Real Diet Reviews - The Skinny on Losing Weight

With every issue of Woman’s World Magazine (and a few others) the cover announces a new diet breakthrough of how you can lose weight and/or fat.  Most of the time it is an actual diet program that you can follow and/or purchase a book for full details. 

Years back they offered some fun ones like The Doughnut Diet which allowed you to have doughnuts every day (I believe it was the mini doughnuts) as long as you followed the rest of the diet plan which came to a certain amount of daily calories.  If I can remember it totalled approximately 1200-1400 calories daily, allowing the mini doughnuts for meals and snacks.  I’m sure it worked as long as you stuck closely to the plan.  I’m assuming the rest of the program was as nutritional as possible while keeping the calories low.

I have found many different diets in magazines that I have followed over the years.  I am trying to find one I used a couple of times.  Again, it was mainly a 2 week plan spelled out with breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks for the day ranging from 1200-1400 daily calories.  You needed to follow the plan as closely as possible and make similar substitutions in calories & fats if you didn’t like a particular food item.  Some plans offered substitution lists.

The problem with many of these plans was the fact that you had to cook some specific meals that were part of the plan.  I do cook almost every dinner but sometimes these types of programs can be a pain.  Of course, you can use common sense & simply count calories if you don’t feel like preparing the lunch or dinner recommended for that day’s food intake.  But for those people who enjoy following a precise plan, some of these magazine diets are pretty good.

Like any diet, however, can you stick to them?  They rarely offer any type of maintenance program so once you’re off the plan you have to be careful about overeating again.  And many of the magazine plans can only fit up to 2 weeks of meals in an article.  You either have to start getting creative or keep following the same plan over and over.

If you’ve found a great magazine plan please share it with us all.