Lean, low-fat protein is common ingredient in many popular diets today, including the South Beach Diet, the Sonoma Diet, and the Zone Diet. If you're new to nutrition, though, you might be wondering what kinds of foods, exactly, are diet-friendly proteins. A few examples include:

• any type of fish, excluding breaded or deep fried
• canned fish, packed in water
• chicken or turkey, unbreaded, skinless and preferably white meat
• ground beef with less than 10% fat
• pork tenderloin
• eggs
• tofu
• tempah
• beans
• deli-sliced meats
  

For more information about diet-friendly proteins, check out this article from AOL Body.

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Last night, my fiance and I sat down and watched an episode of The Biggest Loser. I tell you, what a great show that is. The amount of weight the contestants have lost so far has been nothing short of astonishing. The program truly is a testament to how effective exercise and proper diet can be in helping to shape a healthier body.

What's equally refreshing about the show is that it does not pull any punches. It makes it quite clear; if you want to get into better shape, you have to work HARD. At no point did I see any of the trainers pushing any quick-fix diet solutions or pills on the contestants. Do you know why? Because 99.9 percent of those quick-fix diets are completely ineffective, that's why.

A great article was brought to my attention by a reader, highlighting The 25 Most Ridiculous (and Ineffective) Popular Diets. Click HERE to read the full article, which was published this past Tuesday on RNCentral.com. Or, just take a quick look below at how they ranked each diet.

1. The Atkins Diet

2. The Subway Diet

3. Cabbage Soup Diet

4. The Tapeworm Diet

5. The Cereal Diet

6. The Low-Fat Diet

7. Hallelujah Diet

8. South Beach Diet

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Have you ever tried the "South Beach Diet?" Many millions of people have, with many success stories as well in terms of weight loss. The goal of any diet, hopefully, is to lead dieters into a new lifestyle of eating and tear down old habits which will ultimately lead to healthier eating. But, there is a higher purpose at play here.

The author of the South Beach Diet, Dr. Agatston, is a respected cardiologist and his expertise on taking care of the heart and supporting mechanisms is worth a read to anyone who considers their heart to be the most important organ in the human body.

In Dr. Agatston's book, The South Beach Heart Program: The 4-Step Plan That Can Save Your Life, the author moves through helpful preventative measures against heart disease as well as a nutrition plan that bases itself on cardiological health as a focus (instead of weight loss). Losing weight may be a secondary occurrence with the South Beach Diet, but the primary goal is quite a bit more important. That is, unless you're not concerned about future heart disease.

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Which recent diet method is the best at keeping off weight and actually being healthy? According to results out of a new study, the low-carb, high-fat Atkins diet is the best. Runner ups include the Zone diet, the Ornish diet and others in one of the biggest and longest head-to-head studies of popular weight-loss plans.

Even with the results that placed the Atkins diet first, the study's critics say that it is still very hard to lose weight and keep it off. Specifically, overweight women on the Atkins plan lost more weight over a year than those on the low-carb Zone diet, as this study centered on women only.

The Stanford research team that ran and published the study say that the Atkins diet now should be considered a more healthy diet than most, even while critics of the study conclude that it was not a fair comparison -- because by the end, few women were following any of the diets very strictly. That's a good point -- if the diet is not followed except leisurely, are the results worth anything?

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We've heard them all recently -- the Atkins diet, the Zone diet and the South Beach diet. All of these "diets" are really not diets at all -- they are nutritional plans. Everyone has a "diet" these days, which is defined by Websters as "food and drink regularly provided or consumed."

So, in other words, our routine -- no matter what it is -- is a "diet". But, have you found that a plan for your personal weight loss worked recently? It may have been the "diets" of Atkins, Barry Sears or South Beach -- but what nutritional plans have worked for you for the long term?

I find that a sensible plan of five smaller meals throughout the day plus plenty of water and no soft drinks, fast food or junk food provides a very reasonable way to maintain optimum weight. Beyond that are raw meals and highly-nutritious organic foods, but cleaning your palette of years of chemical-laden and preservative-filled foods is one nasty habit to shove aside in the quest for good nutrition.

What has worked for you?

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To those on a diet -- do you refuse the assistance of your doctor when you've gone as far as you can go with your diet plan? According to a new study, 70 percent of Americans who are trying to lose weight are doing so following their own plans -- and these folks have no interest in seeking a doctor's help.

With many doctors saying that there is no way to safely lose more than a pound or two each week through tried-and-tested methods of watching each meal and regular exercise, a third of the survey respondents had tried dietary supplements of unproven benefit -- pills and powders that promise to burn fat and boost metabolism. I still don't get why people think pills can make them lose weight. That's a much different post, though.

But, this doctor agrees with my thinking, saying "People need to get away from magical thinking ... it's easy to hope for a magic pill that's going to rev up their metabolism or shed their pounds." Does that product exist? Outside of some imaginary world in midnight infomercials, most likely not.

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We all have diets, don't we? While the word "diet" has morphed in popular culture to mean a special way of eating to ramp up weight loss, the word actually refers to the standard offering of nutrition every person eats on a daily basis. But, back to the subject -- when someone "goes on diet" as it were, what are the most poplar websites that feature dieting advice?

The folks at WebMD compiled a list of the top-20 diet-related website which started with the most popular dieting websites -- and there were three websites that scored "Excellent" ratings: Aetna InteliHealth, MayoClinic.com and MedicineNet.com.

Since the top 20 websites popular with dieters scored all over the map, Consumer Reports -- who published the results - said this courtesy of Beau Brendler: "I think clearly there are some good web sites that publish information that will be useful for people trying to lose weight."

Although the results were very mixed for several very popular diet websites, these three rules that Brendler mentioned re key to anyone wanting to ensure they are receiving the most relevant and truthful content possible in regards to weight loss:

-- Look at how well the sites separate advertising from editorial content
-- Check the source's medical or nutritional qualifications
-- Read the fine print (for something, I guess -- Brendler is not clear here)

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