Step Two: Choose a Healthy, Maintainable Eating Plan (MUST DO)
What good is a diet that works for a month when you end up falling right back to where you started? No good at all. Rather than going for the latest fad diet, try something that will be easy to maintain for the long-term -- you'll have much better overall results that way.
Think about it -- if any of your past diets had been completely successful, you wouldn't need to drop any weight and you wouldn't be reading this. They might have worked for a while, but they didn't work over the long-term.
Maintainability, then, is a vital component of any diet plan. Everyone differs in their preferences, but for me, maintainability means: 1) the diet is convenient to follow, meaning it doesn't take forever to prepare meals; 2) the diet is inexpensive and doesn't require any exotic materials that are hard to find; 3) the diet features variety; 4) the diet does NOT feature deprivation.
I rotated through three diets for my weight loss, but that's me. The rotation kept me on my toes, and kept me from getting bored. But any one of the following three diets will work for you. So try one or try them all, but I urge you to focus on long-term results, and not short-term ones. Besides, by following step one, you'll have already dropped some quick weight, and now you can carry that momentum forward.
The Cheat to Lose Diet
This diet is effective and is easy to follow. The underlying premise is that a hormone called leptin helps your body burn fat, and the meal schedules are set up so that leptin is highest when your food consumption is lowest. You can pick up the Cheat to Lose book from Amazon or your local bookstore. It is a portion control diet that takes into account the glycemic index of foods, and includes a full cheat day each week. This gives you a lot of flexibility and it works incredibly well, especially if you're the type of dieter who always hits plateaus.
The Slow Carb Diet Diet
This is a diet of my own invention, and I cycle it in occasionally because it's easy to follow and gives you a lot of food to eat. The Slow Carb diet is the low-glycemic days of the Cheat to Lose Diet, repeated for six days straight. Day 7, like the Cheat to Lose Diet, is a cheat day. Great for a change of pace or when you really want to take in some fiber.
The Eat More, Weight Less Diet
Sometimes the old ones are just as effective as the new ones! You can pick up this book used for a penny (literally) at Amazon or check it out from your local library. It's essentially a high fiber, vegetarian-based diet, and yes it works. But do be sure to add some healthy fats to it -- this was one of the shortcomings of this diet.
The Fat Loss 4 Idiots Diet
Similar in concept to Cheat to Lose, except that it works with the principle of calorie shifting to keep your body guessing. This diet also features cheat days every two weeks, so it is drop dead simple to follow. If you want to get started quickly, you can be up and running in 15 minutes, as this diet is available online. Check it out here.
That's Step Two -- Keep reading for Step Three
So now you've tackled cleansing and detoxification (Priming) and choosing a healthy eating plan (Fueling), and now it's time to cover the dreaded leg of this stool: Working.
