Types of Diets

They say you are what you eat, and it is true to a great extent. Understanding the way you eat, what you eat, how you prepare your meals plays a huge role in our health and body. There are many different types of diets out there that promise better health and weight loss benefits.

  • Atkins Diet

Atkins diet is all about reducing your intake of carbohydrates but having as many proteins and fats as you want. Since most of your diet will constitute of fats and proteins, you’ll have a low appetite which can help you in losing weight. Atkins diet cuts down carbs’ consumption to 20g a day initially and once you approach your weight goal, it hikes carbs up to 50g a day. You will also refrain from having nuts, legumes, pulses, and alcohol. Eating fats, butter, margarine, red meat, poultry, and dairy are allowed.

The “Atkins Diet” started as a fad, but quickly became a counter-conventional movement that reset people’s understanding of nutrition and weight loss, and its link to health.

Atkins public health advocacy has played a significant role in updating dietary guidelines, moving them from less and towards right.

  • Mediterranean Diet

The Mediterranean diet promotes eating vegetables, fruits, whole grains, legumes, seafood, nuts, and olive oil. It pretty much allows you to eat everything except for processed and refined food, seasoning food with salt and added sugars, saturated fats and red meat. This diet is an excellent way of eating healthier food and enjoying long term benefits. Studies show that Mediterranean diets helps to lose weight, prevents diabetes, heart diseases, and even helps elevate depression!

Interest in the Mediterranean diet began in the 1960s with the observation that coronary heart disease caused fewer deaths in Mediterranean countries, such as Greece and Italy, than in the U.S. and northern Europe. Subsequent studies found that the Mediterranean diet is associated with reduced risk factors for cardiovascular disease.

  • Ketogenic Diet

You might have heard the word “Keto” a lot lately and wondered what this diet is all about. Keto diet involved reducing the consumption of carbohydrates and elevating the consumption of fats.Increasing the consumption of fats will force your body to burn fats instead of carbohydrates to fuel itself, resulting in weight loss. The Ketogenic diet promotes including healthy fats in the diet, such as those found in olive oil, fish oil, nuts, seeds, avocados, and coconuts etc.

A keto diet can be especially useful for losing excess body fat without hunger and for improving type 2 diabetes.

  • Paleo Diet

Among the many different types of diets out there, the Paleo diet is a one that suggests we start to eat like our ancestors. Paleo diet allows you to eat meat, fish, vegetables, fruits, nuts, healthy fats and eggs. It restricts from eating processed food, sugar, fizzy drinks, vegetable oils, grains, legumes, and dairy products. Avoiding processed and junk food while eating healthy and whole foods will have a definite improvement in your health and can help you in losing weight.

The premise of The Paleo Diet, and the reason it is an effective, intelligent approach to weight loss, is simple. This diet is the only one to which human beings are genetically adapted. As such, eating the foods your body needs—indeed, the foods you are genetically programmed to consume—will greatly reduce your hunger signals.

  • Dukan Diet

If you love having proteins then you’ll love reading about this diet for losing weight. Dukan diet focuses on eating elevated amounts of proteins and reduces carbohydrates intake. This means that the body will burn fats in the absence of carbohydrates which will result in weight loss. The diet involves four phases, two for losing weight and two for maintaining it. Although this diet is very effective for losing weight, it is also extremely hard due to restriction from carbs, vegetables, and grains.

This diet is based on the theory that counting calories isn’t the key to weight loss; protein is. It’s a weight-loss powerhouse – it’s filling, takes time and work to digest, and has very few calories for each gram of food compared to carb-heavy foods. Limiting carbs, the body’s preferred energy source, forces the body to turn to an alternative fuel – stored fat. By following the Dukan Diet, it’s claimed you can lose up to 10 pounds within the first week and continue to lose 2 to 4 pounds a week…

  • Zone Diet

The Zone™ is a real physiological state in your body that can be measured in clinical tests. If you are in the Zone, you have optimized your ability to control diet-induced inflammation. This inflammation is the reason you gain weight, become sick, and age faster.If you desire to control your insulin levels along with losing your body weight, then Zone diet could be a perfect fit for you. This diet aims for a nutritional balance of 40 % carbohydrates and 30 % each for proteins and fats in each meal. This diet emphasizes more on high quality and unrefined carbohydrates along with healthy fats from nuts, avocado, and olive oil etc.

  • Vegetarian Diet

A vegetarian diet focuses on plants for food. These include fruits, vegetables, dried beans and peas, grains, seeds and nuts. There is no single type of vegetarian diet. Studies have proved that vegetarian dieters enjoy low body fat percentage, better health, are less prone to several critical illnesses, and also have a higher life expectancy than non-vegetarians. Many individuals choose a vegetarian diet for ethical reasons too. This diet is really vast as it includes: Lacto-vegetarian, Lacto-ovo-vegetarian, ovo-vegetarian, pesco-vegetarian, and semi-vegetarian etc.

  • Vegan Diet

Vegans believe that today’s farming is entirely unethical due to the ill and harmful agricultural practices followed nowadays. The principle of Veganism is to completely follow a strict green diet, which would prevent animal lives and also better physical and mental health of the individual. Veganism is not just a diet pattern; it’s more of a philosophy. They follow a strict diet containing only plant-based food and avoiding all animal-based food for environmental and ethical reasons.

  • Raw Food Diet

The raw food diet also is known as raw foodism, involves food consumption which is completely raw and unprocessed. It could ideally be a completely organic end product food.

Think uncooked, unprocessed, mostly organic foods. Your staples: raw fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, and sprouted grains. Some eat unpasteurized dairy foods, raw eggs, meat, and fish.

Your food can be cold or even a little bit warm, as long as it doesn’t go above 118 degrees.

You can use blenders, food processors, and dehydrators to prepare foods

  • Carnivore

The Carnivore Diet is a restrictive diet that only includes meat, fish, and other animal foods like eggs and certain dairy products.

It excludes all other foods, including fruits, vegetables, legumes, grains, nuts, and seeds.

Its proponents also recommend eliminating or limiting dairy intake to foods that are low in lactose — a sugar found in milk and dairy products — such as butter and hard cheeses.

The Carnivore Diet stems from the controversial belief that human ancestral populations ate mostly meat and fish and that high-carb diets are to blame for today’s high rates of chronic disease.

As the name suggests, this diet is all about eating meat and other animal products. Basically, if the food came from something that could fly, walk or swim, it’s fair game, and you can have it morning noon and night.

References

https://www.atkins.com/our-mission

https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/nutrition-and-healthy-eating/in-depth/mediterranean-diet/art-20047801

https://www.dietdoctor.com/low-carb/keto

https://health.usnews.com/best-diet/dukan-diet

https://www.zonediet.com/the-zone-diet/