PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — All diets are not equal.
Losing weight is never easy, and finding the best diet for you can be harder than you think.
Ariana Chao, assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing, looked at many of the different types to determine how to select the best eating plan. She found some that did well — for a while.
“There are some short-term benefits,” she said, “to lower-calorie and lower-carbohydrate types of diets, typically seen around six months or so. However longer-term, at about 12 months or greater, we tend to see that these tend to deteriorate. So there tends to not really be a difference in terms of long term.”
When choosing a personalized diet based on markers like insulin levels, for example, there has been no proof of real success. Chao said exercising and finding a diet you can sustain long-term is still the best plan.
It just may take a few tries to determine if a low-carb, low-fat or plant-based diet works best for you.