculture and Health and Human Services assemble experts every five years to study and recommend dietary guidelines. Why? Because it's a dynamic thing. Scientists and experts are continually studying and learning new data. New dietary guidelines will be released at the end of 2015 but preliminary recommendations were released on Thursday.
Among the 2015 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee's recommendations:
Eggs Are Ok - experts say that dietary cholesterol is "not considered a nutrient of concern for overconsumption". In English - don't be so worried about the cholesterol in egg yolks or shrimp, for that matter.
Coffee Is Cool - between 3-5 cups of coffee per day can be a part of a healthy diet and can actually reduce the risk of type 2 diabetes and heart disease. Don't add extra calories with tons of milk, cream or sugar. Out on coffee? Drink green tea.
Watch Added Sugar - added sugar should be no more than 200 calories a day. Average Americans are getting about 268 calories from added sugar right now. These are completely empty calories.
While You're At It, Watch The Salt - stay under 2300 milligrams per day. This can add up quickly.
Eat A Plant-Based Diet - duh. We know we need to do this.
Get my free guide, "The 10 Easiest Diet Tips: Simple Secrets To Help You Lose Weight & Maintain Your Weight Loss For Good". It's yours free when you sign up for The Real Skinny, my weekly newsletter that shares super simple diet and fitness tips like this one about the wonders of, what else, coffee.
As always, take all this advice to heart but check with a trusted medical professional if you plan on making significant dietary changes. Image via Justin Leibow
DASH Diet meal planner/Image via www.nhlbi.nih.gov
When you're a former fat girl like me, you're always interested in diet news. U.S. News & World Report's diet rankings are out for 2015 and once again the DASH Diet tops the list. The DASH Diet which stands for Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension, (Tweet this) was designed to combat high blood pressure but it gets high marks for its nutritional value and ability to prevent and/or control diabetes. Weight loss is a nice side effect.
After being skinny, gaining weight, losing weight, gaining weight, losing weight, having a kid, losing the baby weight and more, I feel like I'm a diet expert simply through practice.
After years of trying everything: Atkins, the Zone, the grapefruit diet, Cabbage Soup diet, I could go on. There are principles that I know work: eat well, eat real food, don't overindulge, exercise most days of the week.
Fitsugar has a few more diet secrets that are truly effective:
Eat clean - no white food, refined carbs, sugar, alcohol, etc.
Don't diet - think of adopting an overall, longterm approach to eating, not a temporary "diet"
Do more cardio - ramp up the intensity to get that afterburn.
Drink more water - hydration is huge. Drink green tea, water with lemon or fruit added, any water-based drink without extra sweetener or calories added to it.
Make calories in less than calories out - if you eat more than you burn, you will gain weight. I gained weight while training for marathons. Even though I was burning hundreds, sometimes thousands, of calories it didn't make up for the extra cookies I ate at lunch.
Eliminate extras - all the little nibbles, sips and snacks add up.
This is such a practical approach to maintaining your weight (notice I didn't say "diet). If you're looking for a particular dietary approach to follow, try the Mediterranean diet. It's simple, easy, delicious and calls for wine and chocolate. Win!
Anyone looking for healthy snacks to stop sugar cravings
Anyone looking for healthy, sweet snacks
Anyone looking to avoid trips to the vending machine at the office
Anyone looking to keep blood sugar in check
Is sugar your kryptonite? It is mine. I could incorporate a pound of Swedish Fish, a bag of Reese's Mini Peanut Butter Cups and a few oatmeal raisin cookies into my daily diet and not blink an eye.
It's simple: burn more calories than you consume. This is a tried and true formula, yes?
Yes, but.....
Many times those calorie estimates are inaccurate. You could also miscalculate the serving size you consume (I only had one handful of M&M's, okay three). Basically calories in vs calories out is akin to being good on paper but bad in bed.
Don't skip breakfast - good advice but if you're not hungry, don't stress over it. Do what works for you. I love breakfast. If I'm not hungry, I will at least try to get something in my system like my green smoothie.
