The Best Life Diet guides you to develop healthy eating habits and a healthy lifestyle, for weight loss and to maintain a healthy weight. The program does this in 3 phases.
Phase 1 – minimum 4 weeks
Objective: More activity, establishing meal patterns.
Following an initial weigh-in, the diet program stipulates 3 meals (including breakfast) plus at least 1 snack daily, and no eating during minimum 2 hours before bedtime. Plenty of water but no alcohol, and daily supplements. Increase physical activity.
Weigh-in after 4 weeks, and move on if ready – that is, if all the daily objectives are being met consistently, and the overall weight loss has been more than a pound or thereabouts per week. If not, stay on phase 1 for 2 or 3 weeks longer.
Phase 2 – minimum 4 weeks
Objective: Significant and consistent weight loss through control of hunger and dietary changes.
Weigh in at start, and then every week. Develop understanding of the physical and emotional reasons for your hunger, and use the hunger scale. Eat reasonable food portions, and remove 6 foods from your diet that are ‘empty’ or are problem foods. Physical activity may be increased.
Check weight-loss after 4 weeks and move on if ready. If you’re within 20 pounds of achieving your weight goal, and the weight-loss has stopped, move to Phase 3. Otherwise, stay with Phase 2 until your regular weekly weigh-in says you can progress.
Phase 3 – lifetime lifestyle
Objective: Continue to improve quality of diet for good health and weight maintenance.
Weigh in at least each month, but no more often than once a week. Introduce other foods according to the calories advice given, and balance your diet using the guidelines, removing more unhealthy foods and adding wholesome ones. Physical activity may be increased.
This is your healthy lifestyle from here on in.
Exercise physiologist Bob Greene’s TheBest Life Diet is an easy-to-follow, no-gimmicks approach to a healthy diet and lifestyle. It’s a dietitian’s dream diet — and one that apparently changed talk show host Oprah Winfrey’s life. Winfrey describes in the foreword how, after years of struggling with diets, she found success with The Best Life Diet.
There is nothing groundbreaking about The Best Life Diet. Greene’s “diet” is synonymous with the phrase “lifestyle change.” There’s no going on and off this diet, because it’s not a “diet.” It’s a lifestyle of healthy eating, with an emphasis on regular physical activity.
The Best Life Diet is a safe, effective way to lose weight and improve fitness. But it is not quick or temporary. You’re encouraged to make gradual changes, one step at a time. The aim is to transform your old eating and exercise habits into healthier new ones that will last a lifetime.
Depending on your gender and activity level, TheBest Life Diet guidelines suggests calorie levels ranging from 1,500-2,500 and a recommended number of servings from the various food groups. The basic premise is that the more active you are, the more calories you can eat.
Greene’s fitness insights and easygoing style makes weight loss easy to understand. Lots of great tips, recipes, menus, and useful tools are included to help dieters get and stay motivated. The Best Life Diet is easily tailored to a wide array of personal lifestyles, activity levels, and food preferences. The program can be followed online for a fee, or by the book.
What You Can Eat on The Best Life Diet
There is no calorie-counting on the Best Life Diet, only a mindful approach to making wise food choices and monitoring portion sizes. Splurges are worked into the program during the third phase with an allotment of “anything goes” calories.
It appears very simple. You can enjoy a wide variety of healthy foods while slowly ridding your diet of unhealthier choices such as fried foods, foods containing trans fats, white bread, sugary soft drinks, regular pasta, and high-fat dairy. These foods are phased out and replaced with healthier foods such as whole grains, fruits, vegetables, low-fat dairy, and more. Weekly eating plans provide suggested meals.
Greene has placed his Best Life Diet seal of approval logo on a variety of food products he recommends as healthy. Dieters are asked to make their healthier choices from a recommended list of foods from companies involved in corporate sponsorship.
How The Best Life Diet
Greene’s Best Life premise is to promote a non- dieting mind-set so you can focus on improving your life and gaining control over your struggles with eating and weight. While strict diet plans usually set you up for disappointment and ultimate failure, Greene sets dieters up for success, one small step at a time.
Some programs start with a very strict first phase with a long list of prohibited foods. Greene takes a different approach by starting with a more liberal first phase:
Phase One, a maximum of four weeks, focuses on slowly increasing activity levels and changing old eating habits. Recommendations include no eating two hours before bed, eating three meals and one snack daily, eliminating alcohol (temporarily), staying hydrated, and taking a daily multivitamin/mineral, omega-3 fatty acid, and calcium (if needed). The meal and snack suggestions make healthy eating sound delicious.
