Millions of individuals decide each year that they need to adopt a healthier lifestyle. Many of these individuals choose to diet because they want to prevent, manage or reverse some type of illness such as diabetes, high cholesterol, or high blood pressure. Dieting may sound like a great way to lose weight and get healthier but if you diet the wrong way it’s anything but good for you.
Many individuals who diet tend to starve themselves, eating small dinners with no nutritional value, not enough calories and often times only simple carbohydrates… a far cry from the recommended nutritional guidelines. Diets although they may work at first are a temporary fix. Many people who have a significant weight loss gain the weight back with an additional few pounds.
Often times dieting does not work long term because they can be too restrictive for people to follow over the long haul. Think about the Atkins diet that requires very few carbohydrates throughout the day. Are you really going to give up carbs for the rest of your life? As convenient as using a Medifast coupon is, it can be hard to do it all the time.
The word diet should be replaced with healthy eating. When you think in terms of healthy eating you don’t feel as if you have to stop eating all of your favorite foods. When you decide to eat healthier you simply need to increase your intake of healthy foods and decrease your intake of unhealthy foods. You are not supposed to be starving yourself or denying yourself any of your favorite guilty pleasures once in a while (moderation is usually the key!).
Finding healthier foods you like is a big key to a healthy diet. When you eat healthy foods that you actually enjoy you feel healthy without feeling restricted. For me healthy fruits like pineapple and watermelon are two excellent examples of foods that are reasonably healthy and taste great, especially on a hot day!
Cutting portions and allowing cheat days can help you to lose fat while feeling like you’ve taken one more step to a healthy body. Many people scoff at the idea of a cheat day but it can actually be beneficial to cheat every now. Your body needs to “reset” once in a while. As with anything your body gets used to a new diet and you can plateau or stall your weight loss if you repeat the same diet constantly. The key here is to not let a cheat DAY turn in to a cheat WEEK.
Eating healthy is about a lifestyle change. Increasing your intake of healthy fruits and vegetables while reducing your intake of fried fatty foods and sweets can yield amazing results. Deciding to eat healthier is a lifestyle change that is long lasting. When you choose healthy eating over dieting you feel like you are feeding the body vs starving it. Healthy eating in combination with some type of cardio or aerobic exercise works best for effective weight loss.