Popular Low-Fat Diets

It seems as though there is a diet for every person and every lifestyle. Diets can be customized to help you achieve your specific weight loss goals. If you want to follow a low-fat diet, you can choose from many popular options. A diet that is low in fat limits your intake of fat to 20 percent of your daily calories or less, notes MayoClinic.com.

Ornish Diet

The Ornish diet was developed as a way to reduce the risk of heart disease or to reverse heart disease. According to ABC News, the Ornish diet significantly reduces your dietary intake of cholesterol and saturated fat by forbidding specific foods. The Ornish diet keeps fat intake to 10 percent of your daily calories. The diet is primarily based on vegetarian foods -- the intake of plant-based proteins and a significant amount of fruits and vegetables.

Grapefruit Diet

On the grapefruit diet, you eat a grapefruit with every meal. The Diet Channel website cites anecdotal reports that say grapefruit increases the amount of fat your body burns. The fat-burning potential of grapefruit has yet to be supported in research, however. Each meal on this diet includes low-fat proteins and vegetables; snacking is limited to the intake of grapefruit. The grapefruit diet lasts for 12 days and causes quick weight loss. You are allowed to consume as much black coffee on this diet as you desire.

Scarsdale Diet

The Scarsdale diet promotes a low-fat intake and keeps your calorie limit to less than 1,000 per day. Dr. Judith Rodriguez, in the "The Diet Selector," reports that the Scarsdale diet lasts for two weeks and promotes rapid weight loss. On this diet, you can eat lean meats, fruits, vegetables and no-calorie beverages such as water and diet soda.

The Scarsdale diet will induce weight loss because of the drastic reduction in calories and fat. The risk is that you will be unable to maintain the weight loss after the diet is over, unless you can eat healthy regularly.

The Hip and Thigh Diet

The Hip and Thigh diet keeps your calorie intake to 1,200 a day. According to the Every Diet website, this diet is restrictive and forbids certain foods such as nuts, seeds, oils, lards, dairy that is not low fat, butter and low-fat spreads. Low-fat spreads contain a considerable amount of calories. This diet also eliminates a significant amount of healthy unsaturated fats that come from nuts, seeds and oils.

The diet's name may make you think that it will help you lose weight in the hips and thighs, but this is not the case. The low fat and low calories will trigger overall, not targeted, weight loss.