Diet plans tend to come and go, and only a few of the diet plans that pop up online and on bookshelves every year become full-blown fads. When you're trying to lose weight, popular diets can seem like the perfect solution: Everywhere you go, you seem to run into someone who's lost weight with one of them. If you're just entering the weight loss process, knowing the names of popular diets is a good starting point.
The Atkins Diet
This diet, named for its creator Robert Atkins, M.D., a cardiologist, achieved notoriety for its emphasis on cutting out carbohydrates. Bread, pasta, rice, cookies and french fries are just some of the foods that are off-limits for Atkins followers, who focus their diets on vegetables, dairy and lean proteins. Eliminating carbohydrates lowers your calorie intake and helps you quickly shed water weight, adding up to fast results in the first six months of your diet, but staying on the diet long-term may put you at risk for health problems including gall stones, heart disease and high cholesterol.
South Beach Diet
The South Beach Diet was created by Arthur Agatston, M.D., a Miami-based cardiologist who named the weight loss plan after Miami's trendy South Beach area. Like the Atkins Diet, the South Beach Diet comes with a no-carbohydrates mandate for the first few weeks, but after the initial introductory period, the Diet encourages dieters to include healthy carbohydrates, like whole grains, in their diet again. The diet is based on the idea that foods that have a low glycemic index will fill you up faster and keep you full longer than foods that rate higher on the glycemic index.
The Zone Diet
Created by biochemist Barry Sears, the Zone Diet calls for followers to maintain a precise balance of foods in their diet to promote weight loss: 40 percent low-fat proteins, 30 percent carbohydrates--Sears calls for "good" carbs, like fruits and vegetables that have high fiber content--and 30 percent fat. The Zone Diet says it works because balancing nutrients in that specific way steadies your body's insulin production and keeps it from sending hunger cues to your brain.
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