Have you ever wondered what diets were like through the decades? Actually, diets never really did start until the 1960’s when some health reports were coming out that many Americans were becoming obese or at least overweight. People were never known to diet in the 1940’ and 50’s due to the depressive nature of World War Two, the Korean Conflict, and the Cold War threat.

Diets through the decades:

1960’s – Weight Watchers

In 1963 overweight housewife Jean Nidetch held the first public meeting with other overweight individuals and decided to call their group the Weight Watchers, in her living room in Queens, New York. Today, the world’s largest commercial diet and weight loss program retains its original core message: “Move more, eat less.” The diet program sees members monitor their daily intake by counting points in conjunction with weekly support meetings and weigh-ins.

1970’s – The Scarsdale diet

The 14-day calorie-controlled diet was created by Dr. Herman Tarnower. Its specific ratios of 43pc of protein, 22.5pc of fat, and 34.5pc of carbohydrates saw women consume between 650 to 1000 calories a day. Thanks to the Vogue magazine promotion, it became one of the best-selling diet books of the 1970’s.

1980’s – Slim Fast diet

Appetite for the shakes took off in the 1980s after Oprah Winfrey announced that she lost 50lbs on the plan. The concept of the diet is: a Slim Fast shake for breakfast and lunch followed by a sensible dinner. The brand now has a more flexible approach and has been shown to be successful for achieving long-term weight loss.

1990’s – Atkins

Dr. Atkins had thousands of devotees with the release of his diet revolution that told us we could slim down by cutting carbs and loading up on steak and sour cream.

The first decade of the 21^st Century – The Dukan diet

The biggest diet of the new millennium was Dukan, created by Dr. Pierre Dukan. It saw dieters like Ms. Carole Middleton shift weight by slashing carbs, upping protein and chowing down oat bran.

Is there anything you can eat in your diet in order to boost fertility? A new study claims that women who ate a diet rich in protein and low in carbohydrates while undergoing in vitro fertilization (the joining of a woman’s egg and a man’s sperm before transferring the resulting embryo to her womb) had higher pregnancy rates than those who did not. Protein is essential for good quality embryos and better egg quality according to the Delaware Institute for Reproductive Medicine.

Patients whose protein intake represented 25 percent or more of their daily diet, and whose carbohydrate intake was 40 percent or less, had pregnancy rates four times higher than those who ate less protein and more carbs while undergoing in vitro fertilization. Since there were no differences in body mass index from the patients being studied, the researchers concluded that improving fertility may be linked to specific nutritional components in a woman’s diet.

The question about high protein, low carb with regard to fertility was originally taken from other scientific research on the links between diet and fertility, and also extrapolated from previous studies. However, they admit that the mechanisms that link nutrition and egg quality are not well understood. Perhaps the most scientifically rigorous information available comes from a 2007 study led by researchers at Harvard University that used data from more than 18,000 women.

According to the Harvard researchers, women should avoid trans fats and focus on the quality of the carbohydrates they eat, opting for fiber-rich foods and avoiding simple sugars rather than restricting the quantity of carbs. Researchers also found that women who had more full-fat dairy products in their diets were less likely to have problems getting pregnant than those who opted for skim or low-fat options. Dietary input is important and cannot be ignored. Nothing is known about the specific amount or percent of carbs protein. What is known is that any extremes of diet are harmful to fertility.

People are constantly talking about diets. There are so many different ways to diet and different types of diets. However, fad or crash diets are bad and dangerous, so how do you measure up with a diet versus lifestyle change?

What Really Makes “Diet” Bad?

Diets are a temporary change in what they eat for the purpose of losing weight. But, the idea of a diet to lose weight may actually be dangerous. They may not be healthy and focusing on completely eliminating a single food group is not a good idea. They may work to lose weight, but they aren’t healthy. Furthermore, when you add that food group back, you will often see the pounds come back as well. With a diet, you know you won’t be doing this forever so, even if it does have success, at some point, you intend to stop dieting.

What is really a Lifestyle Change?

A lifestyle change means you intend to eat properly and exercise forever. You’re not planning on eating only one food group or giving up one food group. You’re not making a short term change. You start a new plan for how you eat and your activity level and you throw out all the old food and old ways.

The changes in weight, for instance, may actually be slower than what they ultimately thought they wanted when a person starts a lifestyle change. But, the changes are better and are focused on the long term. It’s more important to set habits that will stick, than to simply lose weight since you’re not simply withholding for a few weeks or months, but actually planning on eating and living healthy for the rest of your life.

