Diet 101: Your Diet Is For Life

When we think about “going on a diet”, we tend to imagine some temporary time of deprivation and struggle, with an expected future reward of coming “off” the diet and being slim. We focus on the weight loss part of the diet, and we rarely consider how we’ll maintain that weight loss once we reach our goal.

No wonder so many dieters don’t succeed – and many are trapped in a yo-yo cycle of working hard to lose weight, only to gain it all again. Going on a diet is not a quick fix: it’s a way to change your eating habits for life.

First, let’s look at a couple of things which don’t generally work:

Very Restrictive Diets

If you go on a diet which involves drinking special shakes, or eating only cabbage soup, or cutting out all carbohydrates, you may well lose weight. You might even lose it quite fast. But as soon as you return to your former eating habits – you’ll almost certainly put that weight straight back on.

And the more restrictive a diet is, the harder it is to stick to it. If your diet means you can’t eat with your family or go out to a restaurant with friends, it’s going to become a huge effort to maintain it and live a normal life.

Diet Pills

There are a number of diet pills available to boost weight loss, such as Alli, which blocks the absorption of some fat, or appetite-suppressants which make you less hungry. The problem with this is that you’ll end up seeing better results than you’d get from changing your diet alone – potentially fooling you into thinking that you’ve established good eating habits when you haven’t.

Once you come off the diet pills, you may well find that you regain the weight you lost on them. Diet pills also have the dangers of side effects (Alli can have some particularly unpleasant ones involving involuntary bowel movements) and the expense involved in buying the pills.

So, for real long term success, what do you need to do?

Change Your Lifestyle

If you’re overweight, it’s because you’re eating too much for your size and activity levels. So if you really want to be slim for the rest of your life, you need to make true lifestyle changes. For most of us, that’s likely to mean:

• Getting into good habits, like eating five portions of fruit and veg a day, and drinking plenty of water
• Swapping some high-calorie options (like full-sugar sodas) for low-calorie options (like diet sodas)
• Learning to cook foods without added fat, eg. steaming or boiling rather than frying or roasting
• Ditching bad habits for good
• Taking more exercise and being active on a daily basis
• Eating more slowly and really enjoying your food, rather than munching in front of the TV

If the thought of a lifelong diet is depressing you, it’s probably because you’re thinking about deprivation and not being able to eat what you enjoy. Yet one of the most positive factors in a weight loss diet is figuring out which healthy, nutritious foods you love – and potentially discovering many new favorites which you’ll want to eat for the rest of your life. Similarly, with exercise, you’ll want to focus on finding activities that you love.

How could you start making your diet part of your life, not just a temporary fix?

Written by Ali Hale

Related posts:

1. Can You Have a Social Life While You’re on a Diet?
2. What Do You Need to Cut Out of Your Life?
3. How to Love Your Body – While You’re On A Diet