Any luck with the DASH Diet?

shawndimantha wrote: »

Really just eat a balanced diet of natural food, mostly plants. One thing I don't like about DASH is the high amount of carbs, which is not conducive to weight loss that a lot of people on the diet need (maybe minor weight loss).

You can lose weight eating lots of carbs. Most of my nutrition is carbs. Carbs have nothing to do with weightloss.

I just started the Dash diet 3 days ago It is clean eating and portion controlled. I like it because left to my own devices, I eat terribly and know that I am missing important nutrition. This forces me to make sure I am getting all the necessary food groups and a good amount of them. It can be altered to fit each calorie intake.

One of my friend's M.D. put her on it in January for hypertension and post cancer treatment reasons. She's 53 and told me earlier this week she has lost 19.5 lbs and all her blood work and BP ratings were super at her appointment this week.

With the DASH diet is the food choices or the weight loss supposed to lower your blood pressure?

maidentl wrote: »

LuckyStar813 wrote: »

With the DASH diet is the food choices or the weight loss supposed to lower your blood pressure?

My understanding is that it's the food choices, and that they found that people lost weight on the program as well. Probably not everyone with hypertension needs to lose weight. My mother lost a ton of weight and reached a normal BMI and her blood pressure didn't go down.

Thanks. I have 2 friends who take HBP meds but don't need to lose weight. They are both in shape and ideal body weight and seem to eat well. But there are a number of factors for HBP, including stress and age.

I am really hoping mine goes down as I lose weight.

mossyoakcwgrl wrote: »

Hello! New here, but just wanted to add that I started DASH for weight loss phase 1 yesterday and so far I'm liking it. I'm used to eating 2 large meals and it has been an adjustment to eat 3 moderate meals and 2 snacks. I fill my plate with colorful veggies and then use portion control for my protein. I'm a nurse and I'm about to work my 3 days in a row, but I'll try to remember to check in.

What is the purpose of 5 meals? Just the usual "keep yourself from getting too hungry"? I seem to naturally gravitate to 3 meals or maybe 3 and a small-ish snack, so the idea of trying to eat every few hours always seems so burdensome and irritating to me.

I've lost lots of weight without doing DASH, for what it's worth, but never had hypertension issues. Does it do anything specific for hypertension other than cut sodium?

lemurcat12 wrote: »

Sabine_Stroehm wrote: »

lemurcat12 wrote: »

segacs wrote: »

DASH is basically an update of the food pyramid rebranded under a snappy new name. It's not a fad diet; it's basically about getting your balanced servings in from the various food groups.

Seems reasonable enough (although I have my issues with the pyramid), but WHY do people have to follow some named diet? Why not just follow the pyramid or my plate or figure out what you (not you!) think is healthy and balanced. I SO don't understand it. Seems so weird to want to follow some special diet.

I'd assume they want more guidance? Suggested meals etc.? I know when I started learning how to eat right, having a bit more guidance would have been helpful. But it was my first time trying anything other than what I'd been doing and didn't have any idea what I was doing.

I guess it's just personality differences, but it seems really weird to me to want someone else telling you how to eat. I think people make it way too complicated and then think you need a PhD to figure out what's mostly pretty simple or common sense. I mean the basics are things that everyone already knows. It just seems to be that eating vegetables and getting in some protein is super boring, but going on a special shiny new diet with a NAME and buying special foods from a list and tossing all your old stuff seems more exciting or something than going to the store and buying the fruits and veggies and meats that seem appealing, like regular folks do. Or so it seems.

I was being kind of grumpy yesterday, but for some reason the idea that you need a special diet (unless you actually do, like DASH was intended, I suppose) really rubs me the wrong way. (Although to be fair DASH is not much of an offender. I just think the good bits are basic common sense that people know anyway, and that meal plans are silly.)

Just following up on this. Thanks for answering then. I must have missed your reply. When I began my journey *I* wanted more guidance. In the end, I didn't use any meal plans or anything of that sort, but I definitely needed someone to tell me what "eating right", "eating a balanced diet" etc. meant and how to go about it.
I had never tried "dieting" for more than a single day before, so I also wanted guidance with that. What I would have tried (if I'd ever done it for more than a day) would have been stupid, ill advised, unbalanced and unsustainable. I know that.

I was raised without that sort of guidance. I had many years of bad habits as an adult. I wanted guidance.
I learned from that. And I believe that learning is part of the reason I've been maintaining now for 14+ years.

ps: many years ago, I was chatting with an acquaintance. He ran a bike shop. He was a smart enough guy, ran his own business, college educated. He told me he was "dieting". He was middle aged, and had a bit of a paunch. I asked him what he was doing. He said: grapefruit for breakfast, and then rice for lunch and dinner.
I suggested he read the SB diet book. I saw him a few months later. Trim and happy. He said he was stunned (when he read the book) to learn that what he was doing, essentially an all fast burning carb diet, had been so dumb. He'd been a cyclist. "Carb loading" was all the rage then. He had assumed "carb loading" would be a great way to lose weight and have energy.
We still chat from time to time. He's eating a mostly mediterranean style diet approach (basically SB phase 3 I'd bet). He still thanks me.

TL;DR yes, sometimes folks want guidance. I know I did. I was raised on utter crap and ate quite badly as an adult.

I've been on the DASH Diet for about 100 days now: dropped 32 pounds and my blood pressure went down about 12 points. I read a bit about what I should be doing online, but really I just cut out salt as much as possible (probably consuming something like 900-1100 mg of sodium a day), and eat very lean meats. I also tried to focus on whole grains and veggies in my diet.

The DASH diet isn't necessarily focused on losing weight--it's focused on controlling blood pressure. That being said, it generally helps people lose weight because most foods that have a high sodium content also are high in fat and calories.

