Just How Good is the Best Life Diet?
If you watch Oprah or read O magazine, you’ve probably heard of the Best Life Diet. Oprah herself swears by it, and the Best Life website shares stories of dieters losing 35, 100, even 140 pounds! It sounds too good to be true, but a bit of research reveals that this “diet” is a real, sensible lifestyle change with proven results. That doesn’t mean the Best Life Diet is a miracle solution for fat loss—consider Oprah’s own struggles—but the program does suggest a corrective to bad diet and exercise choices that plenty of us make. Here is a summary of the Best Life program, as I understand it. Read on and make your own conclusions.
The Basic Premise
The Best Life Diet is the brainchild of Bob Greene, a personal trainer and exercise physiologist, and Oprah Winfrey’s weight loss guru. Greene started his writing career in 1996 when he and Oprah co-authored the book Make the Connection: Ten Steps To A Better Body — And A Better Life, and he is now a regular contributor to O magazine.
“I truly believe that all of us have the inner strength to make beneficial changes to improve our lives,” Greene writes in his online bio. “My goal is to help you find that strength—and to guide you along the way to good health.”
Greene has been doling out diet and exercise advice for over a decade in his books and through Oprah’s media outlets, and the Best Life website is basically the continuation of Greene’s campaign to be universally available as a personal trainer and fitness expert.
The Best Life Diet is less a diet than a lifestyle change. Theoretically, Best Life followers will never go “off” the diet, but there is a set procedure for getting “on” the Best Life plan. Like many diet plans, Best Life is structured in three phases: an adjustment phase followed by short-term and long-term maintenance phases.
In Phase One of the Best Life Diet, program followers increase physical activity and restructure their eating habits to rev up the metabolism. In Phase One, dieters are also asked to cut six “problem foods” out of their lives. The foods to avoid include anything with trans fats, fried foods, white bread, non-diet soft drinks, high-fat dairy products, and some kinds of pasta.
Phase Two focuses on calorie restriction using tools like portion control and an aid called the “Hunger Scale.” The hunger scale is basically a mental exercise that forces dieters to ask themselves how hungry they actually are, on a scale from 1 (weak and light-headed) to 10 (full to the point of nausea). The goal is for diet followers to stop themselves as they reach for a snack and to only eat if they actually feel hunger, as opposed to boredom, stress, or force of habit.
Phase Three is a long-term maintenance program of continued exercise, healthy diet choices, and learning to listen to the body’s signals and respond in a healthy way. Greene has partnered up with some major food companies to market products bearing the Best Life seal of approval, making shopping that much easier.
The Upside
This diet allows followers to plan satisfying meals with real food, as opposed to tedious meal replacement programs. The website also provides recipes to keep dieters interested and on track.
We all secretly want a personal trainer. Think about it. When you open up the latest celebrity gossip glossy—and we all do it from time to time—you see those fit and trim bodies and think, “of course, she can afford a personal trainer.” Well, receiving Bob Greene’s online encouragement isn’t quite the same, but it’s easier than going it alone.
The Best Life website emphasizes community. By signing up, dieters get support and advice as well as the sense of belonging to a like-minded group of people who share the same goals. This can really boost the morale of a person struggling to reach fat loss and health goals that can at times seem all too distant.
Membership has more tangible benefits, including online exercise videos, a nutrition and weight loss article library, prize drawings, and coupons for Best Life-approved foods.
The Downside
Fat loss doesn’t happen overnight with Best Life. The Best Life Diet emphasizes gradual lifestyle changes and slow weight loss. A close look at those website testimonials reveals that most dieters lost their weight over the course of a year or two.
Belonging to the Best Life community costs money. Registration is $19.95 for the first month and $9.95 thereafter. That comes to roughly $130 per year. Registering ahead of time for a full year costs only $69.95, but there is no option to cancel in that case.
The Bottom Line
The Best Life Diet is a healthy choice, and I would encourage anyone who wants to improve their health and diet choices to at least take advantage of the Best Life-approved foods in the supermarket and the good advice on Bob Greene’s and Oprah’s websites. But this is not the diet for someone who wants to lose ten pounds in time for bikini season or to get a trimmer waistline in time for the class reunion. In those cases I would recommend a faster, more focused fat loss strategy.
For people who want a targeted fat loss plan, I recommend Fat Loss 4 Idiots. It offers a wide variety of food choices, customized plans, and no counting of carbs or calories. FL4I subscribes to the theory that your body must be "tricked" into burning fat rather than going into "starvation mode" and holding on to it. Like the Best Life Diet, FL4I not only determines the best things to eat, but also the best times to eat. The difference is that Fat Loss 4 Idiots clearly defines the ultimate eating schedule to speed up fat loss. FL4I’s food recommendations keep your metabolism up and running so you are always burning calories, and you get three “free” days after being good for only 11 days.
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