Atkins. Ornish. Weight Watchers. South Beach. The Zone.

As a physician, I’m often asked which diet works best.

Carbs or protein? Liquid only? A “cleanse” diet?  Mediterranean? Grapefruit only?

Many people want to know whether any of them even work at all.

Scientific research has been focusing more and more on weight loss, as a record number of Americans – more than one-third of adults – can now be considered clinically obese. Evidence shows that you can lose weight on some of the popular diet programs.

Which ones?

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Is an ounce of prevention really worth a pound of cure? Or how about an extra year of life?

Cardiovascular experts believe so, calculating that if everyone with a risk factor for heart attack or stroke – 78 percent of the American adult population! – got serious about prevention, it would boost the average life expectancy by 1.3 years.

Researchers determined that if everyone took “to heart” the known preventive strategies for cardiovascular problems and made positive lifestyle changes, the incidence of heart attacks would decrease by 63 percent, while stroke would drop by 31 percent.

That is no small benefit. But unfortunately, it requires no small feat.

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“All natural sweetener.”

“Zero calories.”

Artificial sweeteners have been billed as the perfect alternative to sugar – a way for weight-conscious adults to have their cake and eat it, too. Yet more and more, a modicum of restraint is certainly advised when reaching for those packets of aspartame or sucralose.

While it’s true that sugar alternatives are much sweeter than table sugar, requiring smaller amounts to achieve the same level of sweetness, they won’t necessarily help you lose weight and keep it off. Simply taking the sugar out of a slab of chocolate cake doesn’t miraculously transform it into a low-calorie, high-nutrient food. At the end of the day, it’s still a slab of chocolate cake, with calories from flour, shortening, eggs, and other ingredients like nuts. So if you eat too much of it, your body will be the worse off from the encounter, regardless of which sweetener is used.

In fact, a growing body of evidence suggests that, when compared with sugar, no-calorie sweeteners may actually make it harder for people to control their body weight.

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I call it the “nickel and dime” approach to losing weight. 

As anyone who has ever looked under their couch cushions for loose coins knows, small change can add up. And when it comes to losing weight, small changes can also make a big difference. In fact slow and steady is the best way to sustain weight loss.

Thing is, many dieters unsuccessfully attempt a major makeover of their eating habits, giving up all pleasurable foods or starving themselves to reduce their calorie intake – and their waistline. Those strategies, however, are generally not ones people are able to stick with for a long time. So more often than not, the diet ends and the weight slowly (or not so slowly) comes back on, and the health benefits gained from weight loss slip away.

My “radical” suggestion is to consider something not at all radical: Making small, simple changes for life. Not only are they the easiest to attempt, they are also often the most successful.

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You might expect to read the “Eight Secrets to Weight Loss!” in a popular women’s magazine. But in a top medical journal? And based on a long-term scientific study of thousands of people who lost weight and kept it off for more than a year?

Both a scientific journal and a health conference held earlier this year highlighted the key characteristics of successful weight loss in the National Weight Control Registry, an ongoing study of more than 5,000 successful dieters. Brown University researcher Suzanne Phelan, who is involved in the study, noted that the people who lost at least 30 pounds – and kept them off for more than a year – tended to share certain success strategies. Anyone with some unwanted pounds to shed, she said, would be wise to learn from the “successful losers” in the research project.

“There is a general perception that almost no one succeeds in long-term maintenance of weight loss,” Phelan and a colleague wrote in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. “However, research has shown that [roughly] 20 percent of overweight individuals are successful at long-term weight loss when defined as losing at least 10 percent of initial body weight and maintaining the loss for at least one” year.

So how do they do it?

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With high gas prices already pinching you in the pocketbook, you might be cringing a bit when you see the cost of organic foods these days. A gallon of organic milk: $6.99. Small container of organic blueberries: $4.99. A single sweet potato: $1.69.

What price health?

But don’t let the dollar amounts deter you. When you eat organic foods, especially fruits and vegetables, you aren’t just doing a good turn for the environment. You are doing your body good, and possibly lowering your risk for health problems in the future, including conditions covered in the Navigenics genetic health service.

Many consumers have long wondered whether organics live up to their hype. More nutritious? Better for the waistline? Less toxic? I’ve looked at the science, and the answers are a resounding yes, yes and yes.

Here’s why.

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