Do-It-Yourself Diets

EDIETS REVIEW:Go to Site | Back to Chart

eDiets.com offers customizable popular diet and fitness plans that feature innovative motivational and support tools. By offering over 20 diet plans, eDiets.com has something for everyone. The eDiets.com plans combines recipes, expert support, general guidelines, and a fitness plan into one package. The eDiets.com plans are based on portion control and the selection of proper food choices. The plans are highly personalized and based on your own preferences. The weekly menus allow you to create instant shopping lists to take to the grocery store. If you are going out, eDiets.com helps you prepare by having the nutritional information for many restaurants stored in the system. eDiets.com offers both phone support and online support with their experts, as well as the online community for peer support. Also included in your membership is a subscription to a daily tip newsletter. Using your membership, you can keep track of your weight and other measurements to gage your progress, journal your weight loss, or track your food intake. The fitness portion of the diet is also highly customized to your individual needs, laying out a weekly program for you to follow that is complete with a virtual trainer to demonstrate. The eDiets.com consist of diet plans such as Fall's Best Diet, Glycemic Impact Diet, New Mediterranean Diet, Atkins Diet, Bill Phillips Eating for Life, Slim-Fast Optima Diet, The Blood Type Diet, Perricone Diet, eDiets.com Alternative to Jenny Craig, and Trim Kids. In addition, eDiets.com covers healthy lifestyle diets like the Wheat-Free Plan, Low-Fat Plan, Living with Diabetes Plan, Heart Smart Plan, the Low-Sodium Plan, High-Fiber Plan, Vegetarian Plan, and the Lactose-Free Plan. Recently, eDiets.com introduced DeliciouslyYours, a chef-prepared fresh food delivery service that provides a large variety of delicious, nutritionally sound menu items to those demanding a convenient and effective method to eat great food and lose weight. With DeliciouslyYours you just login to your account every week to create your own personalized menu and the chef-prepared meals are delivered to your home. All you have to do is heat and eat. Another great tool that eDiets.com provides for an additional fee is eDiets Mobile, a special weight loss software for you PDA that gives you a variety of diets and excercises while away from your computer. The eDiet.com program has a cost of $17.96/4 weeks. This program automatically renews every 4 weeks until you cancel. There is an early termination fee of $25.00 if you cancel before the 3rd-4 week billing cycle.

GLYCEMIC IMPACT DIET REVIEW:Go to Site | Back to Chart

The Glycemic Index (or GI) is a ranking system that tells you how much a particular carbohydrate food item will affect your diet. Carbohydrates that break down rapidly have the highest GI, while slowly digested carbs have the lowest GI. A low GI diet has been proven to be effective in regulating blood sugar, losing weight, and managing diabetes. The Glycemic Impact Diet is a healthy nutrition diet plan that balances unrefined complex carbohydrates (high GI foods) with lean protein and healthy fats (low GI foods) to help stabalize blood sugars, increase energy, lose weight, and feel fuller longer. With The Glycemic Impact Diet there is no need to count calories or keeping track of points. The Glycemic Impact Diet provides 40% of calories from mostly low Glycemic impact carbohydrates. Another 30% of calories come from lean protein, including fish, chicken and occasionally lean beef and pork, with vegetarian options including soy protein; tofu and textured vegetable protein. The approximately 30% of remaining calories are from healthy fats including nuts, fatty fish, avocado and olive oil. A sample meal from this plan consists of Breakfast: Breakfast Egg and Cheese Burrito with Honeydew Melon, Lunch: Curried Turkey Salad with Walnuts and Flat Bread, Dinner: Foiled Fish with Couscous and Balsamic Tomatoes, Snack:Yogurt with Raspberries and Almonds. Since this diet plan is part of the eDiet.com list of customizable plans you get the benefits of expert support, general guidelines for the Glycemic Impact Diet plan, and a fitness plan. Also included in your membership is a weekly newsletter which gives you daily tips for keeping the weight off. Using your membership, you can keep track of your weight and other measurements to gage your progress, journal your weight loss, or track your food intake. The fitness portion of the diet is also highly customized to your individual needs, laying out a weekly program for you to follow that is complete with a virtual trainer to demonstrate. Finally, the Glycemic Impact Diet will not harm your health like many of today's diets, but rather will actually reduce your risk from heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes, colon and prostate cancer.

