Correct Carbs
Diets such as Sugar Busters! and the Glucose Revolution don't ban carbohydrates. Instead, they embrace "correct" carbs while shunning "harmful" ones. In a nutshell, this means eating plenty of fruits, vegetables and whole grains, and cutting back or cutting out refined sugars (white sugar, high-fructose corn syrup, honey, molasses, etc.) and processed grains.
Right-carb diets rely heavily on the glycemic index and glycemic load. In theory, foods with a low glycemic load generate small but steady increases in blood sugar that help stave off hunger. In contrast, the rapid increases in blood sugar and insulin that follow consumption of foods with a high glycemic load are followed by equally steep drops that soon get your internal hunger alarm ringing.
Bottom line: In general, right-carb diets promote healthy eating by focusing on fruits, vegetables and whole grains. But you don't really need to rely on the sometimes contradictory glycemic index and glycemic load tables to tell you that. Plans that prohibit refined sugars also make dieting and healthy eating more complicated than it needs to be. Refined sugars aren't toxic; they just add unnecessary calories.
Perfect Proportions and Careful Combinations
Several diets sell the idea that specific proportions of nutrients or certain combinations of foods are essential to weight loss. If you want to enter The Zone, you must create meals and snacks that contain 9 grams of carbohydrate for every 7 grams of protein and 1.5 grams of fat (40% carbohydrate, 30% fat, and 30% protein).
The Eat Right 4 Your Type diet promotes the wholly unscientific idea that your blood type determines what you should eat, along with how you should exercise, what supplements you need and what type of personality you have. Following it isn't easy, since you must remember lists of good and bad foods. It isn't balanced, something you can tell from the long list of recommended supplements. And it makes it hard to prepare meals for a family with several different blood types.
Bottom line: Proper proportions or correct combinations force you to focus on what you are eating, which helps most people eat less each day. That's where any weight loss from these diets comes from, not from any nutritional or physiologic secrets the diet developers have uncovered.
Does Density Matter?
According to the Volumetrics plan, focusing on foods that fill the belly without adding too many calories will help you shed pounds. Foods with a high water content, such as fruits, vegetables, low-fat milk, cooked grains, beans, soups and stews, get the thumbs up, while high-fat foods like potato chips get the thumbs down, as do dry, calorie-dense ones like pretzels, crackers and fat-free cookies.
Bottom line: This strategy helps people lose weight the same way most other diets do -- it narrows your choices so you take in fewer calories each day. Whether it has a long-term role for weight control isn't known.
Behavior Change
Some people use food for comfort and overeat in response to sadness, loneliness, depression or any number of other triggers. Breaking an unhealthy relationship with food can help such individuals lose weight. That's where Dr. Phil's Ultimate Weight Solution, the Automatic Diet and others come in.
Dr. Phil offers "seven keys to permanent weight loss" -- right thinking, healing feelings, a no-fail environment, mastery over food and impulse eating, intentional exercise, a circle of support and what Dr. Phil calls high-response cost, high-yield nutrition. The plan offers little advice about nutrition. The Automatic Diet uses behavior modification techniques to reprogram the patterns that work against healthy eating.
Bottom line: If you think that your habits, behaviors and relationships with other people and with food promote poor eating habits or influence your ability to lose weight or maintain a steady weight, then a behavioral approach makes sense. Combining it with a healthy eating pattern based on sound nutrition would be even better.
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