Cutting out entire food groups - I mean really. Who can live without bread or cheese fries the rest of their lives? It's ridiculous. It's about moderation and occasional indulgences.
Filling up on diet soda drinks - this is a game changer. From a pure hydration standpoint, you will feel so much better if you avoid diet soda (as well as regular) and quench your thirst with plain water, sparkling water, water infused with fresh fruit or cucumber slices or iced tea.
Thinking about it as a "diet" in the first place - TRUTH!
Your "diet" is your overall approach to eating. If you think about a "quick fix" it won't work. You will fall right back into those bad habits once your calorie-reduced diet ends. Sure, you can jumpstart your weight loss by restricting calories and dropping a few pounds quickly but you must consider how you will MAINTAIN that weight loss once you resume "normal" eating.
The "Diet" That Works For Me
I've said it repeatedly and will say it again: that Mediterranean "diet" is the BOMB. Fish, veggies, fruits, nuts, olive oil, feta cheese, red wine and chocolate. There is nothing "diet" or restrictive about it. It's abundant in its bounties.
The Great Green Smoothie Recipe
Looking for a great way to get some fruit and veggies in your system first thing in the morning? Try my great green smoothie. This one features Almond Breeze almond milk, a banana, frozen berries, spinach and chia seeds.
Kids love it, too. You can hear my daughter, Jordan, saying "Yummy! Smoothie!" in this video. Or at least a 2-year old's version of those words.
Should I diet or exercise to lose weight? Which one is more effective?
It's a constant discussion whether either you're trying to drop just a few pounds or 30. Ultimately, it's a combination of the two that work.
But when trying to drop a large amount of weight the challenge can be daunting. It's usually a basic premise of move more, eat less crap and more of the good, real stuff that works.
Yet you see studies and those motivational pictures on Instagram that scream "A FLAT STOMACH STARTS IN THE KITCHEN" or "YOU CAN'T OUT-EXERCISE A BAD DIET."
All of that is true but nothing gives you the immediate satisfaction and endorphin rush of a nice, 30-minute workout to get the blood flowing.
A new study proves that.
It's a big, scientific-jargon-filled piece outlined in the October's Annals of Behavioral Medicine but the results are clear: it's best to diet and exercise at the same time but you might see results if you start with exercise first. Once you see the benefit of a few weeks at the gym and you start seeing changes in your body, improving your diet might be the next natural step.
Just try moving for 30 minutes. It will make you feel like a new person. Promise.
Looking for some great exercise options? Here are a few of my favorites:
Walking or running - being outside in the fresh air does WONDERS
Pilates - great for the core
A workout from the Nike Training Club app - they don't pay me to endorse it....it's just that awesome
Hula hooping - it's like a natural corset for your core
My full-body toning routine that can be done anywhere and requires no equipment. Perfect for the gym-averse.
When it comes to dieting to lose weight, I believe you ultimately have to experiment to find what's right for you. Not every diet works for every person.
Remember these?
Trust me, when I was 50 pounds heavier, I tried the then-popular Atkins diet only feel lethargic, constipated (sorry) and just blech. Following a fake-food, low-fat diet full of sugar made me hungrier for more crappy low-fat food.
Staples of the Mediterranean Diet
What Helped Me Drop 50 Pounds Ultimately, no magic diet works for me. I do enjoy the Mediterranean approach to eating but I try to eat real food, most of the time. I focus on fruits, vegetables and avoid saturated fats. I love fish, dark chocolate and wine. I have a sweet tooth that I am always battling and I enjoy indulging in what I love. I had my once-a-year basket of Snuffer's Cheese Fries Sunday after the TX/OU game and loved every calorie of the fat-bomb without an ounce of guilt.
There. That's it.