Phase Two, a minimum of four weeks, promotes a more aggressive approach to losing weight through healthier eating and increased physical activity. This phase builds upon the changes made in Phase One, with an emphasis on controlling physical and emotional hunger, removing six problem foods from your diet, weekly weigh-ins, and portion control.
Phase Three is maintenance, or the phase for the rest of your life. It focuses on eliminating more unhealthy foods and adding more wholesome foods, and introduces “anything goes” calories. Greene’s “anything goes” calories are similar to the “discretionary calories” found in the U.S. government’s 2005 Dietary Guidelines, which allow you to enjoy your favorite treats in small portions. Greene gives the green light for more “anything goes” calories when you are most active.
Greene also tackles issues that lead to overeating, such as hunger and emotional eating. Using his hunger tool helps dieters stop overeating by learning how to gauge real hunger. He tackles emotional eating head-on by asking dieters to answer some tough questions before beginning the program:
Why are you overweight?
Why do you want to lose weight?
Why have you been unable to lose weight in the past?
Answering these questions honestly can help dieters identify the things that need to be changed so they can start to address problem issues.
Diets
What the Experts Say About The Best Life Diet
The Best Life Diet is based on science — it supports the U.S. government’s 2005 U.S. Dietary Guidelines with very doable and easy suggestions. And most registered dietitians and fitness trainers agree that true weight loss success comes from making lifestyle changes.
Greene’s flexible approach helps dieters stick with the plan. But obesity expert Cathy Nonas, RD, wonders if his realistic, gradual approach will appeal to overweight people who want the quick fix.
“Once a person decides to lose weight, they want it gone immediately,” says Nonas, a spokesperson for the American Dietetic Association. “And unfortunately, they choose fad diets [and] lose weight quickly only to regain it back instead of choosing a program like Best Life Diet that tackles changing eating behaviors.”
Nonas says she likes the slow and gradual first phase followed by the more intense second and third phases.
“Anyone who gets through the first phase, regardless [of] if they lose weight, will improve their dietary picture,” says Nonas. If you’re not successful at losing weight during the first or second phase, “stick with the phase longer before moving onto maintenance,” suggests Nonas.
Counting calories is too difficult and inaccurate. But if you cut out the sodas, fried foods, and giant white bagels, the calorie savings will add up.
“For people like me who already avoid the six perilous foods, it won’t make much of a difference,” says Nonas. “But for anyone who eats or drinks the high-calorie foods, it should help them lose weight.”
Nonas also points out that some “forbidden” foods can be enjoyed in moderate portions.
“There is nothing wrong with high-fat dairy if you make modifications elsewhere in your diet, and likewise if you enjoy white pasta or white bread as long as you get enough fiber in your diet,” she says
The bottom line, Nonas says, is that Greene’s recommendations are sound for the most part. She suggests that dieters buy the book but ignore the branded merchandising.
“What is really important is not the brand of yogurt, but reading labels to choose a low-fat yogurt,” she says.
Food for Thought
If you’re tired of gimmicks and strict food lists and are looking for a program that can help you change your life once and for all, this book is for you.
The plan’s goals are attainable, and, more important, sustainable. Tools, tips, recipes and a wealth of helpful resources, including the online Best Life Diet message board, provide great support.
Diet review: The Best Life Diet
Sure, you may not have Oprah’s billions or her retinue of personal chefs. But for a retail price of $26, you can pick up a copy of Bob Greene’s The Best Life Diet (Simon & Schuster, 2006) and get sensible, sensitive fitness and diet advice from the popular TV talk-show host’s longtime personal trainer — the man who, she writes in the book’s foreword, “changed my life.”
Consumer Reports magazine recently ranked Best Life as No. 1 in its June 2007 review of seven new weight-loss books. Neither a fad diet nor a restrictive plan, Best Life combines a motivational voice with generous calorie counts and detailed fitness guidelines. The book is a weight-loss tool kit, filled with user-friendly aids such as 75 recipes, a weekly meal plan and food-buying guides.
With its reassuring “let’s-take-this-slow” tone, Best Life allows you to wade, rather than plunge, into dietary waters. Greene believes that most weight-loss plans fail because they include only diet and fitness advice. People who are overweight are generally emotional eaters, according to Greene. And without understanding why you’re turning to food to deal with, say, stress, loneliness, anxiety, guilt or shame, even the most well-designed diet is, at best, only a short-term fix.
