What’s the best diet for weight loss?

 It’s a question on the minds of most people once they’ve decided they need to shed some pounds—what is the best diet for weight loss? 

While that’s not an unreasonable question, it often implies an approach that is less than optimal, which is to plan on adopting a radically restrictive mode of eating for a while, until the weight is lost, and then going back to eating as normal. Instead of embracing “fad diets,” people who have lost weight—and kept it off—usually have made a permanent shift toward healthier eating habits. Simply replacing unhealthy foods with healthy ones—not for a few weeks, but forever—will help you achieve weight loss while also offering numerous other benefits. So a better set of questions might be, “What is a healthy diet? What does a healthy diet look like?”

A healthy diet favors natural, unprocessed foods over pre-packaged meals and snacks. It is balanced, meaning that it provides your body with all the nutrients and minerals it needs to function best. It emphasizes plant-based foods—especially fruits and vegetables—over animal foods. It contains plenty of protein. It is low in sugar and salt. It incorporates “healthy fats” including fish, olive oil and other plant-derived oils.

Here a few examples of healthy meals for weight loss. For breakfast, a bowl of bran flakes with sliced strawberries and walnuts with nonfat milk. For lunch, a turkey sandwich on wheat with vegetables and an olive oil and vinegar dressing. For dinner, a salmon steak on a bed of spinach.

You don’t have to cut out snacks in order to eat a healthy diet, either. Healthy snacks for weight loss include almonds or pistachios, string cheese with an apple, Greek yogurt or a banana with peanut butter.

Before you begin your weight-loss journey, do some brainstorming about the kinds of healthy foods you enjoy so that you can have lots of choices as you plan your meals and snacks. Remember that the best diet is the one you’ll stick to, so don’t rush out and buy a bunch of “health foods” that you know you’ll never eat.