There are many types of diets. On the left hand navigation bar detail is given to types of diets. Loosing weight is highly dependent on your own body type and motivation. A common thread to all successful dieters is a reduction in caloric intake coupled with moderate exercise. Some diets that some report success are:
Atkins Diet
The Atkins Nutritional Approach, popularly known as the Atkins Diet or just Atkins, is the most marketed and well-known of the low-carbohydrate diets. It was adopted by Dr. Robert Atkins (1930-2003) in the 1960s from a diet he read in the Journal of the American Medical Association and utilized to resolve his own overweight condition following medical school and graduate medical training. After successfully treating over ten thousand patients, he popularized the Atkins diet in a series of books, starting with Dr. Atkins' Diet Revolution in 1972. In his revised book, Dr. Atkins' New Diet Revolution, Atkins updated some of his ideas, but remained faithful to the original concepts.
The Atkins franchise (i.e., the business formed to provide products serving people "doing Atkins") had been highly successful due to the popularity of the diet, and is considered the iconic and driving entity of the larger "low-carb craze". Low Carb diets are highlighted by restricted carbohydrate consumption, based on research that ties consumption of certain carbohydrates with increased blood insulin levels, and overexposure to insulin with metabolic syndrome (the most recognized symptom of which is obesity).
Under these dietary programs, foods high in digestible carbohydrates (sugars and starches) are limited or replaced with foods containing a higher percentage of proteins, fats, and/or fiber.
Detox Diet
A detox diet is a dietary regimen involving a change in consumption habits in an attempt to detoxify the body by removal of toxins or other contaminants. It is claimed to improve health, energy, resistance to disease, mental state, digestion, as well as aiding in weight loss.
Various methods of modifying the diet for the said purpose of detoxification include:
Fasting, including water fasting and juice fasting.
Increased consumption of fish such as salmon
Food combining.
Caloric restriction.
Herbal detox (if one considers herbs food and not a form of drug).
Master Cleanse also known as the lemonade diet, terms coined to refer to the fasting paradigm penned by Stanley Burroughs
Detox diets usually suggest that fruits and vegetables compose a majority of one's food intake. Limiting this to unprocessed (and sometimes also non-GM) foods is often advocated. Limiting or eliminating alcohol is also a major factor, and drinking more water (which helps curb appetite) is similarly recommended.
Some proponents of detox diets would emphasize it as a lifestyle, rather than a diet. It has made some appearances in the media, such as the film Super-Size Me. Literary references include "Ultimate Lifetime Diet" by Gary Null advocating veganism as a (lifestyle) method of detoxification.
Weight Loss Diets
Weight-loss diets restrict the intake of specific foods, or food in general, to reduce body weight. What works to reduce body weight for one person will not necessarily work for another, due to metabolic differences and lifestyle factors. Also, it's important to note that short-term dieting does not necessarily lead to weight loss in the long term. Reducing the body's food supply causes it to stockpile excess fat as a starvation response once normal eating is resumed - meaning crash dieting leads to small short-term weight loss, then an increase in weight shortly afterwards.
Many professional athletes impose weight-gain diets on themselves. For example, wrestlers may overeat in order to achieve a higher weight class. American football players may try to "bulk up" through weight-gain diets in order to gain an advantage on the field with a higher mass.
Medical conditions often require the following of special diets. Each of these diets will specifically include or exclude or regulate certain chemicals (and the foods that contain them). For example, a person who has diabetes is often on a diet designed to carefully manage his or her blood sugar level. Epileptics are often put on the Ketogenic Diet. Sufferers of celiac disease must follow a gluten-free diet, the lactose-intolerant are advised to omit milk products, and people with kidney disease must follow a strict low-sodium diet to ease the strain on their kidneys. Treatment of mild hypertension includes adhering to a diet rich in fruits and vegetables and low in fat and sodium. This diet may be tailored to focus on weight loss if that is necessary to control blood pressure. Some people show allergic reactions to different types of food. They may include but are not limited to wheat flour, nuts, various types of fruit, egg white etc. These foods are to be avoided in such cases. A special diet may be necessary to prevent health problems.
GI Diet
Glycemic index (also glycaemic index, GI) is a ranking system for carbohydrates based on their immediate effect on blood glucose levels. It compares carbohydrates gram for gram in individual foods, providing a numerical, evidence-based index of postprandial (post-meal) glycemia. The concept was invented by Dr. David J. Jenkins and colleagues in 1981 at the University of Toronto.
Carbohydrates that break down rapidly during digestion have the highest glycemic indices. Such carbohydrates require less energy to be converted into glucose, which results in faster digestion and a quicker increase of blood glucose. Carbohydrates that break down slowly, releasing glucose gradually into the blood stream, have a low glycemic index. A lower glycemic index suggests slower rates of digestion and absorption of the sugars and starches in the foods and may also indicate greater extraction from the liver and periphery of the products of carbohydrate digestion. Additionally, a lower glycemic response equates to a lower insulin demand, better long-term blood glucose control and a reduction in blood lipids.
The glycemic index of a food is defined by the area under the 2 hour blood glucose response curve (AUC) following the ingestion of a fixed portion of carbohydrate (usually 50 g). The AUC of the test food is divided by the AUC of the standard (either glucose or white bread) and multiplied by 100.
