Best Life Diet Diet

Best Life Diet Diet

Author and Fitness Trainer Bob Greene is well-known due to his work with talk-show host Oprah Winfrey. Greene combines the best of his knowledge to date into the book The Best Life Diet

Since his rocket to fame, thanks to the Oprah show, Greene has a whole line of books and DVDs available as well as his popular website. He has just release his own food line and endorses many other food brands as well.

What is the Best Life?

The Best life Diet takes an approach that addresses your life first. It asks questions like "Why are you overweight?" and "Why have you been unable to maintain weight loss in the past?"

From answering these questions, Greene leads you into a three-phased approach to managing your weight.

Each of these phases comes with considerable and detailed assistance.

Phase One

• Minimum 4 weeks.
• Focuses on moving more and changing meal patterns.
• This includes; stop eating at least 2 hours before bedtime. Eliminating alcohol, increasing activity level, and eating 3 meals plus at least one snack daily.

Once you have adapted to these new patterns it's time to move to Phase 2. Note that emphasis in Phase 1 is not necessarily about weight loss.

Phase Two

• Minimum 4 weeks.
• Builds onto Phase 1
• Increase activity level.
• Address the physical and emotional reasons behind your hunger.
• Focus on portion sizes.
• Remove 6 empty or problem foods from your diet.

This phase is effectively a weight loss phase. After the 4 weeks you compare your current weight against goal weight. If you've met your goal weight then you can move to Phase 3 - otherwise you can remain in Phase 2.

Phase Three

• Lifetime
• Builds on Phase 1 and 2.
• Increase Activity Level.
• Remove more unhealthy foods from diet.
• Add more wholesome foods to the diet.

Inspirational and Successful

The Best Life Diet provides a lot of helpful guidelines to assist in every step of each phase. The process is gradual and holistic and is not focused on the "lose x pounds in x weeks" mantra that sells so many other diets.

Best Life On-line

Greene has provided a version of the diet in an on-line format. Best of Life gives the subscriber 30 days free but then they are charged $3 a week to continue using the online services. The website provides much of the information found in the book, but also provides some additional tools:

• Weight tracking and journalling
• Ability to network with others following the diet
• A comprehensive selection of meal plans, recipe database, how-to videos.
• An online support community

Meal Plans

The Best Life comes with two sets of meal plans. The first plan is a week of Oprah's personal menus. The second is two weeks of optimal Best Life menus.

Here is an example meal plan. This base plan is around 1700 Calories. However the full Best Life plan does provide extra food items to increase the calories to various levels.

Positives?

• This is a very comprehensive book and diet. Bob Greene covers all the bases: the whole spectrum of healthy nutrition and supplementation, the ability to increase activity and exercise level. He also carefully addresses personality and behavioral issues that play a part in weight management.
• Many calorie levels of food plans are provided. This is not a restrictive diet and leads up to you to decide what is working for you.

Downsides?

• The Best Life diet has an agreement with a number of food brands that allows the "Best Life seal of approval" to appear on their products. This is a dubious partnership as some of the foods are processed (e.g. Green Giant, Progresso soups, Yoplait yogurt, Cheerios).
• The Best Life now has its own line of food which has started with a butter alternative, no doubt in hopes of further capitalizing on the fame Oprah has brought the company.
• Some consider the book to be an "upsell" to the website.