The Mayo Clinic Diet is a lifestyle strategy designed to help to remove the complexity involved in trying to lose weight in a healthy way. While healthy weight loss may sound as though it’s a pretty straightforward effort, once you get started, the amount of information available can easily become overwhelming. From food groups to macronutrients and from cardio to strength training, there are many details to consider.

The goal of this strategy is to make it easier for people to live a healthy lifestyle.  The Mayo Clinic Diet is meant to provide people with confidence in knowing that the recommendations are made from experts at a reputable medical and health organization.  Through this strategy, people can avoid fads and crash diets while improving the relationship they have with what they eat and with their regular activity level.

Why Was the Mayo Clinic Diet Developed?

Interestingly, while the Mayo Clinic Diet was designed to get right to the heart of the matter and provide people with directions to lose weight while living a healthy lifestyle, the timing of the creation of the diet was not necessarily chosen by the organization. Instead, there were so many unofficial versions of the diet already circulating under that name, they decided it was time to create a legitimate, official one that people could trust.

What is the Mayo Clinic?

The Mayo Clinic, the prestigious Minnesota-based organization.  It is a not-for-profit organization focused on bringing health education, research and clinical practice together.  It currently employs over 4,500 physicians and scientists in addition to 58,400 allied health staff and admin staff.

Publishing a Book for Common Sense Recommendations

The organization created a diet and published a book under its name in order to provide a common sense, practical and healthy way to eat nutritiously, get in shape and lose weight. It is highly user friendly and features a range of tips, recipes, pictures, graphics and additional support information to simplify weight management.

Replacing a Fad Diet with an Official Weight Management Strategy

According to the diet’s medical editor, Donald Hensrud, MD, the fad diet bearing the Mayo Clinic’s name had been circulating for years and they decided it was time to put things right with an actual healthy weight loss plan that people can actually use.

The unofficial, phony version of the diet involves consuming a low-carb, high-fat eating strategy. It promises that following this and eating grapefruit, which it claims to have nearly miraculous powers for fat burning, will skyrocket weight loss. The plan is followed for twelve days before there are two days off and then back on again. This is repeated ten times for what the diet claims will bring 50 to 55 pounds of weight loss.

On the other hand, the legitimate Mayo Clinic Diet provides a medically reviewed, scientifically sound long term weight loss strategy. The focus on building healthy eating and fitness habits that will be maintained for a lifetime in order to provide weight management as a lifestyle and not just over the short term. The goal isn’t to choose certain foods or food groups as being better or worse than others. Instead, it promotes overall wellness and understand how to incorporate health into a real person’s lifestyle.

What does the Mayo Clinic Diet Recommend?

It has a nutrition component, a fitness component as well as a preventive medicine component. That way, it’s not just focusing on getting the pounds off. Certainly, that’s a factor, but the aim is to do so healthfully so that it helps with overall health. Reducing weight in a healthy way is an important path to preventing many types of chronic disease and illness. This diet recommends eating according to the Mayo Clinic’s Healthy Weight Pyramid, boosting physical activity, keeping up healthy lifestyle habits, defining and achieving realistic goals and keeping up motivation levels.

Overall, the Mayo Clinic Diet is based on the foundation recommendations that are already being made by doctors and other health experts.  It uses government data and solid research to back up its recommendations.  That said, what makes it different is that it applies this data in a practical way. It provides people with ways they can use that information in their real life.

Over time, people following this strategy are meant to regularly improve their choices for nutrition, exercise and overall wellness.