Whenever it’s time to lose weight, individuals have to think about what they need to restrict from their diet. In essence, every diet is a restricted eating pattern. If you focus on calories, you are reducing the number of bites of the foods you are already eating. A focus on protein forces lower protein foods like grains and many vegetables and fruits off of the plate, in favor of larger portions of meats. I’ve even seen diets that focus on eating lots of fat, arguing that fat prevents hunger—some even recommend a special butter for coffee!
Then there’s the infamous cookie diet, where the dieter can eat cookies as a meal replacement. Certainly, weight loss will occur if a person is just eating 800 calories of cookies a day, so the cookie diet can claim to be effective to help you lose weight. But of course, even though you can lose weight eating nothing but cookies or candy, that’s obviously not the best choice for your health, in the short or long term.
The real question is, what foods should be restricted so that weight loss and health are achieved? What type of diet leads to the easiest weight loss while still safeguarding your health?
Plant-based diets like the one recommended by Get Waisted are tied to reductions in heart disease, cancer, diabetes, hypertension, and cholesterol. They also appear to be among the most effective ways to lose weight. Researchers followed 63 overweight adults for 8 weeks, using low-fat, high-glycemic foods with the advice to eat without calorie restriction. Different research participants followed different diets, including vegan, vegetarian, pesco-vegetarian, lacto-ovo vegetarian, and omnivorous. Of the five groups, the dieters with the most plant-based foods in their diet lost the most weight.
Researchers felt that the absence of measuring made the diet more acceptable to the dieters and easier for weight loss, because the focus was not on portioning food. Previous studies have suggested that decreased portions of unhealthy foods is often unsuccessful; for weight loss to be maintained over long periods of time, individuals need to change the choices they are making. That suggests that eliminating certain less healthy foods from your diet will not only help you get healthy, but will also help you lose weight and keep that weight off for your whole glorious life!