Losing weight and making changes to your life that have a good impact for your health is always a wise decision. There are many choices in diet plans that you can consider, depending on your specific health concerns.
You should always choose the kind of diet that focuses on foods that are good for you and one that has a goal of bringing things like blood pressure or bad cholesterol under control.
The TLC diet, which stands for therapeutic lifestyle changes, is one of the diets that can help you slim down as well as keep your blood pressure and cholesterol within a healthy number range.
It focuses on eating right, working out and keeping your weight at a number that’s healthy for your height and age. It’s rated one of the top 4 diets in the world and is especially strategic for those battling high cholesterol.
The TLC Diet versus the Biggest Loser Diet
The Biggest Loser Diet grew in popularity thanks to the show by the same name. But the quick weight loss does have drawbacks. People who tend to lose weight quickly don’t always keep it off and this diet ranks lower in long term weight loss statistics than other diets do.
It’s an extremely challenging diet, which makes it difficult for people to stick with. It’s an expensive diet because of the foods that you’ll buy. It mainly focuses on six weeks of hard exercising. In fact, some of the diet has people exercising for hours a day.
You’ll be eating foods that you can buy from the grocery store and you don’t have to buy any specialized meals just like with the TLC Diet. However, unlike the TLC Diet, you have to buy one of the books based on the Biggest Loser Diet so that you can follow the guidelines for the diet.
You’ll be able to choose from more than one option in the books. Because of the hard emphasis placed on exercising, some people found that as soon as they stopped exercising, they did put back on the fast weight loss.
There’s also a high potential for eating too little calories with this diet. It’s always better to follow a life changing diet like given by the TLC Diet rather than a short term fix.
The TLC Diet versus the Engine 2 Diet
The name of this diet comes from the way it was established. It was a firefighter who came up with this diet and while it does have some good points, it is a heavily restricted diet as well as being ranked with a hard effort level.
It’s a plant based diet, so you’ll have to cut out animal products, dairy products and any foods that have a higher fat content than what the diet allows. The cost of the diet has a couple of options.
You can do it yourself and there is some help and guidance available for those who choose to use this diet. However, as far as any in depth support, that’s only available if you pay for a membership.
So what you learn about the diet, you’ll have to look up yourself or try to piece it together from others. The diet calls for you to get rid of every processed food you have in your kitchen.
While this isn’t a bad idea, you’ll also have to get rid of foods that contain over 2.5 grams of fat based on 100 calorie increments. So if you have a food product that’s 100 calories but contains 3 grams of fat, you’ll have to throw it away.
The good news is that the diet does work to help you lose weight as well as lower your cholesterol. The bad news is that you’re not going to lose it in the healthiest way possible like with the TLC diet.
On the Engine 2 Diet, you may find yourself struggling to get the level of calcium that you need and you’ll also have to take a vitamin B12 supplement since you won’t be eating any meat products.
You might want to simply pursue the TLC diet and implement small changes, such as decreasing your dietary cholesterol to less than 200 mg a day for a 3-5% reduction in your bad cholesterol.
The TLC Diet versus Mediterranean Diet
One thing that you’ll notice with the TLC diet is that it has a strong focus on the health of your body as a whole and rather than just weight loss alone. Instead of just giving you calorie levels to adhere to, you also have to maintain a level of exercise (30 minutes a day) to be successful.
If diabetes is an issue for you, then the TLC diet can help with that, too – since it helps more than any other diet to stabilize blood sugar levels. You’ll benefit in many ways following this diet.
The Mediterranean Diet gets its name from the areas near the Mediterranean Sea. Like the TLC diet, the Mediterranean Diet encourages people to try to eat healthy. It suggests foods that are based on the eating style of those that live near the Sea.
On this diet, you would eat things like vegetables and fruits along with whole grains and lean meats. There’s a strong focus on eating fish and using olive oil to give the foods their flavoring.
The Mediterranean Diet has some issues that can cause potential risks to your health. The first one is that there’s such a strong focus on eating fish rather than consuming other meat.
While there is some truth to the health recommendation of not eating a lot of red meat, eating certain kinds of fish and seafood too often can give you too much mercury as well as other toxins.
Also, having wine daily is a staple of this diet and alcohol in any amount can cause damage to the cells in your liver as well as fatty liver disease if you overdo it.
The TLC diet has more of a plant sterol-based emphasis, making meat a rare inclusion of the meal plan. Your body will respond positively to the vegetables’ ability to reduce high cholesterol numbers.
The TLC Diet versus DASH Diet
The DASH Diet stands for Dietary Approach to Stop Hypertension. Those who go on this diet will find themselves consuming meals that focus on eating things like fruits and vegetables, beans, poultry, whole grains, fish, nuts and dairy as long as it’s low fat.
While you’re on this diet, you’ll need to learn about controlling your portions. You’ll also have to learn about eating a wider array of foods than you might be used to.
The good news is that this diet is good for delivering the desired results if your goal is to lower your blood pressure. If you’re someone who wants to jumpstart a weight loss plan, this one is not a fast start diet.
This diet takes a lot of time to not only learn about, but to put into effect as well because of the amount of food prep you’ll face. If you’re someone with a hectic schedule and don’t have much extra time, this diet is probably not going to be the best choice for you.
With the TLC diet, you can either go all in at once, or make gradual changes that will deliver specific benefits toward lowering your cholesterol. For example, if you implement the recommendation of fiber additions to your diet, you’ll see a 3-5% lowering of your cholesterol.
