Eating a healthy diet mostly means keeping it simple. Prepare your own food because most processed food is unhealthy. One man's food is another man's poison according to the old saying that is just as true now as it has always been. I can eat monosodium glutamate and it might kill you. I can eat wholemeal bread that would kill someone with celiac disease. I like peanut butter that would kill someone sensitive to peanuts.
These are the dramatic things, but they are just the tip of the iceberg. Do you find that nothing you do stops you gaining weight? It could just be a food sensitivity.
Keep a record
If you want the best healthy diets to lose or gain weight, start off by keeping a record. The unsaturated oils lie would have been impossible if everyone had kept a record of what they ate.
Remind yourself of what you want to gain or lose. Keeping records is a very large nuisance and you will give up if you don't remind yourself of the benefits.
Start keeping records of everything that interests you about food and health. You will want the date, and your weight, and your waist measurement, and what you ate at each meal, and what hearth problems you are having.
Record everything that you think you might want to know later on. If you suddenly realise that you haven't had a splitting headache for a time how are you to know what cured you if you don't even know when you had your last headache or what you were eating at the time.
If your acne gives you problems or stops giving you problems, if your blood pressure or the amount of iron in your blood changes, if your thyroid gland starts working again - how are you going to know what caused the change if you don't have complete records?
Don't fake your records - you'll only be cheating yourself! Record the smallest snack that you eat. Record vitamin pills, aspirins, cups of coffee, sweetener in your drink, salt in your food, tomato sauce, vinegar, mustard, anything at all that you swallow.
Now that your record tells you what you are eating each week you know what you have to work with.
Remove all foods that you normally eat each at least twice a week. These include milk products, wheat, maize (corn) beef, chicken, mutton, soybeans. That won't leave much of your usual diet so investigate alternatives that are available near where you live. Try buffalo instead of beef. Millet porridge instead of oatmeal porridge. Lima beans instead of soybeans. Have fun!! There is a vast range of food out there.
Be particularly suspicious of the following Cow's Milk, Eggs, Nuts from trees, such as walnuts and macadamias (even though they are good for most people, they might upset you), peanuts (remember that unsaturated peanut oil is bad for you), shellfish, fish, wheat, soybeans, individual fruits such as citrus, strawberries, persimmons, pineapple, solanacea such as tomatoes and potatoes,
Avoid all food additives. I'm afraid you'll have to learn to cook.
If you are lucky all your symptoms will disappear. Wait a week until you are sure then reintroduce one of the foods again. Wait for three days to see if there is a delayed reaction, and if nothing bad happens try reintroducing the next food on your list.
When you reintroduce one of the foods that was giving you trouble you will get the symptoms again - perhaps an a quarter of an hour - perhaps in three days. You can either remove that food permanently (I favour that because there is such a wide variety of other foods that you can use instead) or you can try to work around it. For instance milk intolerance may disappear if you use raw organic milk. You may find that even though milk makes you swell like a balloon, Kefir fermented milk suits you just fine. Cabbage might be poison for you but your body just loves sauerkraut.
How do you personalise your food?
How do you get food that is just right for you? I've got some bad news for you if you don't like cooking. You will have to employ a cook to prepare meals designed for you. On the other hand, you can learn to like cooking, and I'll probably include some interesting healthy diet recipes pages on this site.
Don't let the chefs convince you that you need 6 years study to be a cook. The truth that they don't want you to know is that if you put any foods together in any quantities they will taste good. The exception of course is the strong-tasting foods such as mustard, horse-radish, radishes, garlic, curry and the list goes on... Just use common sense. If you don't like a cupful of pepper powder in your soup, don't put it there.
Don't let the chefs convince you that you need to cook everything. Raw food is usually just as tasty and is more healthy with the possible exception of tomatoes. Lycopene is a cancer-killer and is released from tomatoes by a minimum amount of cooking. I'm suspicious of the chemists. Just because they say that lycopene is the part of tomatoes that fights cancer... it needn't necessarily be true. All we know is that tomatoes fight cancer.
It's easy to learn to stew, boil, fry, roast and bake. I learned from books. You might prefer to do an evening class. But don't be brainwashed by recipes.
Do you want to know how a chef designs a recipe? He bungs together whatever ingredients come to hand (I used to like walking round my garden and picking food for the meal as I walked). One TV chef made a game of calling at a house unexpectedly and making a gourmet meal with whatever happened to be in the fridge. Once the meal is eaten to enthusiastic appreciation the chef guesses how much he used of each ingredient and writes down a recipe. You can do the same. About twice now I've added too much salt to my food. All my other random recipes have worked.
Remember not to fall for the lie about using unsaturated cooking oils for a heart healthy diet. Use coconut oil or butter for all your cooking requirements if you want to remain (or become) healthy.
You've found your personal diet
Once your records show that you've got rid of food sensitivities for a week or two you can start to think about your new perfect diet.
Firstly do you really need a new diet? What's wrong with the one you've been following for the last week? If your weight has started heading for the ideal weight for your height then you might already be eating the perfect diet for you. Learn more about using fruit and vegetables to fight cancer and heart attacks and infection, but you might have to make only minor changes such as adding broccoli or garlic to your diet.
I'll tell you more about choosing your best diet but "if it ain't broke...don't fix it". If you've accidentally found your ideal diet stick with it. I personally prefer to learn more about nutrition so that if I feel like eating witchetty grubs or crocodile eggs or kangaroo meat I know exactly where they fit into my nutritional requirements.
Do cut out as many refined foods as you can. Sugar is not poisonous in sugar cane or in sugar beet or in fruit. But one teaspoon of refined sugar switches off your immune system for three hours, so children who sip sodas all day only have immune systems during the early hours of the morning when they aren't meeting any sick people.
Potato skins are very good for you. Throw away the rest of the potato.
White bread ithis, but you simply add foods that contain more carbohydrates such as carrots, pumpkins, figs, dates, bananas to your normal healthy diet.
Low carb, High protein
This is the typical Atkins diet, and I think the South Beach Diet has followed the same trail. Don't believe anything that people tell you about the Atkins diet. Read about it for yourself in the original Atkins books and then you'll know the truth. You can borrow them for free from the lending library.
After a few years of successfully following the Atkins diet (I brought my weight down with the first three Atkins diets, then held it there with the fourth) I heard about an interesting piece of research.
Students were given 2000 calories per day in one meal with no other meals. Half the students got the meal for breakfast, and half got it in the evening. The students getting it for breakfast lost weight. The others put on weight. It was found that the body's ability to tolerate carbohydrate decreases as the day goes by until it drops to zero at about 3pm.
When I heard that I applied it. I was also familiar with the experiments of Dr Pottinger with his cats. He proved a long time ago that cats receiving cooked food became more aggressive, and less fertile, and had more health problems than the cats receiving uncooked food. After a few generations the cats getting cooked food died out.