Popular Diets: Obesity
Content provided by the Faculty of the Harvard Medical School
Popular diets
The answer to the perennial question "What's the best diet for losing weight?" is any diet that you can stick with for a long time. It should be as good for your overall health — your heart, bones, colon, and psyche — as it is for your waistline. It should offer plenty of good-tasting and healthy choices, banish few foods, and not require an extensive and expensive list of groceries or supplements.
Many different weight-loss diets have been in the limelight, from very low-fat diets (such as the Ornish and Pritikin diets) to low-carbohydrate diets (such as Atkins and South Beach) as well as combination diets (such as the Zone). Other trends include calorie-density diets (Volumetrics) and Mediterranean-style diets (such as Sonoma).
Here are short summaries of some of the most popular types, followed by a "bottom line" assessment of their effectiveness.
| Last updated: | June 20, 2007 |
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Medical content reviewed by the Faculty of the Harvard Medical School. Harvard Health Publications, Copyright © 2007 by President and Fellows of Harvard College. All rights reserved. Used with permission of StayWell.
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