Diet That Will Work For You

Online Diets
Carolyn Classick-Kohn,MS,RD

There’s a lot of online diets that offer tools like calorie counters, tracking tools and menu plans. As a professional online diet website, PersonalDiets™ has reviewed and evaluated many of the better diets & tools and have compared them to our own.

Here’s some thoughts you should consider when choosing your diet no matter whether you're dieting for health or to lose weight:

You’ll need a real diet plan to get results that last Calorie counters and tracking tools offer no guidance or recommendations on what to eat and make no distinction between healthy calories and junk. Tracking tools are a great start but you’ll need a real diet plan to get results that last.
Does the diet limit itself to food databases & tracking calories only? If so, you have no assurance that the food databases used contain accurate and correct nutrition information or that sources are accurate. I have used free recipe sites and have found enormous errors in the nutrition information calculated for recipes because the serving sizes and amounts of foods were not entered correctly.
Is it too complicated to use daily and to access when you actually needed it; when you diet? Many of the menu plans we trialed were too cumbersome to use, take time to load foods and are often not planned with the right balance of foods at each meal and snack.
Too basic and too simple to be practical because there are not enough real food choices. That and the lack of recommendations on what to choose make many of these plans less helpful when you plan your diet for the day or week. Is hard enough to lose weight so seek a plan that's personal, practical and customized enough so you can follow it. This is an even bigger problem if you have health issues and have to watch out for certain foods like fats, cholesterol, and sugars and the diet is not planned with this in mind.
Jenny Craig, Nutrisystems (and even Special K) offer free menu planners. Should you uses these - they're free? Try them but do remember the adage: "You Get What You Pay For" as it couldn't be more true. The problem with each of these planners (and the other free diets we tried ) were that they accomplish the primary goals of the company at your expense. They offer the manufacturers' foods, nutrition bars, etc but are quite inadequate when it comes to allowing you to create a realistic diet for you that leads to lasting results. Unless the foods used are foods you normally eat then choosing a diet like this makes little sense if you want lasting results.

*Note: None of the online meal planners we tested compared well to PersonalDiets diet planners; they were either too limited in food choices, aligned with what benefited the company goals and not the users, or were aligned with the site goals - not the dieters. When choosing any diet you should seek a plan that offers a variety of foods, and allow you to add the foods you eat; not limit you to particular brands or supplements.

Planners and diet tools offered by free sites could be beneficial for a few but because they lack the real foods choices we eat AND lack professional oversight (that lead to errors in critical foods and also in metabolic calculations), these types of programs are very limited for most dieters who want real diet solutions that last!

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