Weight Loss & Diet Plans

The Dr. Oz Ultimate Diet: Review

Stuck in a food rut? Frustrated with your weight? Ready to overhaul your diet?

The Dr. Oz Ultimate Diet promises to reboot your body in just two weeks.

It’s not a fad diet. You just slash 100 calories a day, follow Oz's rules, exercise, and eat healthfully. Do it for a year, and you could lose 12 pounds, Oz says.

The plan is not just about weight loss. It's also about your waist size. The goal of Oz's plan is to lose weight to gain health benefits when you trim inches off your waist.

Your waist size, Oz says, should never be more than half your height. Women should strive for a waist size of less than 35 inches; men less than 40 inches, according to the National Institutes of Health.

The Dr. Oz Ultimate Diet is a free program on the Dr. Oz web site. More information and details are found in You: On a Diet, which Oz wrote with Michael Roizen, MD.

The Dr. Oz Ultimate Diet: Kitchen Purge

First, you must purge your kitchen according to Oz’s rule of 5.

Here's the rule of 5: Throw out food that has any of the following ingredients within the first five ingredients listed on the package:

1. Simple sugars - includes all kinds of sugars and sweeteners
2. Syrups - corn syrup, high-fructose corn syrup, honey, and maple syrup
3. Enriched flours - any flour other than 100% whole grain
4. Saturated fats - animal fat, milk fat, butter, lard, and tropical oils
5. Trans fats - partially hydrogenated fats, hydrogenated vegetable oil blends, many margarines, and cooking blends

Although sugars and syrups are on the "dump" list, you can keep table sugar, honey, and maple syrup on hand for use in recipes.

Once you get rid of those foods, stock up on fruits, vegetables, whole grains, lean protein, eggs, nuts, beans, yogurt, fish, and healthy fats. The Dr. Oz Ultimate Diet includes a shopping list for that.

Does it work? “It is a very helpful approach to clean out your kitchen of low-nutrition foods and restock it with healthy and wholesome ones that are conveniently organized in the detailed grocery list,” says Dawn Jackson Blatner, RD, author of The Flexitarian Diet.

Still, overhauling your kitchen could be expensive, time-consuming, and some good foods may get tossed. For instance, it's confusing when Oz allows some sugar for recipes but not natural sugars in yogurt.

“Not all sugars are bad, especially natural sugars like lactose in dairy and fructose in fruit -- both are good for you and belong in your kitchen, not in the trash,” says Andrea Giancoli, MS, RD, a spokeswoman for the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics (formerly called the American Dietetic Association).

Good nutrition is not as simple as dumping all foods that contain the specified five ingredients at the top of the plan's list. To make the best decision about which packaged foods to keep and toss, check the ingredients and the nutrition facts panel.