Sandi Kaplan, MS, RD, Associate Director, Clinical Development & Support

It’s mid-January and most people are hanging on to their weight loss resolutions by their finger tips. So it's good timing for the release of the US News & World 2012 report on the best diet plans to follow.

A panel of 22 nationally recognized experts in diet, nutrition, obesity, food psychology, diabetes, and heart disease rated each of 25 diets in seven categories: how easy it is to follow, its ability to produce short-term and long-term weight loss, its nutritional completeness, its safety, and its potential for preventing and managing diabetes and heart disease.

Here at Alere Wellbeing, we were happy but not at all surprised to see that the DASH Diet (Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension) took the top spot in the best diets overall category.

In our online and phone-based weight management programs, we use a Healthy Eating Plan which is based on the DASH diet. When we created our programs, we looked closely at the evidence base for healthy diets and found that the DASH diet came out on top.

The DASH diet started off as a diet to lower high blood pressure, but has also been shown to lower cholesterol, blood sugar, and weight. Most importantly, it is a sustainable lifestyle approach to weight loss. The DASH diet does not eliminate whole food groups or consist of rigid food rules. It is based on sensible principles like eating more fruit and vegetables, eating less processed food and boosting fiber intake by focusing on choices like whole grains and legumes. It encourages several nonfat or low fat dairy servings per day and fats that are included are heart healthy (like olives or avocadoes). Meat is used as more of a condiment than the central part of a dish.

Most people go on diets and then go off them. That roller coaster of dieting, losing weight, and then regaining the weight is physically, mentally, and emotionally draining. The key is to focus on realistic long-term changes. We find that our participants who incorporate DASH diet principles are able to maintain those changes more readily than those who are choosing overly restrictive diets to follow. The key is to make dietary changes that you can see yourself maintaining years from now.

One of our favorite techniques is to focus on what you can add to your diet instead of focusing on the things you are trying to avoid. For example, the DASH diet recommends eating lots of veggies each day. So a good starting point is to see if you can add a veggie serving to each meal and snack. I have had program participants eating baby carrots along with their vending machine chocolate bar. Over time, those veggies become an automatic habit and the chocolate bar tends to be easily replaced by healthier options.

So if you are feeling discouraged about your weight loss resolutions because the diet you have chosen feels like a diet you can’t wait to get off of, consider something more sustainable. The dietary changes you make only benefit your health for as long as you make them. So think long-term for 2012 and beyond.