Why should you stop “dieting”
The meaning of Diet is: to limit yourself to small amounts or special types of food in order to reduce weight. The word “diet” for most people has a lot of negative feelings. This is due to the facts that diets have always been marketed as a short-term quick answer to your body goals that need you to cut out the foods you enjoy, eat unusual foods that you hate and feel at fault if ever you “break” your prepared routine. Throw everything you previously heard about diets out of your head and let’s start over!
If you want to change your body type drastically or only a small amount, whether to lose excess body fat, build muscle or tone, there is no short-term solution, but it is never unachievable. You have to make some small improvements to your lifestyle. Don’t be afraid of this statement, these are not big changes. The reason why a lot of people “yo-yo diet” or consider some “diets” as unsuccessful is that they are not sustainable. Yes, you can reduce weight and/or build muscle during a 6-week diet plan, but as soon as you stop and return to your old habits, you will gain weight once more and be honest, no one wants to make a diet for the rest of their life. So, what minor and non-drastic changes can you do to your lifestyle can you do to achieve your goals?
1. EXERCISE EVERYDAY
This doesn’t mean you have to go very hard in the gym or run 10k a day, but that means you have to be active everyday. Whether it is walking the dog, a yoga routine before bedtime or cycling to work, something has to get your blood flowing everyday. If you want to make a big change in the shape of your body, you should do big exercises on most days of the week. You always need to take time off every week but the truth is, making drastic changes, you need to be determined and put in work.
2. LEARNING TO BALANCE AND MONITOR EMPTY CALORIES
The best thing you can do to have a good idea of what you should eat in a day is to talk to a personal trainer or nutritionist who can give you a tailored guide to your body. Everyone processes fats, proteins, and carbohydrates in different ways and a generic diet plan does not certainly work for your body. Once you have personalized your daily calorie goal, it is easier to have a rough guide to what you should consume during the day. Once more, do not worry if you increase your calories one day, remember the next day to balance it again. It is a good suggestion trying to get all your daily calories from good foods. General snacks are full of empty calories, which means that the calories in your chosen snack while counting towards your daily total, have no nutritional value and are really unnecessary for your body.
3. DON’T ALWAYS SELECT THE FAT-FREE OPTION
This doesn’t apply to all foods, for example low-fat turkey meat is still a good choice over a piece of fatty pork. We’re talking about 0% fat, low-fat or “light” versions of food. A good example is low-fat yogurts. When the fat content is removed from the food, it doesn’t taste very good. To compensate for this, most companies up the sugar content. As we mentioned earlier, your body is having a hard time processing the sugar and store it as fat. We won’t mention any names, but a known brand of Full-Fat yogurt has 5.4g of sugar per 100g and its Low-fat version has 7g of sugar per 100g. If you prefer to have a low-fat version of something, always inspect that it has no added sugar. Unsaturated fats are good fats that are needed in your diet in moderation and must replace saturated fats and trans fats.
4. WATCH YOUR SUGAR CONSUMPTION
Sugar is the underlying devil in your food. Always read the sugar content label even in “HEALTH FOODS”! Sugar can’t easily be broken down by your body and is kept as fat. The only way to break down the sugar more quickly is with the fiber, e.g. whole fruits are good to eat because the fiber in the fruit begins to break down the sugar as it is consumed, but that’s also why fruit juices are unhealthy and have a high sugar content that can’t be broken down because the fiber has been eliminated in the mixing process.
5. YOU DON’T HAVE TO STOP EATING ALL THE TREATS YOU LOVE
The trick to sustaining a permanent change is that you should never limit yourself from the foods you love. Simply do not have too much of them. For an instance, if it’s a Monday night, you’ve had a long working day and you really want a chocolate bar, or if you grab dinner and want a dessert, get one and don’t feel bad about it. Just make it a reward from time to time when you feel like and make an extra effort in your workout the next day. This involves balancing, thinking about your daily food intake and producing your energy expenses in your workouts.