What Does a Real Lifestyle Change Consist Of?

Again, you want to eat healthy. You want to eat balanced. You want to begin to eat appropriate portions. Exercise is the next important thing. Exercise doesn’t have to mean going to the gym and getting on the treadmill, but creating a habit of exercise is vital. It can be going for a brisk walk with your spouse. It can be playing competitive basketball with friends.

A healthy lifestyle should include some time to disconnect and enjoy something non-technological. Go outside and soak in a little sun, get some fresh air. This is a tremendous help to you mentally and physically.

Quality time with family and friends will help you psychologically, and it’s proven to help people live longer. It can put life in perspective, take you out of a self-centered world, and help you focus on others.

Most people can lose weight while dieting but once the diet is over, the pounds come back. Weight and diet studies conducted by the Oregon Research Institute (ORI) explain why most weight loss diets fail and give a more comprehensive description on the impact of caloric restriction.

Their results suggest that restricting high-calorie, appetizing food intake increases the reward value of food. The more successful people are at caloric-restriction dieting, the greater difficulty they will face in maintaining the restriction.

Additionally, poor food choices when the individual eventually does eat and abstaining from food intake for longer durations increases the reward value of food.

To lose weight characterized by intake of low energy dense healthy foods results in dieting characterized by meal skipping and fasting that is not successful.

Results of the study are unique because the data suggests that elective caloric restriction increases the degree to which brain regions implicated in reward valuation and attention are activated by exposure to palatable foods.

Participants of the study were two groups of adolescents who volunteered for the lose weight experiment. They intentionally restricted their caloric intake so as to approximate what occurs with real-world dieters. Using brain imaging, the study team examined the response of adolescent’s attention and reward regions of the brain to exposure to and imagined intake of palatable foods, unpalatable foods, and glasses of water shown in pictures.

Thus, the study was able to determine whether self-imposed caloric deprivation correlated with responses to attention and reward regions for palatable versus unpalatable foods.

The study further examined whether the number of hours since the last caloric intake correlated with neural activation in response to receipt and anticipated receipt of a palatable food. They also tested whether youth who were in a negative energy balance for a 2-week period versus energy balance or a positive energy balance showed aberrant neural response to food stimuli.

The implications of this imaging study are clear that if people want to lose weight, it would be more effective to consume healthy, low-fat/low-sugar foods during regular meals, rather than go for long periods of time without any caloric intake.

Olive oil

4 or more daily tablespoons of this oil, which is rich in heart-healthy monounsaturated fats is much better than 1 serving per day of saturated-fat-rich butter or cream in your diet. Make olive oil your primary “fat” for cooking and baking and swap it for butter.

Nuts

3 or more daily servings of nuts, peanuts, mixed nuts, walnuts, almonds, and hazelnuts are packed with heart-healthy fats. For your snack diet, try trading your afternoon snack for a handful of nuts or sprinkle them on top of your favorite yogurt or a salad.

Fish

You seldom see an overweight person living on the shore of the Mediterranean. This must be due to the daily servings of fish or shellfish in the diet. Aim to add fish of any kind (not fried) such as salmon or tuna, which are rich in omega 3 fatty acids that is good for the heart.

Legumes

3 or more servings of legumes each week may include beans, peas and lentils. These make for a good meat alternative because they’re a great vegetarian source of protein. But they also count as a vegetable because they deliver fiber, folate (vitamin B9), and potassium.

Fresh fruits

Natural or 100 percent fruit juice, are an important part of the Mediterranean diet. Add fruit to your diet in many ways by mixing it into a salad or oatmeal, topping your yogurt with fruit or just snack on it plain.

Fresh vegetables

Start your day out by adding vegetables to an omelet and have a bowl of vegetable soup or a salad for lunch or dinner.

Sofrito

It is a sauce made with tomato and onion and often includes garlic and herbs. It’s slowly simmered with olive oil and is typically used to season vegetables, pasta and rice. Mediterranean diet followers eat sofrito at least twice a week.

White meat

In the Mediterranean diet, you are encouraged to eat white meat instead of red meat, such as chicken or turkey breast.

To top off everything above, drink a small glass of red or white wine every other dinner time. The wine gets your heart pumping and increases metabolism and anti-oxidation.

