Change One Diet from Reader's Digest: Another View

 

Publishing powerhouse Reader's Digest compiled content from its health and nutrition writers to produce Change One: Lose Weight Simply, Safely, and Forever - The Breakthrough 12-Week Eating Plan. Change One promises you a healthier lifestyle if you follow their "one step at a time" approach to making just one single change to your lifestyle and eating habits each week for three months. It's the "baby steps" theory of starting small, and in time looking back at how far you've come. A suggested outline looks like this:

Week 1: Change your breakfast program
Week 2: Change your lunch program
Week 3: Change your snacking habits
Week 4: Change your dinner programs
Week 5: Change your eating out habits
Week 6: Change your weekend and holiday behavior
Week 7: Change what's in your kitchen - clear the junk from the fridge, cupboards
Week 8: Review how far you've come in two months
Week 9: Make a concentrated effort to ease your stresses
Week 10: If you're not on a regular exercise plan, get one going
Week 11: Review your progress
Week 12: Research and find ways to alleviate boredom

Depending on your body type and the exercise regimen you're committing too, calories are limited to either 1,300 or 1,600 - so right off the bat, you are looking at a very low calorie diet. But Change One is not a calorie counting diet per se - you're advised, obviously, to ditch the fast food and make smart, sensible food choices, but nothing is banned if consumed in moderation. Two words: Portion Control. This way, your meals are similar to what you were eating before, just...smaller.

The bestselling Change One book is now also an interactive online plan. The site is typical of online diet plans, with a broad range of diet and nutritional information, support, tools like calorie calculators and food and exercise journals, etc. The price of the online plan is dependent upon how long you sign up for.

Following Change One is not going to shed the pounds overnight, but nor is it the brutal kick in the rear that most dieters rapidly grow weary of and abandon. Change One is a common sense approach to learning to make permanent lifestyle changes for the better - gently.