For what it's worth, it's been working for me: both in it's main purpose and with the fringe benefit of dropping 32 pounds (so far) from by body.

Sabine_Stroehm wrote: »

lemurcat12 wrote: »

Sabine_Stroehm wrote: »

lemurcat12 wrote: »

segacs wrote: »

DASH is basically an update of the food pyramid rebranded under a snappy new name. It's not a fad diet; it's basically about getting your balanced servings in from the various food groups.

Seems reasonable enough (although I have my issues with the pyramid), but WHY do people have to follow some named diet? Why not just follow the pyramid or my plate or figure out what you (not you!) think is healthy and balanced. I SO don't understand it. Seems so weird to want to follow some special diet.

I'd assume they want more guidance? Suggested meals etc.? I know when I started learning how to eat right, having a bit more guidance would have been helpful. But it was my first time trying anything other than what I'd been doing and didn't have any idea what I was doing.

I guess it's just personality differences, but it seems really weird to me to want someone else telling you how to eat. I think people make it way too complicated and then think you need a PhD to figure out what's mostly pretty simple or common sense. I mean the basics are things that everyone already knows. It just seems to be that eating vegetables and getting in some protein is super boring, but going on a special shiny new diet with a NAME and buying special foods from a list and tossing all your old stuff seems more exciting or something than going to the store and buying the fruits and veggies and meats that seem appealing, like regular folks do. Or so it seems.

I was being kind of grumpy yesterday, but for some reason the idea that you need a special diet (unless you actually do, like DASH was intended, I suppose) really rubs me the wrong way. (Although to be fair DASH is not much of an offender. I just think the good bits are basic common sense that people know anyway, and that meal plans are silly.)

Just following up on this. Thanks for answering then. I must have missed your reply. When I began my journey *I* wanted more guidance. In the end, I didn't use any meal plans or anything of that sort, but I definitely needed someone to tell me what "eating right", "eating a balanced diet" etc. meant and how to go about it.
I had never tried "dieting" for more than a single day before, so I also wanted guidance with that. What I would have tried (if I'd ever done it for more than a day) would have been stupid, ill advised, unbalanced and unsustainable. I know that.

I was raised without that sort of guidance. I had many years of bad habits as an adult. I wanted guidance.
I learned from that. And I believe that learning is part of the reason I've been maintaining now for 14+ years.

ps: many years ago, I was chatting with an acquaintance. He ran a bike shop. He was a smart enough guy, ran his own business, college educated. He told me he was "dieting". He was middle aged, and had a bit of a paunch. I asked him what he was doing. He said: grapefruit for breakfast, and then rice for lunch and dinner.
I suggested he read the SB diet book. I saw him a few months later. Trim and happy. He said he was stunned (when he read the book) to learn that what he was doing, essentially an all fast burning carb diet, had been so dumb. He'd been a cyclist. "Carb loading" was all the rage then. He had assumed "carb loading" would be a great way to lose weight and have energy.
We still chat from time to time. He's eating a mostly mediterranean style diet approach (basically SB phase 3 I'd bet). He still thanks me.

TL;DR yes, sometimes folks want guidance. I know I did. I was raised on utter crap and ate quite badly as an adult.

I only just saw this. I'm trying to be more open minded about this, and do take your comments seriously. My feeling is still that even though lots of people find silly fad diets appealing (I think any diet with a name just seems more exciting, beats me why), that if they really thought about it they'd know how to eat.

The desire to do something crazy like the rice and grapefruit diet seems to me more a result of all these silly diets and confusing proliferation of advice than not knowing that it's good to eat veggies and some protein, but I will accept that maybe what seems to me to be common knowledge isn't so much.

(I do continue to think that a lot of this really is common sense and if you made someone sit down and look over their actual choices for the past week and then tell you what they do that is leading to weight gain and what they could do to improve their diet, they could probably come up with a pretty good answer.)

My major problem with everyone wanting to do some special diet is that I think it obscures the fact that what's needed to be healthy is, for most people, pretty simple and determined by personal preference. As I said in another thread: being generally active, being at a healthy weight, eating vegetables (and some fruit) and enough protein, ideally including fish and greens if you enjoy those food, and getting a reasonable amount of fiber (which you probably will if you eat fruit, veggies, beans, and whole grains) are probably the keys. I'd add to that that cooking from whole foods for the most part can make all this easier and that there seem to be some positives to whole grains and beans and monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats, (although now we are getting into things people will fight about).

Traditional people have been healthy on a huge range of diets with a huge range of macronutrient breakdowns, but many of which include starches as a significant part of the diet, as well as other plants.

Here's my update- 35 days on dash and I'm down 16.4 pounds and have lost inches (I don't know how many exactly but I am down a size in scrubs). I have tons more energy and I have started running and doing Jillian Michaels cardio workouts. If you are debating on starting DASH, DO IT!

My doctor recommended trying DASH about 6 years ago when I started having trouble with blood pressure. I lost about 15-20 pounds, too, which was awesome. I just started it again three days ago. My goals are to get the servings of fruits and vegetables, make the potassium and calcium goals, and stay within a calorie range. After I regularly meet these goals, I will start on the sodium and fat. Fruits, vegetables, calcium and calories have been easy, but I have been disappointed that my potassium levels on my food diary. I have been able to get to 25-50% of my goal. I started double checking my food diary and noticed that potassium is not generally recorded in many of the foods that actually do have calcium. Has anyone else faced this? Any suggestions -- other than recalculating all of my food with potassium?

Update: I'm now down 45 pounds from when I started the DASH diet, and overall I prefer the foods I'm eating over the fatty, greasy, cheap stuff I ate before (sometimes I really want to eat a slice of pizza, and I might let myself, but not often and not a whole pie!).

The DASH diet works if you let it work, and you work with it.