Diet Review: The Traffic Light Diet

What’s the theory?

The Traffic Light Diet plan offers a new way to help you cut calories. Foods are divided into one of three colour categories based on their calorie content and nutritional value. Red foods are high in calories with few nutrients, Amber foods are high or reasonably high in calories but are also high in nutrients and Green foods are low in calories with plenty of nutrients. By choosing Green foods, going easy with Amber foods and limiting Red foods you’ll lose weight.

What does the diet involve?

Quite simply you eat as much as you like from the list of Green foods, eat moderate amounts of Amber foods and avoid or eat only small amounts of Red foods.

What can I eat?

Green foods include veg, fruit, low-fat milk and yoghurt, white fish and seafood. Amber foods include potatoes, low-fat cheese, oily fish, lean meat, poultry, beans, nuts, seeds, rice, pasta and high-fibre breads and cereals. Red foods cover just about everything else.

What else does the book include?

The extensive colour-coded chart lists a wide range of foods and includes advice on portion sizes. There’s also sensible information on healthy eating and a selection of 7-day plans for different lifestyles such as single people, couples and families. Plus there’s an extensive list of questions and answers, recipes and a section on exercise.

How much weight will I lose?

At least 1lb a week.

Juliette’s verdict on the Traffic Light Diet

This is one of the easiest diets to understand and follow. You’ll love it if you’re sick of complicated diets that leave you scanning the shelves for weird and wonderful ingredients or fancy a break from counting calories. It also follows recommendations made by the government’s Health Select Committee last year to introduce a traffic light system to help people eat a balanced diet. Prepare to see a lot more of this as supermarkets introduce food labeling with a traffic light coding system.

10/10

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