The TLC Diet versus Mayo Clinic Diet
When people hear the name Mayo Clinic, they immediately think a diet by the same name would have to be one that didn’t have any downside to it. But the truth is that this diet is pretty simple.
What you get by following the diet is the same advice you get with most of the ones out there which is to eat less and exercise more. While that’s pretty standard advice, it’s not what most people are looking for.
They want to eat healthier but they want to know exactly how to do that in a way that will help them to lose weight and maintain that loss as well as provide other medical benefits, such as the lowering of bad cholesterol.
Unlike the TLC Diet, the Mayo Clinic Diet is not convenient. Unlike the TLC Diet, the meals are pretty detailed, many of them aren’t quick to fix and they can involve expensive ingredients.
On top of that, some of the recipes associated with the diet aren’t on par with medical advice pertaining to dieting. It’s suggested that followers of the diet use egg substitute rather than eating real eggs.
The old, unproven claim is that real eggs are high in cholesterol and can cause heart disease. This advice is not only outdated and has been debunked but also has users consuming a processed food over real food by suggesting egg substitutes.
The diet pushes portion control but that’s no different than most other diets. With the TLC diet, you can reduce your cholesterol 5-8% if you lose just 10 pounds of body weight.
This type of specific and measurable advice will help you hone in on the main health issues you have so that you can reap the benefits of making those changes.
The TLC Diet versus Vegetarian or Vegan Diet
There are many reasons that people choose the vegetarian or vegan diet. For some people, it has to do with wanting to be healthy. For others, it’s about weight loss and for some, they just don’t want to eat animal products.
Whatever your reason, there are some things that you should know about these diets versus the TLC diet before you commit to choosing your eating plan. The TLC diet can lower your cholesterol just like a vegetarian or vegan diet if that’s your goal.
And it can do that while ensuring that the meals you eat are nutritionally sound as well as being tasty. But unlike the nutritional benefits from the food plan in the TLC diet, with the vegetarian or vegan diet, you miss out on important nutrients.
One of the problems with this type of diet is that most people don’t get the protein load from plants that’s found in animal products. The same kinds of vitamins and minerals found in meat can’t be found in plants. One that’s often lacking in vegetarian or vegan diets is Vitamin B12.
For people who choose to follow a vegan or vegetarian diet, it’s recommended that they work with a dietician or other nutrition expert to make sure that their diet is healthy.
With the TLC diet, you can implement certain tips – such as adding 2 grams a day of plant sterols – to give you a 5-15% LDL reduction. It’s more about what to add in some cases than it is about what to give up.
The TLC Diet versus Flexitarian Diet
There’s a diet that people enjoy following when they want to have a vegetarian diet that’s based on plants as the main staple food source, but also want to be able to eat meat if they want to have it. This diet is called the Flexitarian Diet.
While it looks pretty good on the surface when you think about eating fruits and vegetables along with the nuts and legumes, you have to take a deeper look to see just what this diet is all about.
It calls for heavy calorie restrictions that, according to health guidelines, don’t offer enough calorie consumption to be considered good for you. In fact, the low calorie count can lead to episodes of low blood sugar.
Unlike the TLC diet, this one doesn’t make sure that you get the proper amount of food that you need. To follow the eating plan, you have to buy a guide book to lead you through the steps of how to eat on this diet.
While it might be a diet for people who want some meat but not a lot, as a whole, this diet doesn’t stack up well against the TLC diet. You can implement a portion of the TLC diet that tells you to decrease saturated fat to less than 7% of your calories and you’ll enjoy an 8-10% reduction in your LDL levels!
The TLC Diet versus Weight Watchers
Weight Watchers has been around for many years and boasts of many success stories. The diet focus is on nutritionally sound foods, yet no foods, including those that aren’t all that healthy, are off limits.
There is a focus on eating foods based on certain points and counting how the food ranks. This is a definite negative for the program because the focus is on labeling food using a points system.
Users can count up their points to see how much they have left to eat for the day. This doesn’t effectively teach anything about nutritional values. There may be a lack of nutritional needs being met by those who follow Weight Watchers.
Some people buy the frozen meals offered by Weight Watchers and just eat those thinking that this way is healthy, but fresh food sources are always more nutritionally sound than frozen ones.
The TLC Diet versus the Dean Ornish Diet
There are a few ways that you can use this diet to lose weight and get healthier. You can completely change your eating lifestyle from top to bottom or you can make some small changes that can make a difference in how you look and feel.
While it’s not too much of a challenging diet, it’s not as easy as others that are available either. The concept of this diet is that it can be used to shed excess pounds but also to reverse certain health conditions such as diabetes or high cholesterol.
It’s considered a preventative diet for some diseases as well. To go on this diet, you would follow the guidelines given for the different groups of food which are ranked according to group 1 to group 5.
The problem with the diet is that it strictly limits proteins and encourages followers to limit meats – even lean, unprocessed meats that should be a part of a healthy diet as encouraged by the TLC Diet.
There is a focus on plant based foods, which can often cause a nutritional lack of certain vitamins and minerals. The foods suggested are vegetables, fruits, grains and beans while limiting dairy products.
Following certain guidelines suggested in the diet such as eating organic foods can be too expensive for some dieters. The best thing you can do if you’re suffering from high cholesterol is implement the various steps within the TLC Diet and test your cholesterol after each one to see how big the changes were. Keep going until your health issues have been resolved and new habits have replaced the old ones!