The effect on blood glucose from a high versus low glycemic index carbohydrate.The average GI value is calculated from data collected in 10 human subjects. Both the standard and test food must contain an equal amount of available carbohydrate. The result gives a relative ranking for each tested food.
Glycemic index values for different foods are calculated by comparing measurements of their effect on blood glucose with an equal carbohydrate portion of a reference food. The current validated methods use glucose as the reference food, giving it a glycemic index value of 100 by definition. This has the advantages in that it is universal and it results in maximum GI values of approximately 100. White bread can also be used as a reference food, giving a different set of GI values (if white bread = 100, then glucose ≈ 140). For people whose staple carbohydrate source is white bread, this has the advantage of conveying directly whether replacement of the dietary staple with a different food would result in faster or slower blood glucose response. The disadvantages with this system are that the reference food is not well-defined, and the GI scale is culture dependent.
Gluten Free Diet
A gluten-free diet is a diet completely free of ingredients derived from gluten-containing cereals: wheat (including Kamut and spelt), barley, rye, oats, and triticale.
The gluten-free diet must be strictly followed by sufferers of coeliac disease and dermatitis herpetiformis. Some medical practitioners also believe the diet may be helpful for persons with multiple sclerosis and other autoimmune disorders, [citation needed] as well as autism spectrum disorders, ADHD, and some behavioural problems.
One well-controlled study examined the effect of a strict casein-free and gluten-free diet on children with autism. The experimental group were fed the diet for 12 months. During that period the children had significantly fewer autistic symptoms than the control children, who were not fed the diet.
Grapefruit Diet Plan
The Grapefruit Diet also known as the Hollywood Diet, an 18-day diet, dates to 1930 Hollywood.
This so-called fad diet regained popularity in the mid-1970s as a bit of Xeroxlore. It is occasionally attributed (erroneously) to the Mayo Clinic, which has expressed a decidedly negative opinion of the diet, considering it unbalanced and possibly dangerous. However, a 2004 study led by Dr. Ken Fujioka at the Nutrition and Metabolic Research Center at Scripps Clinic found in a 12-week pilot study that on average, participants who ate half a grapefruit with each meal lost 3.6 pounds and those who drank a serving of grapefruit juice three times a day lost 3.3 pounds. Additionally, many patients in the study lost more than 10 pounds.
Dr. Fujioka found that grapefruit diet appears to reduce insulin levels and thus, affects blood sugar regulation. Bear in mind that pancreas secretes insulin in response to the amount of carbohydrate ingested (also affected by the glycemic index and glycemic load of a food or meal) and that grapefruit by itself is considered by some to be low glycemic.
Another theory is that the fruit's low glycemic index is able to help the body's metabolism burn fat.
Still another explanation for the weight loss in the Scripps Clinic study can be found in the report -- participants "slightly enhanced their exercise regimens." Depending upon what "slightly enhanced" means, this might well account for the weight loss observed.
Low Calorie Diet
The beginning of the modern history of low-carbohydrate diets is popularly attributed to William Banting and and Dr. William Harvey[5] (before this, though, anecdotal and holistic prescriptions, containing passages about limiting certain foods, including foods of mostly carbohydrates, have appeared throughout history). Banting was an overweight undertaker who developed hearing difficulties. He sought the help of Dr. Harvey who diagnosed his hearing difficulties as being directly related to his weight problem (his fat was pressing against his inner ear). He prescribed a diet that was very much like the low carbohydrate diets of today (which indicates this diet was, at least informally, known to be effective even at that time). Banting lost weight and his health problems disappeared. This led to Banting's publication of the book Letter on Corpulence in 1869, the first modern low-carbohydrate diet book. The mainstream thinking, though, formalized by the invention of the concept of the calorie in the late 19th century, was still that weight control was primarily a matter of controlling the amount of food consumed.
In the 1920s, Johns Hopkins Medical Center developed the high-fat, low-carbohydrate ketogenic diet for the treatment of epilepsy. This diet was found very effective in treating many forms of epilepsy. As drug therapies were later developed this treatment gradually fell out of favor (although notably it has always been one of the treatments used by Johns Hopkins).
In 1926, Dr. Clarence Lieb published a case study on anthropologist and explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson who lived for years with the Inuit consuming a diet that was almost entirely meat and fat. Despite expecting to find serious health problems Lieb had found Stefansson (like the Inuit) to be in perfect health showing no adverse effects from his diet. Later, during World War II the medical department of E. I. DuPont hired Dr. Alfred Pennington to help address weight problems with many of the employees.[6] After some study and experimentation Dr. Pennington determined (partly inspired by previous research at the Russel Sage Institute) that the key to weight loss was not restricting consumption overall but reducing consumption of carbohydrates and increasing consumption of proteins and fats. The diet he developed came to be known as the Dupont Diet. During the 1950's studies such as Kekwick and Pawan, 1956 and Mackarness et al., 1958 continued to demonstrate the effectiveness of carbohydrate restriction and the ineffectiveness of calorie restriction.
Mainstream science still favored the idea of calorie restriction. In addition, research by Ancel Keys starting in the 1950s led ultimately to the publication of Seven countries: a multivariate analysis of death and coronary heart disease in 1980 which linked consumption of cholesterol and saturated fats to heart disease. This research led to the contemporary low-fat diet trend and discouraged research into low-carbohydrate diets. It should be noted that Keys' theory was not universally accepted when published originally, Dr. George Mann being a noted detractor.