SOUTH BEACH DIET REVIEW:Go to Site | Back to Chart

The South Beach Diet is a plan created by Dr. Arthur Agatston as a way of helping his cardiac patients get their diets under control and engage in a healthy lifestyle. The diet consists of 3 phases: Phase 1 is the diet's kickstart, designed to get your body off bad carbs and geared towards weight loss; Phase 2 is when you reintroduce good carbs and continue to lose weight until you reach your goal; Phase 3 is where you turn the diet into a lifestyle, maintaining your weight and continuing to make responsible food choices. The South Beach Diet online portion includes a wealth of tools, including a recipe database, meal planner, shopping list generator, food guides, registered dietitians to answer your questions, answers from Dr Agatston, a 'Beach Buddies' program which gives you a dieting support partner, message boards, a private online journal, daily newsletter, calendar tool to help you plan your diet, and a weight tracker to help you track your progress. The online tools are simple to use, and provide a nice at-a-glance dashboard of your progress and helpful tips once you log in. The journal sorts your entries according to phase so you can track your food diary and progress at each stage. The South Beach Diet website also offers a 'Fitness Club' with tips, videos, and instruction -- but we were disappointed to learn that this came at an additional charge ($38.87 quarterly). This online offering would be more well-rounded if the meal planning portions were integrated into the exercise portions. Overall, the diet is a healthy approach to weight loss and eating in general, and provides a solid foundation for continued success.

ATKINS REVIEW:Go to Site | Back to Chart

The Atkins diet is perfect for someone looking for a low carbohydrate meal plan that is still high in fiber. With this plan you will no longer have to count calories and you can eat until you are satisfied. The basic philosophy of this diet is to limit carbohydrate intake initially to 20 grams per day. This will jump start your weight loss and switch over to fat metabolism. As you get closer to your weight goal you'll add back healthy carbohydrates to continue to promote weight loss and adopt this healthy lifestyle. The Atkins diet consists of 5 core principles; high protein, high fiber, high intake of vitamins and minerals, low sugar, and no trans fats. With this diet plan you will enjoy 3 meals and a daily snack that provide you the nutrition you need while limiting your carbohydrate intake based on your current carbohydrate level. Also, the meal plan is further customized based on you preferences-including whether you want to include butter, bacon and more. A sample meal from this plan consists of Breakfast: Greek Omelet with Sliced Tomatoes, Lunch: Ham and Turkey Chef Salad, Dinner: London Broil with Broiled Herb-Tomato, Snack: Cream Cheese with Chives Ham Wrap. The Atkins diet plan allows you to create weekly menus and combines the ingredients into a shopping list you can print out and take with you when grocery shopping. Dining out is possible, but you will have to pass on the breadbasket, vegetables, and dessert. Beef, chicken, pork, cheese, veal, bacon, and fish are some of the foods allowed. There are also numerous stores that sell Atkins Diet food products. Since this diet plan is part of the eDiet.com list of customizable plans you get the benefits of expert support, general guidelines for the Atkins diet plan, and a fitness plan. Also included in your membership is a weekly newsletter which gives you daily tips for keeping the weight off. Using your membership, you can keep track of your weight and other measurements to gage your progress, journal your weight loss, or track your food intake. The fitness portion of the diet is also highly customized to your individual needs, laying out a weekly program for you to follow that is complete with a virtual trainer to demonstrate. Because this is a high-protein diet there are definitely down sides such as headaches, bad breath, nausea, and carbohydrate cravings. The Atkins diet is very high in saturated fats and low in fruits, whole grains, calcium and fiber. Again, since this is part of the eDiet.com program the cost is $17.96 every 4 weeks. This program automatically renews every 4 weeks until you cancel. There is an early termination fee of $25.00 if you cancel before the 3rd-4 week billing cycle.

WEIGHTWATCHERS REVIEW:Go to Site | Back to Chart

WeightWatchers has 2 basic plans to choose from: the 'Flex Plan' which is the classic WeightWatchers points system of assigning points to foods that you eat, and the 'Core Plan' which consists of foods that fill you up but are lower in calories. The Flex Plan does involve a form of calorie counting, with a daily allowance of points and a weekly allowance of extra points, but the online tool makes it easy because it will do the counting for you as long as you remember to record your meals. Extra points are given for exercise and nursing moms. (WeightWatchers is one of the only plans with a special program for nursing moms.) The Core Plan is for people who feel they need more food and who would rather have a list of foods instead of tracking or counting. You can switch between the plans at any time, but they recommend you do it at weigh-in instead of mid-week for tracking purposes. With both plans, WeightWatchers helps you to establish healthy goals for weight loss including helping you to determine a healthy range for your final weight goals. Weigh-ins are done weekly on the day you choose during sign-up. WeightWatchers offered the most exercise options for all fitness levels, including online exercise videos, tips, and workouts. The signup was relatively quick, and the user interface is simple and easy to understand. The core of the WeightWatchers online plan is the password-protected area where you can track your points values, find recipes, get meal ideas, track your weight, switch your meal plan, read motivational success stories, and watch videos. The online portion has several interactive tools to assist you with your diet: a food search, a recipe builder, a points tracker, and an activity search. The food tracker lets you save common meals and tracks your daily points intake. The activity tracker lets you determine the points allowance for your exercise activities and automatically factors that into your daily points allowance. The recipe builder where you input the ingredients and it calculates the points totals for your meal; recipes can then be saved for later use. The food search lets you find the points values for a variety of foods. The activity search allows you to see how different activities will affect your points totals. Overall, the program is very well-rounded, promoting sustainable weight loss and a healthy lifestyle, and the online tools are very effective in helping you track and manage your goals.