Snuffer's Cheese Fries
If I want to drop weight quickly or balance out an indulgent weekend, I might juice for a few days or live on watermelon and vegetables. That is NOT a good way to sustain weight loss but it's a quick fix which I sometimes, yet rarely, incorporate into my regime. Does Low-Fat Make You Fat? There's an interesting article in Britain's Daily Mail that bucks the theory that all calories are created equal.
Perhaps it's because I have a tried a slew of fad diets (and failed) but I love diets. I enjoyed learning the history of them, the science behind them, the failure rate behind them. You get the idea. There's even a fun, new book by New York magazine writer Rebecca Harrington chronicling her adventures in celebrity dieting titled "I'll Have What She's Having, My Adventures In Celebrity Dieting". This book is heaven for a diet lover like me.
The History Of Fad Diets
The LA Times had a great feature this weekend on the history of fad diets, starting all the way back in 1825 when French gastronome Jean Brillat-Savarin introduced a low-carb regime called "The Physiology of Taste".
Since then fad diets have included eating all caribou and whale blubber (GAG), bananas and skim milk, food combining, the grapefruit diet and the Drinking Man's Diet (which is exactly what you think it is). They also include more popular ones like the Paleo Diet, the South Beach Diet and the Zone Diet.
The thing is that many of these so-called "fad diets" don't work because it's almost impossible to adopt these habits permanently. Think about it: can you eat only grapefruit forever? Or caribou? Can you go Paleo in perpetuity? Probably not.
You can do almost anything for a few days. That's why many of these fad diets take off initially. You drop a few pounds at the start and start feeling like a million bucks.
Then, reality sets in and you realize you can't eat only skim milk and bananas or diet bars or cabbage soup for the rest of your life. That's why "diets" don't work.
If you read this blog, you know how I feel about dieting: eat well, mostly real food (produce and lean meats), get moving most days of the week and enjoy it. That's a recipe for success. As for dietary approaches, I love the Mediterranean philosophy which emphasizes plant-based food, replaces butter with healthy fats like olive oil, uses herbs and spices to flavor foods, limits red meat, advocated red wine and dark chocolate in moderation.
Your Fad Diet Experiments
Have you experimented with fad diets? I would love to learn about your crazy diet experiences, what worked and what didn't. Please share your diet disasters and success stories in the comments section. Don't worry. This is a judgement-free zone.
When I was fat, I tried the Zone & Atkins (hated them both). It wasn't until I made permanent changes, like closing the kitchen after dinner, that I experienced real weight loss. Want to learn how I did it? Get my free guide "The 10 Easiest Diet Tips: Simple Secrets To Help You Lose Weight & Maintain Your Weight Loss For Good". It's yours when you sign up for the The Real Skinny, my weekly newsletter that features simple diet and fitness tips designed for busy people who live in the real world, not fantasy-diet-land.
The Cafe Phase - a kickstart, lasting 8-10 days which includes plenty of liquids
The Bistro Phase - a 2-3 week period in which you consume fiber and protein-rich meals
The Gourmet Phase - the longterm phase you maintain until you reach your ideal weight.
The main tenets of his diet are simple:
Quality, not quantity - meaning smaller portions of food. No supersizing.
Savor your food and avoid mindless eating. A meal is a ritual in which to celebrate, not chow down at your desk. I have a bad habit of doing this.
Don't deprive - skip a salad if you don't love it! Instead eat a smaller portion of something you love rather than a large salad you'll hate consuming.
I tend to lose weight when I visit France (and any other foreign country, for that matter). But what's interesting when I visit France is that I indulge. Granted, we usually walk about five or more miles a day but there isn't one bit of restraint. We eat cheese, drink wine, eat desserts, macarons and sumptuous, multi-course meals. Here's the thing: the portions are small and the ingredients are fresh.
Here is a typical Parisian vacation diet, in pictures.
Breakfast
I visited Eric Kayser every morning to pick up pastries.
This was my daily breakfast which is a departure from my normal routine of a green smoothie, oatmeal or toast and peanut butter. We would get four pastries: one for me, my husband, my daughter and one to share. Notice how these aren't huge.
