What You'll Eat
Exactly what you eat is up to you, but for the diet to work, you need to follow some rules. Cut saturated fat to less than 7 percent of your daily calories—which means eating less high-fat dairy, such as butter, and ditching fatty meats like salami. Make sure you get no more than 200 milligrams of dietary cholesterol a day, or the amount in about 2 ounces of cheese. And to further drop your LDL cholesterol, add in plant stanols or sterols, which are found in vegetable oil and certain types of margarine. If you follow the diet correctly, you’ll be eating lots of fruits, vegetables, whole grains, low-fat or nonfat dairy products, fish, and poultry without the skin.
Recipe Resources
Lots of online resources offer not only recipes and food guides, but tips for sticking to the TLC diet when you’re out of the house, and how to tell if you’re eating the right amount of food. Here are a few:
- How sterols and stanols can help lower cholesterol
- What is cholesterol?
- Guide to Lowering Cholesterol with Therapeutic Lifestyle Changes (TLC)
Last updated by Angela Haupt | January 04, 2013
The Dean Ornish Diet can be tailored to your specific health issues. The strictest version is challenging because it severely reduces fat intake.
The macrobiotic diet mimics vegetarian and vegan eating approaches. Dieters can expect to eat lots of organic, whole foods on this diet.
DASH was developed to fight high blood pressure—not specifically as an all-purpose diet, but experts give it high marks all around.
