What Kind of Diet are You? - Page 2

And it isn't just food habits that must be documented and examined. Exercise habits and their intensity and duration need to be recorded, too. And not just planned exercise, but activities like walking down the stairs or around the corner to pick up a newspaper. That's a lot of documentation.

Then, there's the data gathering. If you haven't had your blood pressure taken, or your cholesterol or blood sugar checked lately, you'll need to have that done for this diet. If you have, but you don't have the results, then you need to get them. Again, the reason is a sensible one. A diabetic, for example, wouldn't do well on a high carbohydrate diet. A person with high cholesterol would do poorly on a high fat diet. Still, it doesn't make following this diet any easier to know that you have to go to the doctor to have the testing done in order to find your perfect fit.

And then, there's the Perfect Fit Questionnaire - forty three pages of multiple choice questions about personal preferences, eating habits, exercising habits, laboratory values, and family history that, like one of those internet personality quizzes, places the reader in one of three categories - carbohydrate counter (low carb), calorie counter, or fat counter. Answers to the quiz also direct the reader to sections of the book that cover advice on how to adapt the various diets to reader taste and temperament.

And, finally, if you're unlucky enough to fall into the "carb counter" category, you have to test your urine for ketones for the first two to three months of the diet, to make sure you're not eating too many carbohydrates. (Restricting carbohydrates makes the body use up its fat stores to provide energy. Ketones are a by-product of that process.) It's an extra step that helps the carb-counter monitor their progress and adherence to the diet, but it's also one that's likely to turn a off a lot of dieters.

Article Author: Sydney Smith

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