The Traffic Light Diet

Forget calorie counting, stop trying to work out how many forbidden carbohydrates are hiding in that banana, the Traffic Light Diet is here to solve all the common diet obstacles! This is probably the simplest diet ever devised, and manages to be one of the healthiest as well, which is why it has already proven itself in trials with obese children in a London hospital study.

Basically, the Traffic Light Diet works by dividing foods into three groups. Low calorie foods are green, foods with more calories but containing plenty of vitamins and minerals are amber, and high calorie foods low in nutritional value are red. All you need to do is to try to eat as many from the green group as possible, add a few amber foods and try to avoid the red group as much as you can. There is no limit to the amount you can eat, and no food is really forbidden, which means that there is no problem in eating a balanced diet while following this program.

This is the third diet program devised by British nutrition expert Judith Wills, and is based on the latest recommendations of the Commons Select Committee 2004 report on obesity, which highlighted the increase in obesity in western countries in the last 50 years. The very visual and simple to teach method of traffic lights which the program uses makes this an ideal method of working with children, and the lists of popular foods in the book include most snacks regularly eaten by children today, as well as most of the fast foods and ready meals that are so popular with teenagers. In fact, the Great Ormond Street hospital in London used the program in a ten week study with 34 obese children in 2004, and reported an incredible 99% success rate, with all but one child losing a significant amount of weight.

Adults will find the traffic light diet useful too, especially because it is a long term healthy eating plan which is meant to improve weight and good health permanently, without shocking or tricking the body into a rapid loss of weight. Most fad diets do result in weight loss, but it usually comes back as soon as the diet ends. The Traffic Light diet doesn't cause rapid weight loss, but it does give you the tools to live healthily and avoid the worst of the supermarket pitfalls which are responsible for modern obesity. There is a portion guide, which shows what a reasonable portion of food actually looks like on the plate, a recipe section which helps to transform your green choices at the supermarket into green meals,without too much fat or sugar, and lots of well researched nutrition advice.

The fact that a program this simple really works shows that we have simply forgotten today what is a reasonable amount of food to eat. The enormous portion sizes in most restaurants, the encouragement to eat unhealthy foods in huge amounts and the lack of nutrition in many popular foods combine to make us fatter than we have ever been. Finally here is a program that attacks these factors, instead of making things worse!