Traffic Light Diet

Familiar with the diet called ‘Traffic Light’ diet? Well forget calorie counting if you’re one of those diet fanatics who’s ironically doing that at McDonald’s. Stop trying to work out how many calories are in everything that you consume—  from fruits down to junk food. The traffic light diet is said to be the simplest and healthiest diet ever devised, proving itself effective as was shown in the series of tests done with obese children in a London hospital study.

It’s a type of diet that follows the principle of the stoplight. Developed during the 1970s by Dr. Leonard Epstein, Ph.D., this program makes use of a tri-color palette as a guide to create an easy to follow diet that was initially designed for the overweight children. Since it was launched, the Stop Light diet has steadily increased in popularity and is now being used mostly by pediatricians to encourage healthy eating habits among their young patients. This diet divides the food by the colors of a traffic signal: green for low-calorie foods that can be eaten in as many servings as you’d like; yellow for moderate-calorie foods that should be eaten occasionally; and red for high-calorie foods that should be eaten rarely.

The basic idea is to eat as much as green light food as you like, eat some yellow light foods and only touch the red light food once the urge becomes unbearable. The less red light food you consume, the more successful your weight loss progress will be. Red light foods aren’t banned like its illegal even to look at it, okay? It’s not banned, it’s actually accepted… but only in small amounts. The green light foods include vegetables, fruits, white meat fish, seafood, yogurt and low-fat milk. Yellow light foods include cheese (the low-fat version), oily fish, lean meat, bread and high fiber cereals, pasta, rice, seeds, nuts, beans, and poultry. Red light foods include everything that wasn’t mentioned.

Even though the diet was initially developed for overweight children, adults will also find the traffic light diet useful. There are a lot of diet strategies nowadays that  can make you lose your weight but then you’ll eventually gain some again. The traffic light diet doesn’t cause rapid weight loss, but do be patient because in the long run, not only will it cause you to lose weight but also, you’d be developing healthier habits when it comes to your food selections. If you keep sticking to this diet plan, then you might be able to lose at least 1lb a week. Sounds good, right?