COMPARATIVE PLANS

Throughout the years, I've researched and read many diet books and tried most of the popular plans. While there is merit to these plans, they have failed me. I've found these plans to be too rigid. If you break one rule, the entire house of cards collapses. I was left feeling guilty and it brought me back to square one. Here's an overview of some of the more popular diet philosophies that I've researched and tried in the past:

Traditional Plan

This is the most common plan. Simply put, you eat three meals — breakfast, lunch and dinner — and three snacks a day. For women, combined calories from meals and snacks should not exceed approximately 1,200 calories. Men can add a few hundred calories more to this number. Height and weight does factor into the exact daily caloric count. While this is a great starting point (and I understand the value of eating three meals a day), I am not a morning person and thus rarely eat breakfast. I also felt it was a bit rigid to commit to eating three snacks everyday of the week.

Points System

With this mainstream popular approach foods are assigned point values. It's like going to the casino and trading in money for clay chips, but more complicated. At a casino, if I have 100 dollars to gamble with then I have a few options. I could trade in my money for twenty $5 red chips or four $25 green chips or one $100 black chip. It's pretty clear-cut. However, with this point plan the options are so much greater, because there are thousands of different combinations of foods and meals available to choose from. In order to grasp the system and accurately count the points it is encouraged to use a points manual and buy foods sold by the company that created this plan.

When I go out for a slice of pizza different pizzerias use different flours, different amounts of cheese, etc., thus the calories could differ. It was extremely hard to transfer these foods into points unless I was buying this company's pre-fixed meals. I didn't want to be