Everyone agrees this diet works

There is only one kind of diet that works, says the latest 2-year federal study.

And it's exactly what I have been telling you in this blog for more than 2 years.

Reduce the calories and you reduce your weight. It doesn't matter whether you listen to Atkins, Zone or Ornish. It doesn't matter if you visit Weight Watchers, Medifast or Jenny Craig. It doesn't matter if you eat only grapefruit, cabbage or red meat.

There's only one way: eat less calories than you burn. For most Americans you need to eat about 1,200-1,500 calories a day to lose weight.

Take it from me. I stopped eating 1,000 and 2,000 calorie meals, and in six months I lost more than 90 pounds. I did it through Nutrisystem, but any type of food would have worked in the right portions. And this is what this blog is all about. Let's get all of America eating the RightSized portions. Let's get all the restaurants to serve smaller portions at smaller prices. 

The study was published in this week's New England Journal of Medicine.

MSNBC.com reports: LOS ANGELES - Low-fat, low-carb or high-protein? The kind of diet doesn’t matter, scientists say. All that really counts is cutting calories and sticking with it, according to a federal study that followed people for two years.

However, participants had trouble staying with a single approach that long and the weight loss was modest for most.

As the world grapples with rising obesity, millions have turned to popular diets like Atkins, Zone and Ornish that tout the benefits of one nutrient over another.
Some previous studies have found that low carbohydrate diets like Atkins work better than a traditional low-fat diet. But the new research found that the key to losing weight boiled down to a basic rule — calories in, calories out.

“The hidden secret is it doesn’t matter if you focus on low-fat or low-carb,” said Dr. Elizabeth Nabel, director of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, which funded the research.

Limiting the calories you consume and burning off more calories with exercise is key, she said.

The study, which appears in Thursday’s New England Journal of Medicine, was led by Harvard School of Public Health and Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Louisiana.