Logical Guidelines for Best Diet Selections
Scientific,Critical Evaluation of Diets to Attain Maximum Benefits
Jun 24, 2009
Which diet is best and why? Are some diets fit for certain people, and not others? How does one choose a proper, good diet?
Food selections in some places on earth are limited—often to an extreme. Elsewhere, food is abundant with hundreds of possible diet combinations including special, balanced, diets designed to help people obtain, or maintain, a healthy weight.
Food choices are daily decisions and these choices can lead to better health, or possible disease. Diets can be long-term life or death decisions. Here the focus is on rational and wise diet choices.
Scientific Method Approach to Diets, Food, and Best Personal Diet Choices
Imagine a wonder diet, or pill, expensively advertised and promoted, with dozens of personal testimonies as to its wonders—is that sufficient proof? Look at those folks— 10, 20 or hundred pounds lost—they look terrific.
- But, how true is what they say?
- How many total participated?
- How many failures were there?
- What were the controls? Those questions are never answered, are they?
The scientific method involves observation, hypothesis, experimentation and ultimate results.
- Observe— available diets.
- Speculate as to some best diets.
- Experiment with the diet by choosing, doing, following, and recording daily results.
- See what the total, final results are.
Everyone can make intelligent, rational diet choices. Dieting involves thinking—clear, logical, scientific thinking.
Rational Choices of Food and Diets for Good Health, Disease Prevention
Some diets are not balanced. Many diets tested with large populations and suitable controls (unregulated diet participants). Choose a diet that is:
- tested, evaluated, and proven statistically as a healthy diet.
- suitable to the dieter’s tastes.
- varied and healthy.
Dieter’s Wise Choices and How to Make Them
- Decide on a scientifically proven, verified diet.
- Maintain a daily and weekly log book of planned scheduled meals and diet.
- Log in the amounts of calories eaten as accurately as possible.
- Keep a separate weight log. Be honest and accurate.
- Give the diet at least a 30 day trial.
- Eating out is fine, but stay diet-focused. Eating out is no excuse for breaking the diet.
- Indicate what diet violations, if any, there were.
- If the diet is not working, and it is being followed honestly and rigorously, toss that diet regime and try another—that is good, logical, scientific.
Find Diets That Work
- Study available diets.
- Seek diets with great recipes and exciting ideas.
- Review healthy diets used successfully by friends, rather than commercials. Quality, lean, low salt, frozen meals, carefully selected, might work for those who do not cook.
- Weight Watchers International is one organization with longevity, experience and good reputation.
- Five or six small meals and healthy snacks typically work well for most folks. Remember— lots of fresh vegetables and fruits, small portions of nuts (walnuts, pecans, pistachios) are healthful. Prescribed exercise, judiciously and regularly done, is important.
- Drink pure water routinely.
- Avoid yo-yo dieting, with big losses of weight followed by big gains.
- Weight loss that works may take a few days to a week before the first pounds come off.
- Remember there are 454 grams in a pound of fat. That weight is equivalent to about 3,200 calories, or 1.5 days of usable caloric energy for an average person—even if nothing is eaten.
- A person who is 50 pounds overweight has about 75 days of energy stored in fat.
- Dieting is so difficult for so many. But, it can be done if one thinks it out every day, is focused, disciplined and wants to reach that finish line as a better-looking, healthier person.
Anyone considering a new diet should consider a consultation with a physician and a medical exam. This is word to the wise.
Read more about diet basics, calories and healthy Mediterranean diets.
Sources
Castelli, W. P. and G. C. Griffen. 1997. Good Fat Bad Fat. Fisher Books. Tucson, Arizona. 256 pp
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