Five Corresponding Diet Principles That Help You Lose Weight

Fortunately, the five most common diet myths are based on diet facts. The honest diet facts can help you lose weight.

1. If you want to lose weight and keep it off, let someone else count calories for you

This is the idea behind most medically supervised weight loss diets and the Jenny Craig program. You get most of your calories in prepackaged meals, and you only add salad vegetables, fruit, and dairy products that you buy at the store. If you take any possibility of super-sizing (and forgetting about it later) out of your diet program you will lose more weight, especially if you "overeat" vegetables and fruit rather than cookies and ice cream. If you also have a counselor or dietitian whom you meet in person or with whom you have conversations over the Internet or telephone, you are much more likely to keep the weight off for a year or more.

2. If you want to lose weight and keep it off, plan a menu before you eat rather than recording your memories of food choices after you eat

Ideally, you would carefully plan your diet food menu and then hand it to your kitchen staff at the beginning of each week. Your personal attendant and butler would make sure that you adhered to your diet choices by politely reminding you of your weight goals.

But if you prepare your own food on a budget, you can at least make healthy choices in the foods you buy during your weekly trip to the market, preparing high-calorie foods ahead of time in carefully planned portions. Let your salad and fruit choices be spontaneous, but eat soups, casseroles, roasts, stews, and bean dishes that you prepare on your shopping day, from recipes that give you accurate calorie counts.

3. You may be able to lose fat and gain muscle while you diet with a little help

Sometimes weight loss dieters who exercise gain more muscle when they shift the way the body uses the amino acid arginine. You don't have to take huge amounts of protein powder to do this. Just 1,000 mg of a mixture of arginine and ornithine twice a day is enough. This inexpensive amino acid supplement keeps arginine from being transformed into other amino acids, and makes it available for muscle growth. You only add 10 calories a day to your diet, and if you are already exercising, this should not be a problem.

4. Ultimately, dieters lose weight on low-calorie diets, not low-carbohydrate, low-fat, or low-protein diets

It is not exactly true that calories in = calories out + calories stored as fat. The body has to transform essential amino acids into the non-essential amino acids it needs, which requires energy. The action of digesting food requires energy. And even storing excess calories as fat requires some energy.

But the amount of energy the body needs every day to use the food you eat is less than you can consume in a single donut. Ultimately, weight loss is about eating less. If the boredom of a high-protein diet kills your appetite, this approach may work for you (at least for a while). If the variety of a raw foods variety distracts you from your hunger, this approach may also work for you (probably for a longer while). But the key to success to any diet always comes down to eating less. The diet plans are really about fighting hunger, not about losing weight.

5. Take an 18-hour break from eating every other day to lose weight

There is nothing magical about eating less later in the day. There are two things that are nearly magical about short-term fasts.

When you don't eat for 17 or 18 hours, your body's lipase enzymes begin to take more fat out of fat cells that other processes put in. Even if you overate at your last meal (and please don't interpret this as license to overeat before an 18-hour fast), your body begins to burn fat.

And when you don't eat for 17 or 18 hours, your body begins to make growth hormone to protect your muscles. Your muscles do not, as the three-hour diet advocates tell us, begin to break down if you don't constantly eat protein. Growth hormone protects them, and also rejuvenates many other processes in your body. Since growth hormone production is enhanced during sleep, it helps to skip dinner rather than breakfast.