What's the best diet for weight loss? A healthy diet favors natural, unprocessed foods over pre-packaged meals and snacks. It is balanced, meaning that it provides your body with all the nutrients and minerals it needs to function best. It emphasizes plant-based foods—especially fruits and vegetables—over animal foods. It contains plenty of protein. It is low in sugar and salt. It incorporates "healthy fats" including fish, olive oil and other plant-derived oils. Here a few examples of healthy meals for weight loss. For breakfast, a bowl of bran flakes with sliced strawberries and walnuts with nonfat milk. For lunch, a turkey sandwich on wheat with vegetables and an olive oil and vinegar dressing. For dinner, a salmon steak on a bed of spinach. You don't have to cut out snacks in order to eat a healthy diet, either. Healthy snacks for weight loss include almonds or pistachios, string cheese with an apple, Greek yogurt or a banana with peanut butter. Before you begin your weight-loss journey, do some brainstorming about the kinds of healthy foods you enjoy so that you can have lots of choices as you plan your meals and snacks. Remember that the best diet is the one you'll stick to, so don't rush out and buy a bunch of "health foods" that you know you'll never eat. There is no single diet that nutritionists have deemed "the healthiest." However, there are several styles of eating that experts either have designed for optimal health or have observed to be healthy when consumed traditionally by different people around the world. Such styles of eating tend to have a few things in common—they tend to be plant-based diets, they emphasize healthy fats, no simple sugars and low sodium, and they favor natural foods over the highly processed fare typical of much of the Western diet. Red meat and foods with added sugars are only eaten sparingly. Besides being an effective weight loss method, eating a Mediterranean style diet is linked to a lower risk of heart disease, diabetes, depression and some forms of cancer. Remember that the best diet is the one you'll stick to, so don't rush out and buy a bunch of "health foods" that you know you'll never eat. As its name implies, the MIND diet (Mediterranean-DASH diet Intervention for Neurodegenerative Delay) was designed by doctors to take elements from the Mediterranean and DASH diets that seemed to provide benefits to brain health and stave off dementia and cognitive decline. In practice, it is very similar to both the Mediterranean and DASH diets, but it puts stronger emphasis on leafy green vegetables and berries, and less emphasis on fruit and dairy.