The Perfect fit Diet

A New Look At Weight Loss

For the past several years, I've been working with a team of researchers at Yale and Stanford Universities. We've conducted a systematic analysis of hundreds of weight-loss studies dating back to the turn of the last century. Initially, we were looking at whether low-carbohydrate diets, such as the Atkins diet, were any better or worse than other types of diets. That study was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association ( JAMA ) in 2003. Now we're looking at the drugs used in dieting. In the course of my research, I have read literally hundreds of studies on the effect of different diets on weight loss and other aspects of health. After years of sifting through these studies, I was struck by a surprising pattern that seemed to defy conventional medical wisdom: All these diets did work -- for some people.

Time after time, a study would show that a diet worked rather dramatically for, say, 10, 20, even 30 percent of the people who tried it. How is it that nearly every good diet had winners and losers? Each seemed to have a cadre of people for whom the diet worked wonders, while other dieters failed miserably.

I became intrigued by the possibility that there was no single diet that worked for everyone but, rather, different diets that worked for different people.

Perhaps the key to weight loss was not the single best diet, or the most motivated person who was trying to lose weight -- though clearly, diet and motivation are important. Perhaps the key lies in matching the right dieter to the right diet.

One of the conclusions of my research, and the research of many who came before, is that there are aspects of any diet that help predict how well it will work. For example, the lower the calorie content of the diet, the faster you will lose weight. And the longer the diet lasts, the more weight you will lose. But I realized that the key to eating fewer calories and staying on that diet depends on which diet and which individual.

This realization led me down a new path of inquiry: How could we use what we now know about weight loss to do for dieting what is already being done in other areas of medicine? More specifically: What list of questions would let you figure out which diet will work best for you? The search for that questionnaire was the genesis of the Perfect Fit Diet.

For the past year, I've been working to distill my research findings and extrapolate my clinical experience in treating overweight patients into a comprehensive questionnaire that anyone could complete. The questions range from simple "driver's license" information, such as age, gender, weight, and medical and family history, to detailed questions about lifestyle, eating habits, and dieting history.

Once you've completed and scored your self-test, you'll be able to choose a weight-loss diet that best fits you and then further customize it based on specific aspects of how you eat, how you live, and how your body works. The Perfect Fit Questionnaire takes an hour or so to complete, but the results will save years of searching for the right diet.

The Perfect Fit Questionnaire will:

•  Identify which of the three basic types of diets will work best for you.
• Customize that diet to your medical, personal, and family history, as well as your food preferences -- creating an individualized diet that will appeal to your tastebuds and help you lose weight and achieve optimal fitness and health.
• Prescribe a diet and lifestyle plan that you can live with, happily, for the rest of your life.

The Perfect Fit Questionnaire is a direct translation of the doctor-patient Q&A I've been using to design personalized weight-loss plans for my patients. The answers to this questionnaire will empower aspiring dieters -- whether obese or merely overweight -- to successfully lose weight and keep it off, despite previous failed attempts.

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