Diets are a dime a dozen these days. And many adults have tried their fair share. Atkins. South Beach. Jenny Craig. The Zone. The Biggest Loser diet. The cabbage soup diet – hard to believe, but it’s real. The list goes on and on. It’s hard to resist such tantalizing marketing with slender spokespeople touting their weight-loss success stories.
Everywhere you turn there are gorgeous celebrities recommending veganism, macrobiotics, juice cleanses, and just about any crazy food plan you can develop. But if you’ve done your time with diets, you know the truth, most of them work great…for a while but the success is rarely sustainable once you return to your regular lifestyle habits and regain the weight and more. Doctors seem to agree that this yo-yo pattern could be even worse than simply carrying a few extra pounds around. Not to mention…everyone is focused on the weight…there’s more to it then how much you weigh.
So what’s a concerned adult to do? We all want to be healthy and fit, we all want to look and feel our best, but there’s so much conflicting advice out there where diets are concerned that it can be difficult to know what to listen to. Should you avoid carbs or fats? Should you limit yourself to protein or vegetables? Which diet will lead to better lifelong habits and an improved state of health and well-being?
It can be difficult to know what’s right for you and for the human body in general with all the differing points of view. Bio-individuality (one persons food is another persons poison) is key in learning to eat what works best for your body. With a few pointers and common sense, you’ll have all the ingredients you need to create a recipe for success where your diet is concerned. It’s a journey and we are all on it…Here are some truly useful tips to get you started.
Skip the fads
The best place to start with dieting is by scrapping the fads. There is no quick fix, and the sooner you accept it, the faster you can start developing a sustainable plan for healthy eating that will actually work. There is no one diet that will work for everyone therefore there is no quick fix that will work for everyone.
Consider how long you spent learning your trade. Perhaps it was a couple years of education, or a decade plus. The path was different for all of us, so is the commitment. The point is that you made your preparation, education and career a priority. You need to do the same for your diet and overall health.
Learning to eat right is a process that you must devote time and effort to if you want to be successful and feel you’re very best. So stop wasting time with “mindless” fads and start learning about how the food you use to fuel your body actually affects you.
Raise awareness
It’s hard to adjust your eating habits until you know what they are. So your journey should begin by becoming aware of just you’re eating. Start by writing down what you eat each day in a food journal. Make it simple at first just document what you eat for a week. Then you can increase the details of your entries on week two and so on. You will be surprised at how interested you become in what you are eating as well as how your body is reacting. Ultimately your entries will include much of the following:
- What you ate
- Related data (portion size, calories, and perhaps even carbs, fat, sugar, and protein)
- Relative hunger or satiety before and after
- Circumstances (meal time, snacking, etc.)
- Emotions
It will be hard at first, but you’ll begin to see what you eat, how much you eat, and the circumstances surrounding eating, helping you to understand where you would like to go.
Whether you mindlessly munch on chips while watching TV, you graze throughout the day, or you load up during mealtimes, you’ll start to get a picture of what your current diet really looks like when you pay attention to what you’re eating.
Remove processed and fast foods
As omnivores, humans are lucky enough to be capable of eating all types of food from the natural world, including plants and animals. This makes for a varied diet. Unfortunately, we’ve gone the extra mile and created entirely new food groups that are anything but natural. And this is where dieters often have trouble.
Yes, processed and fast foods may be delicious but…. they’re designed to target our taste buds so we want to eat more, thanks to all the fat, sodium, and sugar they often contain, not to mention chemical additives. If you want to develop a healthy diet for life, the processed and fast foods have got to go.
Eat “clean”
In addition to tossing processed foods, you should think about joining the clean eating movement, which pertains to eating food in as close to its natural state as possible. You might think this means eating only raw foods, but that’s not the case. What you want to avoid is processing and additives.
Organic foods, for example, lack chemical additives like fertilizers and pesticides (for plants), as well as hormones and antibiotics (for animals) that can negatively affect you when you eat them. And you’ll want to look for labels with just a couple of recognizable ingredients. Canned peas would fit the bill, so long as the ingredients were, say, peas and water. If you can’t read the ingredients on the label, it’s probably not very good for you.
Eat smaller portions
This is a biggie, so to speak. We’ve gotten used to large meals with large portions, especially of proteins and carbs. But most of us simply don’t need the amount of food we consume, and we need a lot more fruits and vegetables than we get.
If you’re looking for appropriate portion sizes, try using the “crowd it out “ method at first. The idea being that you don’t really have to control the portions so much if you learn to crowd out all the processed foods and starches on your plate with wholesome vegetables and fruits. If your plate contains one third protein and two thirds vegetables and fruit then you will be heading in the right direction. Take your time and eating well will become easy and routine.
Healthy fats are good
When you’re trying to lose weight, you might think avoiding anything with fat is the way to go. But our bodies actually need fat in our diet to absorb vitamins, protect internal organs, and serve all kinds of essential functions. You just need to make sure you’re getting the healthy fats found in foods like natural oils, fatty fish, nuts, avocados, and so on.
Less carbs
It’s easy to say that carbs are bad, but this isn’t entirely true. Fruits and vegetables, for example, have carbs. The problem with carbohydrates in the average diet is that we eat too many and we tend to eat the wrong kind.
If you eat white bread, pasta, and French fries, you know the allure of “bad” carbs, which is to say, those that have been processed until they offer little nutritional value, often paired with a boatload of harmful additives.
In general, healthy eating requires you to cut down on carbs or at least change your diet to include far less of the carbs that fall into the bad category and more of the ones that qualify as good.
Moderate exercise
Some say that weight loss is 80% diet and 20% exercise. This may or may not be true, but if you want to be healthy and fit, a combination of the two is advisable. Many believe that weight loss, in particular, depends on the amount of calories you consume versus the amount you burn and moderate exercise can definitely contribute to the weight-loss process. I rather think that movement is essential to healthy living so at first instead of trying to become the runner, swimmer or biker…just try to move more every day of your life. As you begin to increase your movement you will notice that you feel more like doing physical things and it becomes easier to decide you may like to try a run or a bike ride.
Exercise is important for your overall health, improving cardiovascular function and increasing strength, flexibility, and coordination (depending on the type of fitness activities you choose). So, work up to it slowly and decide what works for your body.
Change your habits
Perhaps the most important part of any diet is sustainability. And if you want to develop a healthy diet for life, you need to work to change your habits. This could mean eating less or making substitutions. It could mean learning to eat in moderation. You might have to become more active.
But when you start to see results, when you lose weight, you feel better, you fit into a smaller size, or you make it to the top of the stairs without gasping for breath, you’ll only reinforce your lifestyle changes.
Kicking bad habits isn’t easy, especially when it comes to eating, but you can do it. And it begins with cutting through conflicting diet advice to find the healthy and sustainable solutions that work for you.
Change your relationship with food rather then calling it a diet!
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