How to Rate Diet Plans

In the U.S., up to $147 billion was spent in 2008 on medical care for people suffering from obesity, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In the fight against these costs, people often look for diet plans. For a diet plan to work, however, it has to meet your needs, as well as support healthy weight loss. You can find a diet plan that will work for you by learning how to compare and rate the diet plans available to you.

Evaluate Yourself

When trying to rate diet plans, you need to understand your personal issues and roadblocks to dieting. Take the time to consider your past diets past, the kind of support you need, the money you have to work with, your health problems and your cultural or ethnic needs, explains MayoClinic.com. On a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 does not meet any of your needs and 10 meets all your needs, rate how well the diet plan meets your needs. When a diet plan meets most, if not all, of your personal needs, your chances of staying on the diet and turning the diet plan into your new lifestyle increases, explains to Dr. Luisito Dingcong, a psychiatrist at Bright Horizons in Clearfield, Pennsylvania.

Appraise The Diet Plan

Once you have talked to your doctor to ensure you can safely lose weight, look at the diet plans available to you. Safe and effective diet plans encourage both regular physical activity and a healthy, well-balanced eating plan, according to the Weight-Control Information Network. To encourage these things, the diet plan should include tips for increasing your physical activity level, an eating plan that allows you to reduce your calorie intake without forbidding the consumption of certain foods, tips on how to decrease the amount of fat and number of calories in you favorite foods and a plan to maintain the weight loss. Remember, going on a very-low-calorie diet or losing more than 2 lbs. per week can harm your health. One a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 represents a diet plan that greatly limits your food and calorie intake and 10 represents a diet the gives you the most flexibility while encouraging healthy food choices, rate how health level of each diet plan.

Rank The Diet Plans

After rating each diet plan you may use, based on both your personal needs and the health of the plan, you can rank them in order from the most likely to succeed to the least likely to succeed. The diet plans that ranks the highest in both meeting your personal needs and in health will give you the best chance of success, advises Dr. Dingcong.