The Best Diet for Weight Loss

By Steve Edwards

Is Atkins back? The oft-maligned high-protein diet won in a battle between some of the more popular weight loss diets. In an extensive 2-year study, participants who followed a high-protein diet lost more weight than those who followed a low-fat or a Mediterranean diet. But before you throw out your whole grains and stock your fridge with steak and butter, read on. Let's take a close look at this study to clarify what it means, and to try to help you determine what should be the right diet for you.

The main message of the study could be that dieting works because all of the participants lost weight. Surprisingly, however, those on a high-protein diet lost more weight and improved their cholesterol levels more than those on a low-fat diet. The third option, a Mediterranean diet plan, fell in the middle. Women, however, showed the best results on this plan.

What makes this study so special is that it was done in a very controlled environment—an isolated nuclear plant in Israel—and that most participants (85 percent) stuck with it to the end. All of the 322 participants ate lunch at a cafeteria with a controlled menu and had very few options for fast/junk-type food outside of work. Most of them were male. The average weight loss for the high-protein diet was 10.3 pounds. The Mediterranean dieters averaged 10 pounds lost, and those on the low-fat regimen averaged 6.5 pounds lost.

For those of you on Beachbody® programs, whether P90X®, Slim in 6®, or Yoga Booty Ballet®, these numbers might not seem too impressive. The study was conducted without any exercise requirement, and the chosen group did not necessarily include participants needing to lose a lot of weight. We know we can get far better results with a Beachbody-type of fitness plan, but the results of this study can still help us refine our own diets. Let's look at some of the main questions the study brought to the forefront.

1. Is Dean Ornish an idiot? The popular "good guy" of the American diet, as seen on TV, was skewered in this study by proponents of the often-vilified Robert Atkins approach. Does this mean that we've been bamboozled by the media? Not exactly. But the "Ornish plan" that's been adopted by our government and recommends getting less than 30 percent of our calories from dietary fat might need to be reconsidered. In this study, those who ate more fat saw their cholesterol indicators fall by nearly double. However, it must be noted that there was no pre-study cholesterol criteria. It's possible—and probably likely—that those choosing the low-fat approach had better cholesterol numbers to begin with. Another consideration is that the Ornish approach (that includes a lot of fruits and veggies) has a lot more margin for error should one stray from the diet, which we'll look at in more depth below.
   
2. Should I try getting my copy of Dr. Atkins' New Diet Revolution back from the Salvation Army? Maybe, but this study does nothing to overturn the reason the public turned on Atkins in the first place. The high-protein approach—popularized but not invented by Dr. Atkins—still has merit as a diet plan. Where the Atkins folks went wrong—though the diet still became popular, it should be noted—was by hyping up their plan as the one that allowed you to eat bacon, butter, and fatty meats. While this is true for a portion of a high-protein diet, it's not something that works well within the scope of an entire meal plan. Atkins tried to reverse this thought pattern by adding phases to the diet plan, but the damage had already been done; carbs had become vilified and fat was "where it was at." The problem was that this only worked during the early phases of the diet; that's if the participants were strict enough to keep their bodies running without blood glycogen. Once you began to cheat, you were eating a very dangerous high-fat diet. Atkins advocates, in part, funded this study, so we should be suspicious. But the reason they did is because they knew that their plan would fare well. Cutting your carbohydrate intake, especially in the early phase of a diet plan and when you aren't doing much exercise, is very effective for weight loss and health in general.
   
3. What was that about women? Oh, yeah, in the study, women did the best on the Mediterranean diet. Since most "dieters" are women, it's rare when a study features less of them, but that's what happens when you use a nuclear facility as a venue. In the study, the Mediterranean diet was similar to the low-fat plan except that more emphasis was placed on eating nuts, fish, and olive oil—all of which are outstanding fat sources.
   
4. What does the small print say? Even though Atkins proponents funded the study, it wasn't a steak and cheese festival. According to the Associated Press, the study "urged dieters to choose vegetarian sources of fat and protein." This is a far cry from the public perception of the Atkins plan. Essentially, each dietary plan used primarily healthy foods, recommending that most calories come from plant sources. This meant that all three options were more or less healthy, the defining difference being the percentage of carbohydrates versus the percentage of fat in the participants' diets. The more sedentary you are, the fewer carbohydrates your body needs to function properly. Therefore, the findings make perfect sense, assuming that the average exercise level was fairly low.
   
5. How much exercise did the participants get? Not much, from the looks of it. Exercise was not a component of the study, except for one comment stating that participants "got roughly the same amount of exercise." But where carbohydrate intake is concerned, exercise is the major component. The more exercise a person does, the more carbohydrates (and overall calories) he or she needs to eat, even to lose weight. A more thorough study would have been to add an exercise element and then see how each participant responded to various phases. What would likely have been the answer? The high-protein participants would have transitioned to being low-fat participants as they added exercise and got into better shape. This is because as you add exercise, you need to add calories. And more of these additional calories should be carbohydrates because they are directly burnt off during exercise. Carbohydrates are fuel. The more driving you do, the more you need to eat.
   

Final observations. This study does a good job of pointing out the importance that dietary fat plays in our diets. It doesn't exactly vindicate Atkins, but it shows the reason he wrote his books in the first place. It reminds us that most people eat more carbohydrates than they burn off. By inference, we can conclude that this is a highly dangerous way to eat and the major culprit in our obesity epidemic. Therefore, reducing carbs tends to improve that average person's health indicators, especially those who are overweight and/or sedentary. The study used healthy sources of fat and protein. This was not the way the original Atkins plan was structured, but it is a far safer approach because those who cheat will then still have a healthy nutrient base. It left out exercise. If that were a component, it's certain that we would have seen the numbers from the lower-fat approach improve as the participants became fitter, since we need to eat more carbs, but not necessarily more fat and protein, to fuel our exercises.