How to Avoid Diet Fads and Get Real Results
It’s that time of year again. Without fail, you will have friends that have jumped on to the newest diet fad tell you to join along with them. Most of us want to lose a few pounds and you might be considering it too. Before you do, I want to share some very important pointers on how to know whether or not a diet will be effective before you even start. I’m not going to focus on if it will help you lose weight right away, but what the long term effects will be. If you have dieted before and lost a lot of weight only to regain it, you know how frustrating that can be. Even worse than frustrating, losing and regaining is very bad for your health because it causes a build-up of fat internally around your organs that can cause severe health problems. This is why it’s extremely important to make your diet and lifestyle decisions carefully and consider the long term effects rather than simply focusing on the short term.
First Things First
Why do you want to lose weight? This is a very important question. Why you start has a huge impact on your long term success. While there is no wrong answer, I think the best reason you can possibly want to lose weight is to get healthier and have more energy. If your main goal is to look a certain way, it is easy to become impatient or develop unhealthy habits. I like to think about it this way: if you get healthy, you will have a ton of energy and weight loss will become easy.
Imagine this: You wake up in the morning feeling energized and refreshed! You have mental clarity, and enjoy eating healthy food. Your weight is at a healthy level and you feel like your health improves a little every day. You rarely get sick even when others around you do. You feel thankful for your health and the body you have been given. This is possible and in my opinion should be the goal of your diet and lifestyle.
Let’s Get Healthy
Good diets are focused on long term health. Bad diets are focused on short term weight loss.
Before you choose a diet, dive in and understand how and why it works. What changes will it require you to make and why? Will it make you healthier and help you to feel more energized or are you choosing the diet because it promises you’ll lose weight really fast? There are great diets that help you lose weight fast by focusing on eating healthy foods. There are other diets that help you lose weight, but teach you bad habits, so that once you are no longer on the program, you will struggle.
I love diets that encourage you to eat a lot of nutrient dense foods. It might have unlimited categories that contain vegetables or fruits and encourage you to eat as much of them as you want. These foods might not be something that you enjoy at first, but if you make eating them a habit you might learn to love them and actually keep on eating them even after you end the diet. Some diets will have new recipes and ways to eat vegetables and fruits; these are amazing things to learn and worth your time and energy. Other popular diets will recommend a superfood mix or a nutrition shake that you can drink throughout your day. These nutrition products can help you increase your nutrient intake and help reduce cravings. Every diet needs to focus on healthy eating and getting plenty of whole-food nutrition in every meal.
Don’t Get too Complicated
Some diets are really complicated. You have to eat certain things every hour and there may be a list of things you can and cannot eat. Your life is busy, the more complicated the diet is the less likely you will be able to stick with it, especially if you don’t understand why you can and cannot eat certain foods. Eating a bowl full of grapes is far better than eating a Snickers bar, but if they are both in the “do not eat in the evening category” of your diet, it can feel like the same kind of failure. A complicated diet could end up becoming an unnecessary burden and keep you from reaching your goals.
Be careful of diets that require certain equipment like tubs to measure for portion control. What happens if you lose one or are not home and forget to bring it? Those programs can be great as a training tool to help you get a good idea of portion sizes, but are not something you want to rely on long term, especially if you have children or many other things to keep track of. This doesn’t mean they are bad programs, it is just something to keep in mind because simplicity is key.
Is it for You?
Different things work for different people. If you have followed my story you know that last year I lost over 50 pounds using a technique called intermittent fasting (Basically 5 days per week I do a partial day fast where I do not eat or drink anything other than water until 4pm). The reason I have been able to do this for over a year and a half is because I feel great when I do it. The first week or so was hard but, once my body adjusted and I learned the rhythm of it, I have been feeling great ever since. Your experience will be similar. When you start, plan on it being hard for the first two weeks. If two weeks go by and you don’t feel good, it isn’t a good plan for you and you need to make some changes. You should be able to eat great food, feel great, and be healthy all at the same time, but sometimes it takes a little while to figure out what that looks like for you.
30-Day Sugar Detox Challenge
Maybe you don’t have a diet that you are considering, but would like a challenge to dramatically improve your health. I have just the challenge for you. What I love about this challenge is that you will feel so good while doing that you might not want to stop after 30 days. It will help you to almost completely eliminate cravings, reduce bloating, increase mental clarity, regulate hormones, and yes, you will lose weight. The rules are simple, but the challenge is very hard. In fact, this might be the hardest challenge you have ever tried, but you can do anything for 30 days. If you successfully complete this 30 day challenge, write to us and tell us how you felt before versus after. We will send you a free gift that you will love as a way to encourage you on your journey.
Here is the challenge.
No sugar. Eliminate all foods or drinks that contain sugar from your diet (food sweetened with fruit, maple syrup, or stevia are fine in moderation).
The reason to completely avoid sugar is because it’s addictive, very bad for your health, and keeps you from feeling your best. Two hundred years ago, the average American ate only 2 pounds of sugar a year. Today, the average American consumes almost 152 pounds of sugar in one year. Sugar is ruining our health.
No wheat flour or food that contains wheat flour (foods with rice flour, almond flour, or other wheat substitutes are fine).
The reason we are eliminating wheat flour is because it is so hard for our bodies to digest. When we digest flour, our bodies convert it to glucose(sugar) in order to digest and it has a similar effect to eating sugar.
Don’t eat until you are hungry.
We eat out of habit when we are not even hungry. We are used to eating 3 heavy meals per day and many times we don’t need to eat that much. Try skipping breakfast. If you feel very hungry, drink a nutrition shake or eat some almonds. You don’t have to skip a meal every day, 3 or 4 times per week is fine. Don’t eat out of habit, eat because you are truly hungry.
Double up on your vegetables and eat them first.
Whenever you sit down to eat, serve yourself twice as much vegetables as you normally would and eat them first before eating any other food. This will help you eat more veggies and help you fill up before eating heavier food. Get creative and try some new recipes with your veggies.
