The Best Kind of Diet is Not a Diet

The best kind of diet isn’t a diet at all. Instead it’s a lifestyle change. Many people have lived their whole lives with a misconception around how much food they really need to be healthy and sustain their energy.

Our beliefs around food come from family and our social group. If you were surrounded by people who ate prepared foods from boxes, cans, packets, and jars, then that’s what your perception of a good meal will be. Portion sizes, too, are dictated to us by the people in our lives. The importance of exercise can either be emphasized or downplayed by our social group. Oddly enough, many parents of kids who play sports don’t practice what they preach to their own kids. If your group of adult friends doesn’t exercise, you are likely to fall out of the habit of exercising as well, even if you know it’s a smart idea.

Myths and Misconceptions About Weight Loss

Here’s a list of ways people mistakenly think which can prevent them from becoming fit and healthy.

People have the wrong idea of what an appropriate portion size is. You may have been conditioned to pile lots of food on your plate, and you also may have been told to clean your plate. Often, we do not need as many of the calories, especially from sugar and fat, that are present in foods we eat, as we think we do.

Furthermore, there are other ways to avoid wasting food (such as

storing our leftover portion, or feeding it to the dog), that do not involve eating when we’re not actually hungry or don’t need such quite such a large portion size as was served to us.

What’s a good portion size when you’re trying to lose weight? If you don’t feel like getting out the measuring cups and mini food scale, you can do a rough determination of how much is a good serving of food by using a dinner plate as a guide.

Your dinner plate should be half filled with colorful vegetables. This can include salad and it can also include lightly cooked green and cruciferous vegetables such as broccoli and cabbage, for the biggest nutritional benefit.

Now you have the remaining half of the plate to fill up. Divide the other half of your plate between meat or other protein source, like fish, beans, legumes, tofu... and a starch such as potato, rice, pasta, or bread. All the better if you can make it a whole-grain starch which helps to slow digestion and keep us regular. People think that once they reach their weight loss goal, they can just go back to eating however they want. This is the quickest way to gain back all of the weight you worked so hard to lose. That’s why we don’t call it a diet which implies that this is temporary. Instead of a diet, your goal for weighing less and being healthy is to permanently change how you eat and exercise, and never look back.

Many people don’t know how to stick to mainly whole foods. We may have been raised on boxed, packaged, and canned prepared foods, bottled dressings and bottled sauces. Often, these foods contain weight gain-causing ingredients like sugar and sugar substitutes, corn syrup and addictive flavorings that cause us to want more of those foods, such as dextrose and MSG in its various forms.

Many people are accustomed to dosing themselves with sugar multiple times per day. Are you one of them? We also have not been taught to recognize that many socalled healthy foods have high amounts of added sugar. The companies who make these products have a goal of making people crave and want more of these foods because of their taste and sweetness. People were never taught that exercise, physical movement, and any activity that increases heart rate should be a part of one’s daily life. There was a time when manual labor was par for the course. So people got their exercise and burned calories without trying. But after office desk jobs and computers arrived on the scene, technology soon replaced physical work and movement. The “white collar” career was born, and with it followed the expectation that if you had a good job you would have less reasons to move around and do physical labor. We have been brainwashed to believe that the less we move, the better off we are. It’s a part of our culture to try and get the closest parking spot, take the elevator instead of the steps, hire someone to do the physically challenging jobs and generally do as little as possible in the way of moving our body or exercising our muscles.