How To Learn A Healthy Lifestyle: Think For Yourself!

Weight Watchers, The Soup Diet, Grapefruit Diet, Low Carb Diet, Glycemic Index Diet, Alkaline Diet, Abs Diet, High Protein Diet, Low Protein Diet, South Beach Diet, Blood Type Diet, Gluten Free Diet, Atkins Diet, Mediterranean Diet and the Zone Diet.

The authors of all these diet programs have one thing in common: they all claim to know the secret for long term weight loss and a healthy lifestyle. How do they say you can achieve this? By doing what they tell you to do! They say what you must eat, what you can't eat and how much you should eat. It's as if these authors think you are to dumb to make these decisions on your own.

Why let these so called "experts" decide what you eat? Did we not go to school and learn to think for ourselves? Find out yourself if counting calories is necessary. Find out yourself if fat is good or bad. Don't let others tell you what ends up on your plate! It's time to take matters in your own hands and start drawing your own conclusions!

But where can you find the kind of reliable and unbiased information about food and health that will allow you to make healthy food decisions? The only thing these diets programs do is present you with a set of rules which you can't break, or you'll fail.

Sure, there are thousands of blogs and websites where you can find a vast source of information. But why should you trust a website in the first place? For all I know the latest weight loss article could be written by the World's Fattest Man (warning: features images ... ).

Wouldn't it be lovely if there were a person that just gives you genuine and trustworthy advice? Someone that doesn't tell you what to eat or how much to eat. Someone that just tells you why something is considered healthy and how certain food decisions can influence long term health. Someone who has studied nutrition for decades, isn't biased and won't be influenced by food politics.

Though severely outnumbered, these people definitely exist. One of them is Walter Willett, a Harvard professor and an authority when it comes to nutrition and it's relation to health.

This man is not the latest weight loss guru, but a very highly respected authority in the field of Medicine and Epidemiology (this is the study of large scale diseases). Willett has been the second most cited scientist in the field of Clinical Medicine with nearly 30.000 Citations. This means almost 30.000 other doctors and professors have discussed Willett's work in their own published scientific magazines and books.

Willett gathered all his knowledge and presented it in his book Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy: The Harvard Medical School Guide to Healthy Eating. In 10 easy to read chapters he talks about topics such as:

• What can you believe about a diet?

• Surprising news about fat

• Carbohydrates for better and worse

• Choose healthier sources of protein

• Calcium: no emergency

• A new food pyramid

When I finished reading this book two years ago I finally felt capable of making my own healthy food decisions. I now understand why certain food decisions are considered healthy or unhealthy.