Lunch
Lunch at Ma Cocotte
This was a normal lunch. We would usually also have salad and dessert....and a few more glasses of wine.
Dinner
The final meal of the day was either one of two things: a blowout dinner or not much at all.
Dinner at Maxim's
Dessert at Maxim's
Treating my daughter like a queen!
We celebrated my birthday in 2013 at Maxim's at around 10pm one evening. Sure it's touristy but it was a wonderful experience.
Crepes, cheese, champagne and fruit for dinner
On other nights, after having a large lunch we would eat a smaller dinner featuring what you see above. The thing about dinners in Paris is that there is no late night snacking, something I struggle with at home. Once the kitchen is closed, it's closed. No more food after dinner.
The ubiquitous bottle of wine
We had wine at almost every meal. Generally a bottle split between the two of us.
Oreos! Mon dieu!
Don't think the French are perfect. Look what I found at the grocery store...processed food!
The Takeaway The Parisian Diet isn't a new concept. It's one that most nutrition experts advocate: eat real food, smaller portions of it, be mindful when you eat and enjoy your food.
Whether in Paris or not, that's something most of us can do every day.
What foreign eating principles do you like? I love the Mediterranean approach to eating. Please share your favorite foreign diet concept in the comments section.
Junk Sucks
So junk food makes you lazy. I could have told you that! When I was 200 pounds and lived on M&M's & Diet Mountain Dew, I was always tired. Now, here's science to support that.
One can argue that those who love the Mediterranean side of France don't need this. True. For those of you who love northern French fare and are looking to lighten it, this is a Godsend. To learn more about dieting with Parisian chic, check out Dr. Jean-Michel Cohen's other book, The Parisian Diet. This book isn't about deprivation. It's about delighting in foodthat's so beautifully prepared and of such high quality that you won't crave crap (like M&M's & Diet Mountain Dew). Details on this and my other favorite French books below.
The Takeaway
Whatever you're planning right now, stop talking about it. Start doing it. Or at least start putting the ball in motion to begin your next big endeavor. You'll feel better about being productive. Promise.
Have a great week!
Buy The Parisian Diet & My Fave French Books Here:
A debate with a friend turned heated recently. He is trying to lose weight and get in "fighting shape". He is incorporating a low calorie weight loss plan that is, frankly, bland and boring. He also laments the fact that he can't have beer, breads, ice cream, the chips he loves, blah blah blah blah.
I countered with two points: First, you CAN have those things once in a while as a part of a well-balanced diet. He thought he had to eliminate them completely. Wrong. Think once a week, not twice a day.
Then I presented him with this: "look at the great food you CAN have. Think fish, chicken, lean steak, sweet potatoes, greens of all sorts, peppers, fresh berries, red wine (HELLO), dark chocolate, blah blah blah blah."
He couldn't get over the fact that he CAN'T have certain food items. I maintain that if you focus on what you CAN have while you're trying to drop weight or stay within a healthy range, it will make the sometimes taxing mental process of trying to win the weight loss game more bearable.
Does this sound familiar: "Crap, no 4pm cookie, no afterwork beers, no pretzels during the Rangers game! This sucks!!!!"
Yeah, it does suck. The thought of what you can't consume can consume you so much so that you end stuffing your face with all the stuff you swore off eating.
That's not some pollyanna way of thinking. It works. Succeeding at eating a healthy diet is as much about mental execution as it is the physical. We know the right foods to eat. It's just hard to do it. Get your mind focused on what you CANeat instead of what youCAN'Tand you WILL succeed.
Promise.
Looking for a great way to eat a bounty of fresh produce, wine, chocolate, nuts and more, try the Mediterranean "diet". I hate using the word "diet" because it's much more of an approach to eating that is wonderfully balanced and so inclusive you won't feel like you're depriving yourself of anything.
in May. There are three phases to the diet:
