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If you've ever asked someone how to stay healthy, you've probably heard this advice: Eat a healthy diet. Really though, what does that mean? If you ask a lot of fans of the fad ketogenic diet, it means avoiding sweet potatoes and quinoa in favor of cheese and coconut oil. For someone else, it could mean avoiding sugary foods like ice cream and candy at all costs. And someone else can tell you to avoid all dairy and gluten nix.
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Pick any diet book and it will claim it contains all the answers to successfully lose all the weight you want and keep it off. Some claim that eating less and exercising more is the key, others that a low-fat diet is the only way to go, while others prescribe cutting out carbohydrates. So what should you believe?
The truth is, there is no "one size fits all" solution to permanent healthy weight loss. What works for one person may not work for you, as our bodies respond differently to different foods, depending on genetics and other health factors.
. Finding the right weight loss tips for you will likely take time and will require patience, commitment, and some experimentation with different foods and diets.
While some people respond well to calorie counting or similar restrictive methods, others respond better if they have more freedom to plan their weight loss diet programs. Having the freedom to simply avoid fried foods or cut down on refined carbohydrates can set you up for success. So don't be too discouraged if a diet that worked for someone else doesn't work for you. And don't beat yourself up if a diet is too restrictive for you to stick to. Ultimately, a diet is only right for you if you can stick with it over time. • Remember: while there is no easy solution to losing weight, there are many steps you can take to develop a healthier relationship with food, curb the emotional triggers of overeating, and achieve a healthy weight.
Four Popular Weight Loss Strategies • 1. Reduce calories • Some experts believe that successful weight management comes down to a simple equation: If you eat fewer calories than you burn, you lose weight. It sounds easy right? So why is it so difficult to lose weight? • Weight loss is not a linear event over time. When you cut calories, you can lose weight for the first few weeks, for example, and then something changes. You eat the same number of calories but lose less or no weight. This is because when you lose weight you lose water and lean tissue as well as fat, your metabolism slows down, and your body changes in other ways. Therefore, to continue losing weight each week, you must continue to cut calories. • A calorie is not always a calorie. Eating 100 calories of high fructose corn syrup, for example, may have a different effect on your body than eating 100 calories of broccoli. The trick to sustained food for weight loss is to ditch foods that are full of calories but don't make you feel full (like sweets) and replace them with foods that fill you up without being loaded with calories (like vegetables). • Many of us don't always eat simply to satisfy hunger. We also turn to food for comfort or stress relief, which can quickly derail any weight loss plan.
2. Cut carbohydrates • A different way of looking at weight loss identifies the problem not as consuming too many calories, but rather as the way the body accumulates fat after consuming carbohydrates, in particular the role of the hormone insulin. When you eat, carbohydrates from food enter your bloodstream as glucose. To keep your blood sugar levels in check, your body always burns this glucose before burning the fat from a meal. • If you eat a carbohydrate-rich meal (lots of pasta, rice, bread, or chips, for example), your body releases insulin to help get all of this glucose into your blood. In addition to regulating blood sugar levels, insulin does two things: it prevents fat cells from releasing fat for the body to burn for fuel (because its priority is to burn glucose), and it creates more fat cells to store everything you need. the body cannot be burned. The result is that you gain weight, and your body now requires more fuel to burn, so you eat more. Since insulin only burns carbohydrates, you crave carbohydrates and thus begins a vicious cycle of consuming carbohydrates and gaining weight. To lose weight, according to the reasoning, you need to break this cycle by reducing carbohydrates. • Most low-carb diets advocate replacing carbohydrates with protein and fat, which could have some long-term negative effects on your health. If you try a low-carb diet, you can lower your risks and limit your intake of saturated and trans fats by choosing lean meats, fish and vegetarian sources of protein, low-fat dairy products, and consuming lots of non-fat, leafy greens. -Vegetables with starch.
3. Cut the fat • It's a mainstay of many diets: If you don't want to get fat, don't eat fat. Walk down any grocery store aisle and you'll be bombarded with low-fat snacks, dairy products, and packaged meals. But while our low-fat options have skyrocketed, so have obesity rates. So why haven't low-fat diets worked for more of us? • Not all fat is bad. Healthy or "good" fats can actually help you control your weight, as well as control your mood and fight fatigue. The unsaturated fats found in avocados, nuts, seeds, soy milk, tofu, and fatty fish can help fill you up, while adding a little flavorful olive oil to a vegetable dish, for example, can make it easier to eat healthy foods and improve the overall quality of your diet. • We often make the wrong concessions. Many of us make the mistake of swapping fat for empty calories from sugar and refined carbohydrates. Instead of eating whole yogurt, for example, we eat low-fat or fat-free versions that are packed with sugar to compensate for the loss of taste. Or we swap our greasy breakfast bacon for a bagel or donut that causes rapid spikes in blood sugar.
4. Follow the Mediterranean diet • The Mediterranean healthy diet plan emphasizes the consumption of good fats and good carbohydrates along with large amounts of fresh fruits and vegetables, nuts, fish, and olive oil, and only modest amounts of meat and cheese. However, the Mediterranean diet is more than just food. Regular physical activity and sharing meals with others are also important components. • Whatever weight loss strategy you try, it's important to stay motivated and avoid common dieting mistakes like emotional eating.
Keeping the weight • You may have heard the widely cited statistic that 95% of people who lose weight on a diet will regain it within a few years, or even months. While there is not much solid evidence to back up that claim, it is true that many weight loss plans fail in the long run. Often times, that is simply because diets that are too restrictive are very difficult to maintain over time. However, that does not mean that your weight loss attempts are doomed to failure. Far from there.