The Best Life plan begins with a very Oprah-esque examination of the reasons you want to lose weight, why you’ve been unable to maintain weight loss in the past and the psychological reasons you experience hunger despite third helpings at the buffet line.
Only after this self-reflection do you ease into phase 1. There’s no calorie cutting here; the focus is on developing healthy habits — drinking lots of water, eating three meals and at least one snack a day, avoiding food two hours before bedtime, taking a multivitamin and bumping up your activity level.
After a month, if you’ve been dropping a pound or two a week, Greene suggests you stick with phase 1 for several more weeks. Otherwise, you move on to phase 2, where the calorie crunching begins. Now you eliminate six problem foods — such as soda, fried food, white bread and regular pasta — from your diet, replacing them with more healthful alternatives. Physical activity is increased to three calorie-burning sessions of 30 minutes or more. The goal in this phase is to lose a steady pound or two a week.
After four weeks, if you’re within 20 pounds of your goal weight, you move on to phase 3 and establish practices that you’ll follow throughout your life. While you keep swapping high-fat, high-calorie foods for leaner options, you’re able to reintroduce small amounts of banished foods in the form of “anything goes” calories.
Dietary recommendations: These vary by activity level. If you’re doing 30 minutes of aerobic exercise at least three times a week, Greene suggests five servings of whole grains and starchy vegetables, six of nonstarchy veggies and fruits, two of non- or low-fat dairy, seven servings of lean protein-rich foods and five servings of healthy fats.
Caloric guidelines: Men and women who maintain a moderate level of physical activity are allowed 1,700 calories a day.
Number of meals per day: Three, with an emphasis on a nutritious breakfast and snacks
What you eat: Whole grains; nonfat dairy products; healthy fats such as olive oil, nuts and seeds; beans; a wide variety of fruits and vegetables, both fresh and frozen; and lean proteins, including white meat turkey and chicken, lean ground beef, flank steak, Alaskan salmon, eggs, tofu.
Foods that are prohibited: After phase 1, no foods are banned entirely, but Greene allows only very minimal quantities of “anything goes” foods such as full-fat dairy, fried food, refined grains and sweets with more than 8 grams of sugar.
Vegetarian-friendly? Absolutely. Greene urges making vegetables a mainstay of your diet, suggests trying a new vegetable each week (including less familiar veggies like jicama, hearts of palm and celery root), and offers recipes for vegetarian soups, entrées, salads and wraps.
Eating out? Yes. It’s OK to do so if you follow the portion guidelines that Greene provides, along with his tips on how to scan a menu for healthful food choices and hone your “hunger scale” to know when to ask for a doggie bag.
Exercise component? Greene is an exercise physiologist and certified personal trainer who specializes in fitness, metabolism and weight loss. He emphasizes that boosting physical activity is as important as cutting calories in losing weight and maintaining weight loss. He has built a fitness-incentive system into his plan; you can earn additional “anything goes” calories by increasing cardio and strength training sessions.
What the nutritionist says: “I like that Bob Greene takes a multipronged approach, focusing on fitness, nutrition and improving the composition of your diet, as well as on the emotional component of eating,” says Elisa Zied, a registered dietitian and co-author of Feed Your Family Right! How to Make Smart Food and Fitness Choices for a Healthy Lifestyle (Wiley, 2007). “What he’s offering is really a weight-loss journey, a reasonable, gradual and flexible way to make lifestyle changes. Allowing discretionary calories for things like dark chocolate is great. But while I’m certainly an advocate of whole grains, his admonition not to eat refined pasta is a bit harsh. I think life without pasta — regular pasta — is not a life worth living, and you can make white pasta the basis of a very healthy dinner by being mindful of portion control and piling on lycopene-rich tomatoes and other vegetables, along with a small amount of cheese.”
Drawbacks/negative health implications: Greene is (reasonably enough) concerned about mercury levels and other contaminants in seafood. But he takes a somewhat alarmist view, acknowledging that he has cut back to a single serving of fish a week rather than following the American Heart Association’s recommendation of eating at least two servings a week of fatty fish such as mackerel, sardines and salmon — which are rich sources of heart-protective omega-3 fatty acids. Instead, Greene recommends an omega-3 supplement. It won’t hurt, but most experts agree that fish provides more heart-healthy benefits than supplements.