False Mayo Clinic Diet #1
This weight loss diet revolves around eating a lot of grapefruit.  For instance, a typical day’s food would consist of:

Breakfast: ½ grapefruit, 2 eggs any style, 2 slices of bacon.

Lunch: ½ grapefruit, any style of meat (any amount), salad with any kind of dressing.

Dinner: ½ grapefruit, any style of meat or fish in any amount, any green, yellow, or red vegetables cooked in butter or any other kind of seasoning.

Snack: 1 cup of tomato juice or 1 cup of milk

Avoid: White onions, potatoes, celery

Eat until you are full and then stop.  Eat everything on the menu including the morning’s bacon.  Cut down on caffeine.  Don’t eat between meals.  Don’t eat any sugar or starch including deserts, bread, or potatoes.

The “key” to this false “Mayo Clinic Diet” is the grapefruit.  It supposedly acts as a catalyst that starts the fat burning process.

False Mayo Clinic Diet #2
They way to lose weight with this diet involves eating gallons and gallons of Cabbage Soup.  You can eat as much of the soup as you want throughout the diet.  You make the soup with the following ingredients:

• 6 large green onions
• 2 green peppers
• 1 or 2 cans of tomatoes (diced or whole)
• 3 Carrots
• 1 Container (10 oz. or so) Mushrooms
• 1 bunch of celery
• half a head of cabbage
• 1 package Lipton soup mix
• 1 or 2 cubes of bouillon (optional)
• 1 48oz can V8 juice (optional) (reduce water by appropriate amount if used)
• Season to taste with salt, pepper, parsley, curry, garlic powder, etc.
• 12 cups water

The Cabbage Soup version of the Mayo Clinic Diet follows a 7 day plan.  On the first day, you can have all of the soup you want plus any amount of fruit except bananas.  The second day, you can have the soup plus all of the vegetables you want including one big baked potato at dinner time.  The third day, you get all the soup, fruit, and vegetables you want except for potatoes.  Then on day four, you get the soup plus all the bananas and skim milk you want.  On day 5, you get up to 20 ounces of beef plus 6 tomatoes along with the soup.  On day 6, you can have up to 3 8 ounce steaks and all the vegetables you want (no potatoes).  The last day calls for brown rice, unsweetened fruit juice, and vegetables along with the soup.

The Real Mayo Clinic Diet
The Mayo Clinic does not recommend that dieters follow either the grapefruit or the cabbage soup plans.  Instead, the Official Mayo Clinic Diet is based on four healthy eating principles that look more like the advice a dietitian would recommend you follow:

1. Eat well using the food pyramid as a guide.
2. Increase your physical activity
3. Set action goals to guide your diet.
4. Get started and stay motivated.

Stop eating lots of grapefruit or drowning yourself in cabbage soup! You’re not following the official Mayo Clinic Diet, which is the real way to lose fat and lower your body weight.

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Weight Watchers, for instance, is perfect for the busy woman.  There are no “forbidden foods,” elaborate recipes, or fancy food combinations.  Instead, each food is given a points value based on its calorie, fat, and fiber quotient.  Then, the dieter is given a maximum number of points to be used each day.  There are also floating points for the week that can either be divided up equally over the days or used for a once a week splurge.

There are weekly meetings on the Weight Watchers program.  At these meetings, dieters weigh in and have their weight recorded and attend a 30 minute pep rally.  Seasonal issues like dealing with eating during the holidays are always addressed.  There are no special foods to buy.  There is an initiation fee and a $10/week meeting fee that is charged whether you attend your meeting or not.  Over all, this is one of the easiest diets you will find.

You should be able to make the same kinds of foods for your family that you make for yourself.  While you might choose to eat less than you normally would or skip the potato or desert course to stay under your point limit, you will find that you can eat with your family at all times.

Another of the recommended easy diets is Jenny Craig.  With Jenny Craig, you are given a pre-set menu and most of your meals are provided for you.  You simply buy the produce for salads, fruit snacks, etc.  You meet with a weight counselor once a week to monitor your progress and buy your next week’s worth of meals.  Some of the meals are shelf stable, but the tastier ones tend to be frozen.

Jenny Craig is expensive.  In addition to an initiation fee, the meals you buy will cost you more than comparable groceries will.  Additionally, you will have to go speific grocery stores to buy your diet food.

You will not be able to eat the same foods as your family when you follow Jenny Craig’s easy diets. You will need to prepare normal foods for the non-dieters at your table and bring your Jenny Craig food to dinner. If you are single, however, the portion controlled foods make Jenny Craig one of the easy diets to follow.

Nutrisystem is a cheaper version of Jenny Craig and an equally easy diet to follow.  While you won’t visit your counselor in person, you will have access to him or her over the phone.  The food is a lot less expensive, and it is all shelf stable which is mailed to you in 4 week boxes.  Taste might be an issue with some dieters. You still have to go to the grocery store to buy some of the diet food, but most is shipped to you in the box.  Like the Jenny Craig diet you won’t be able to sit down to dinner with the family, but cooking the Nutrisystem food is no problem.

So, there you have it, three easy diets that won’t complicate your life while you are losing weight.

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At first glance there seems to be nothing to make this weight loss diet stand out from all the others and it seems at first to be a glorified system for counting calories, where in fact you don’t count calories on this diet plan, the secret lies in the gradual weekly dietary changes and the clever system of visual clues, used for gauging portion sizes. In fact, you can eat just about anything you like on this diet and still loose weight.

Change One is the official Readers Digest Diet and was written by John Hastings with Peter Jaret and Mindy Herman, RD.

John Hastings is the senior staff editor for health at Reader’s Digest magazine, the world’s largest consumer magazine. He has worked as a journalist in the fields of health, medicine, nutrition, and fitness for 14 years.

Mindy Hermann is a registered dietitian who speaks and consults on weight loss and nutrition.

Peter Jaret is a frequent contributor to Reader’s Digest, Health, Eating Well, National Wildlife, and other magazines.

I found the gradual change to be one of the biggest benefits of this diet. No radical changes in what you eat and more importantly, no acute hunger pangs because all of a sudden you aren’t eating enough.

Each week you learn new tips and tricks which when added to the previous weeks successes, ultimately help you to develop good eating habits.

There is a lot of flexibility with the Change One diet, you will receive custom diet plans based on the amount of weight you want to lose and the foods that you like and dislike.

And you really can eat the food you enjoy, I was really skeptical about that initially, but you’ll even get recipes for these foods, amazing! There are limits to the amounts of unhealthy food you can eat though.

Dietary experts almost all agree that a diet must encourage healthy eating and the Change One Diet does that nice and gently.

If you’re looking for a diet that will help you loose weight and then keep that weight off, then I recommend the Change One Diet which scores an 8 on my scale of 1 to 10.

For more information on the Change One Diet please visit http://www.changeone.com

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