With every new year, it seems as if somebody publishes another promising diet book that claims to be the best method for losing weight and keeping it off. And with every new year, you feel a new hope that this diet is the miracle cure that will finally make you lose the extra few pounds you have been struggling with for so long, or help to ensure that the pounds you have managed to lose are gone forever. “The diet that actually works” is a common heading in all types of magazines, followed by additional claims regarding the superiority of this diet over another for inducing weight loss.
Confusion and perhaps headache arise when you try to make sense of all the different diet names, the foods you have to exclude and include in the various diets, and to even figure out which diet that truly is the best one for losing weight.
The researchers Johnston et al. compared the efficacy of 14 different diet programs in achieving weight loss and maintaining weight loss among adults in their meta-analysis research. To not follow any diet was compared with either following a low fat diet, the Atkins diet, the Zone diet, Weight Watchers, the Ornish diet, Jenny Craig, Biggest Loser, the LEARN diet, a moderate macronutrient diet, Rosemary Conley, Nutrisystem, Slimming World and Volumetrics.
The results from the study showed that compared with the adults who did not follow any diet, the diet groups achieved significantly more weight loss. Furthermore, weight loss was observed with any of the diets, and the differences between the individual named diets were small. Success in this study directly correlated with adherence to the diet. This means that no matter which diet you chose to follow, as long as you follow it, you will get results!