Use smaller plates – A full plate sends the signal that you’re eating a full meal regardless of the actual quantity of food. A proven way to eat less is using smaller plates and filling them up.

Breakfast should be protein – Only breakfasts high in protein have been proven to suppress appetite, reduce subsequent eating the whole day, and contribute to weight loss.

Eat three meals a day – People often say that eating many small meals is better than eating three bigger ones throughout the day. This is not a true diet fact. Eating more than three meals a day has not been shown to have any benefit and may even be worse for appetite control. Also, skipping meals can make controlling your diet more difficult.

Keep snacks out of sight – Even if they know it is there, study after study has shown that people eat a lot more when food is visible rather than when away where it can’t be seen. Research has also demonstrated that the harder food can be reached the less likely you are to eat it. The extra work forces you to question the value of your action.

Keep healthy foods prominently displayed and easy to reach and to avoid extra snacking, keep tempting foods out of sight.

Don’t eat from the package – Your stomach can’t count. You’re more than a little likely to lose track and consume double or even triple the amount you’d eat if you can’t see how much you’re eating. Use a plate, a bowl, or even a napkin. Just make sure you get a good visual of what you eat before taking your first bite.

Don’t eat in front of the TV – This may sound strange but distracted eating is overeating. The end of a show or movie is another powerful cue signifying that a meal is over. It is not a good idea to diet in front of the TV with your plate for a Walking Dead marathon.

Health labels are not health food – Healthy diet food supposed to be better for you? In theory, this is correct, however, truly healthy food like vegetables, fruits, and other unprocessed foods don’t have labels. Instead, foods with health claims tend to be processed junk repackaged as better-for-you alternatives.

People drastically underestimate the number of food calories with visible health claims on the packaging. People also tend to eat more food overall as a result of this miscalculation. This is the so-called “health halo.” For real health, stick to food without labels.

Diets can be really funny and dieters are an even funnier breed, bordering on the insane. No? Well, how would you classify someone who intentionally starves him or herself just to lose weight? Amazingly, diets and chronic dieting – going back and forth between one diet and another – has become a fast growing industry in the 21st century. Unrealistic physical and beauty standards from the media has forced most of us to question the way we eat and look, and the dieting industry has been more than happy to offer us thousands of diet weight loss programs every year. Unfortunately, these pills, programs, and bonus DVDs don’t work at all.

The failure of the diet industry to make us thinner or healthier has already messed up several generations. How horrible can logic be if, in order to look and stay healthy, you deprive yourself of foods you love for the rest of your life, skipping birthday cakes and highly rated restaurants, just so you can feel good about yourself when you look in the mirror? Seriously, even if you did have the willpower to pull it off, there is a better way. Think about food, health, and weight loss not in terms of diet, but in terms of portions.

If you’ve tried any diet program in the past, you probably know from experience that dieters almost never eat food. To them food is just a vehicle to ingest essential nutrients, not the ultimate reason for eating. In short, diets take the joy away from eating. What horrible logic, and yet we still persist in this illogical misconception. So we jump from one SlimFast diet to the next fat-free dietary fad. When these fail, we jump on nothing but meat, eggs, and cottage cheese according to Dr. Atkins.

Then we move on to the South Beach Diet. In other words, we follow every ridiculous diet without question or exception. Chronic dieters believe that success comes from sacrifice. So, we deprive ourselves even more and punish our bodies even harder so we can finally look amazing and be happy. But this path does not lead to happiness because it turns life into a constant struggle. When you are constantly depriving yourself through a diet, happiness is always out of reach.

People whose diet quality was bad like being high in processed and red meats, sodium, and sugar-sweetened beverages, and low in fruit, nuts, legumes, whole grains, and low-fat dairy, were more likely to develop kidney disease. This is the findings of a group of medical researchers at the John Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. Developing protein in urine is an early sign of kidney damage. 13% of research participants who had at least three unhealthy factors such as obesity, smoking, and poor diet developed protein in the urine. A poor diet was the biggest negative factor that increased the risk for chronic kidney disease even after adjusting for weight.

