Diet.com Review
Diet.com is a website that offers paid memberships to dieters looking for individualized diet plans and support towards their weight loss efforts. We should have seen it coming, right? Dieting via the internet.
Does it work? Can it work for you? That remains to be seen. Read for yourself and determine whether or not diet.com can help you lose weight and keep it off.
The Plan
So, you’ve navigated and found diet.com. Now what?
For starters, a personality quiz is taken in relation to your general eating habits, feelings about yourself and feelings about exercise. You are then assigned a personality type in three separate areas:
Eating Personality: Meal Skipper; Convenient Diner; Steady Snacker; Emotional Eater
Exercising Personality
Coping Personality
There are about eight different personality types spread out over the three main categories.
Once you’ve completed the quiz and been assigned your personality types, a Personality Type Diet program will be designed for you if you join. Starting memberships that include a few free gifts such as a free year of Fitness magazine and an eating out guide begin at $2.99 a month according to the website but average at about $7.99 – $19.95 per month.
At diet.com, the plan consists of a two week meal plan including meal substitution lists and grocery shopping lists. There’s also a tracking tool available to monitor your progress. This costs extra.
There are blogs written by Dr. Robert Kushner and his daughter RD Shauna as well as members’ boards. These are meant to offer help and solutions to continue on a path to eating right.
Dr. Kushner feels strongly that weight loss should be a multidimensional effort and that it shouldn’t merely focus on food, but rather individual personalities and why the person may overeat or fail to exercise.
Pros
Dr. Kushner’s approach is a fresh approach to dieting because weight loss is in fact a multidimensional issue. Emotional eating, low self esteem and lifestyle account for a lot of obesity issues. A lot of fad diets do not wholeheartedly take this into account. Generic plans are doled out without taking into account these important factors behind weight troubles.
Encouraging a person to exercise is always good advice, but making specific suggestions that work for each individual is more difficult. By having a general idea of the person’s individual exercise personality, more accurate suggestions can be made. For instance, if a person was shown to be embarrassed by working out in a public place, exercise would be geared more towards in home exercise until the person felt more comfortable.
Likewise, if a person’s idea of exercise for the past 10 years has been changing the television channel manually rather than using the remote, advising easier methods of exercise such as walking is much more effective.
There are scads of information and advice from nearly every facet that will tout one plan or another, but unless the individual is kept in mind, the weight loss advice may not be useful to the dieter. Busy people don’t have time for complicated plans. People who are unsure of themselves might do better on a plan designed to give more direction. For these reasons, diet.com may be fantastic.
There is also potential for ongoing weight loss and support. There seems to be plenty of support and ongoing advice offered up by doctors and nutritionists. For people who really need encouragement and tools to aid in their weight loss, diet.com may be a good idea.
It seems that many people have found success with diet.com based on diet.com reviews. Knowing that there aren’t a bunch of complaints about the diet and failure stories may be of some comfort to the person deciding whether or not to hand over their money for the program.
Speaking of which, the program can be inexpensive depending on which membership the person chooses. It is also cancellable at any time. With billions of dollars spent every year on weight loss efforts, it perhaps would be a small price to pay if it works.
Cons
As with any patient reported tool, the diet relies on accurate input by the candidate. Taking a bubble test online doesn’t necessarily mean that the personality quiz answers have hit the nail on the head. Of course, this is something one encounters even when sitting face to face with a single dietician; however, having individualized attention when reporting eating patterns and emotions about eating can be beneficial.
In a clinical setting, though food diaries rely upon the accuracy that the dieters put into them, having the individualized attention in reviewing the food diary may be all the person needs.
It might also be difficult for some people to admit their problems. Instead, they may answer questions with answers that they know are right, but may not be true. There should be a little more instruction prior to taking the test that emphasizes the importance of the dieter being truthful. Without accurate information, the true problem behind the person’s weight troubles may be overlooked and an adequate diet will not be given.
The personality types may be too much of a “one size fits all” concept. Many times, personality quizzes are designed to sort of catch more generalized traits. Really, would you want to take a personality quiz that told you at the end “You have no particular personality.”?
Part of the diet is in fact the rather large website. One could get carried away with posting and blogging which happens in a lot of online communities. It seems a little counterproductive with this plausible problem. If a person is sitting at the computer “talking” about weight loss too often, the potential problem is of course lack of exercise.
Although the diet is relatively low in price as well as being cancellable at any time, it’s difficult to click away answering 50 questions and not even get a peak at what might be on your personalized diet plan. It seems kind of like buying a diet book at the book store, only you’re told you can only read the front and back cover before purchase.
The Bottom Line
It seems like a fresh approach to weight loss so it may be worth a shot if the usual advice has failed you.