Which is the healthiest New Year’s diet?

Whether you’re hoping to lose weight for a holiday later in the year, or you just feel like you may have overdone it at Christmas, it can be tempting to fall for the latest diet trends.

They promise the world, these diet plans, and while some of them sound perfect, often they’re offering something that’s too good to be true. As we love cooking at MyAppliances towers, we’ve had a look at some of this year’s hottest diets, and found out which of them, if any, are healthy enough to actually work in the long-term.

What we found is that quite a lot of the most popular diets nowadays are to do with lifestyle changes rather than quick fixes, which is great!

Dry Life

You’ve heard of Dry Jan — well, many experts are claiming that giving up booze for good is one of the best ‘diets’ you can go on.

Of course, alcohol is highly calorific, and has no nutritional value to speak of. While it gives us other things (like the ability to believe we can do karaoke), for many of us, cutting it out of our diets would have no bad effects whatsoever. What’s more, if you drink a moderate to high amount of alcohol currently, you could be cutting out hundreds of calories every week. And that will definitely lead to weight loss — if you don’t replace those alcoholic calories with calories from elsewhere that is.

The 5:2 Diet

The 5:2 diet has been controversial because it restricts calories in a way some nutritionists consider ‘extreme’. The diet works by giving you five days per week of ‘normal’ calorific intake (2500 calories for men, 2000 for women), and two days per week of a much lower calorific intake (600 calories for men and 500 for women).

This diet works on a similar premise to fasting, in that your body is theoretically given a chance to reboot during low calorie days, burning excess calories and having an opportunity to work on parts of your body it was neglecting while it tried to keep up with digesting. Whether this is exactly how it works is debatable.

The Mediterranean Diet

For decades now, the Mediterranean diet has been heralded as the answer to all of our dieting prayers. You can eat olive oil and drink wine! You can enjoy bread! You can still eat meat!

The key to the mediterranean diet is that all-important M word — moderation. You never see great heaping plates of fried food in authentic Greek fishing villages, and so you’ll never see them in this diet either. Instead you’ll be eating plenty of grilled fish, salads, oils rich in omega 3 and plenty of vegetables. As far as healthy diets go, this one is pretty on the money, but remember, just because a meal looks healthy, it doesn’t mean it’s going to make you slimmer. This diet is about slow changes, satisfaction and enjoyment. And that’s why it’s our favourite.

Are you trying any of these regimes this year? Let us know by commenting below.