Likewise, obese or overweight people were twice as likely to develop kidney disease. Of course, smokers were 60% more likely to develop kidney disease. Smoking linked with obesity or bad diet habits made it an even bigger killer. Using longitudinal data ranging over 15 years, the study analyzed kidney disease risk factors in healthy young people from the Coronary Artery Risk Development in Young Adults (CARDIA) Study. This included information on more than 2,300 black and white adults aged between 28 and 40 years. To summarize, those who were more likely to develop kidney disease were:

• Mostly African-American (because of poor diet habits).
• Those with high blood pressure.
• Those with diabetes.
• Mostly with a family history of kidney disease.
• Those with a high intake of soda drinks, fast food, and red meat.

The following are proper diet suggestions to remove your chance of developing kidney disease: 

• Reduce sodium intake – lessen salt consumption.
• Limit red meat – diets high in animal protein is harmful to the kidneys. Red meat is also high in saturated fat.
• Avoid soda – sugar-sweetened drinks like sodas and energy drinks are high in calories and contain no nutritious value. Some contain phosphorus additives that can damage kidneys.
• Give up processed foods – potato chips, crackers, cheese spreads, and deli meats are a few examples of processed foods that are high in phosphorus additives and sodium and can damage the kidneys.
• Reduce sugar intake – taking too much sugar can result in diabetes or obesity that are both linked to kidney disease.

Last April, PepsiCo finally admitted that the newly mixed and newly designed Diet Pepsi finally confirms what consumers have suspected all along, that the brand is for only half the population. Its target niche market is women. According to Amy Spiridakis, Diet Pepsi’s director of marketing, the new beverage is targeted at females who love home design, talking about the beverage’s new can. In a recent interview with a television channel, Spiridakis publicly pigeonholed the Diet Pepsi brand into the female market. Generally, big soda brands are targeted at everyone. Diet Pepsi is now targeting just one big demographic target market, and this is a revolution on its own.

Even the introduction of two new can designs is revolutionary. One is the Yip can with the love home design. The other is the “slim can.” What makes this marketing campaign also revolutionary is the risk factor, given the fact that Pepsi products have slowly declined in sales since 2000. Last year’s major drop in global sales alone dropped Pepsi to seventh place overall. Marketing flops and a sheer lack of ad dollars are partially to blame. Will the new “Love Every Sip” campaign, which outspokenly takes aim at women alone, resuscitate the brand? As the makeover is only geared towards the female side, it may hurt the brand’s chances with men. After all, when Pepsi came out with their Pepsi Max and the original “white can” Diet Pepsi, almost 46 percent of drinkers were male.

Sofia Vergara is the new Diet Pepsi’s most recent face. She is the face behind the ads in the launching of the “skinny can” design for Fashion Week. The brand is all-women, all the time, in other words. The aim at women is to also provide a drink that can partner with weight loss. In contrast, regular Pepsi has a macho angle. The latest adrenaline-fueled viral ad for Pepsi features NASCAR’s Jeff Gordon.  It’s almost as if PepsiCo is trying to differentiate its brands along gender lines, like the proverbial his and hers towels. Perhaps there is money to be made in this marketing campaign. After all, Luna Bars and Dove chocolate have long prospered from female-only markets.

At 105, Pearl Cantrell is 105 years old. She has one “healthy” habit she swears by for her longevity and that’s her daily diet of bacon.According to Cantrell’s son, Billy Allen, 81, Pearl also has a morning cup of “coffee pudding,” or coffee with lots of milk, sugar and a biscuit before finishing off her diet with a few pieces of bacon. For the past years she has had a minimum of two pieces on most mornings. But bacon isn’t the centenarian’s only ‘healthy diet’ habit. Pearl has been active most of her life. She spent her days in the fields of the family farm in San Saba County, Texas, after Allen’s father died in the 1940′s.

After her husband died, Pearl raised her seven children on her own. Not only was she active by picking cotton in the fields during the day, but that she always loved to dance. She even waltzed at her 105th birthday for a few dances. In spite of her long life, Pearl’s diet habits are not recommended by the medical community for those looking to live up to 105. A study released last year by the Harvard School of Public Health revealed that people who ate a daily serving of processed meat, equal to two strips of bacon or a hot dog, had a 20 percent increased risk of death.

Excessive red meat consumption has been linked to an increased risk of chronic diseases, such as cardiovascular disease and cancer according to research studies conducted by the department of nutrition and epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health. Even moderate red meat consumption carries a magnitude of risk. However, Pearl Cantrell has no immediate plans to change her diet habits. According to Allen and his four siblings, Pearl has recently slowed down a bit, but she’s still getting her handful of meat every morning.