5 tips for a successful diet

Diet Plans

Sun, Feb 17 2008

Upon reading this article at the Diet Blog called 5 Reasons Why Your Diet Is Failing, I thought it will be nice to write a post with 5 tips for a successful diet.

Successful Diet tip #1: Ask for support from the people you live with

When you want your diet to be successful, you should be making long term changes. You will be buying healthier foods and leave junk on the shelves at the store. When the people you live with don't support you and keep buying all the junk food, you'll have a hard time sticking to your healthy ways.

There will be times you won't be as motivated to stick to your healthy food. Then, when junk food is close within reach, things could get ugly. Try to work things out with the people you live with, convince them to buy less junk and inform them about healthier foods.

Successful Diet tip #2: Make time for your diet

In a successful diet plan it is recommended to eat 1 small meal every 3 hours. If your way of living doesn't allow you to prepare healthy meals and eat them at regular intervals, you should try to change your lifestyle somehow.

You can't expect to be eating healthy when you don't make time to buy, cook and eat healthy food. A stressful way of living doesn't attribute to a healthy lifestyle in the first place.

A blog focusing on a healthy eating for the busy people is Dietriffic, personally one of my favorite nutrition / health blogs out there. The latest post at dietriffic, Help: I Don’t Like Fruit and Veggies!, happens to discuss the things mentioned in the first two tips. Definitely go check it out.

Successful Diet tip #3: Inform yourself about nutrition

Now this is the essential part. When deciding what to eat you should know what is healthy and what is not. Sure, you could let a weight watchers program decide that for you and you would be counting points. Or you could just find out what types of food are healthy and what food is unhealthy.

For this I recommend the book Eat, Drink and be Healthy by Walter Willett. This book explains all the important nutrition basics you should know when you want your diet plan to be successful. In this book Walter Willett talks about:

what a healthy weight is
dietary fat
carbohydrates
protein
fruits and vegetables
what to drink
calcium
vitamines
what to believe about food

Walter Willett is an epidemiologist and nutrition researcher for the Harvard School of Public Health and is highly respected by his peers, as he's the second most cited scientist in Clinical Medicine. (Epidemiology is the study of factors affecting the health and illness of populations).

An alternative would be to read trustworthy articles and blogs on the internet, while remaining critical about what you read. Don't just believe everything that's being written. Health and dieting is big business. People will say all kinds of things just to sell their bogus products.

Just remember, A successful diet plan is a diet plan you can follow for the rest of your life.

Successful Diet tip #4: Exercise!

This is obvious, but worth repeating because it's so important. It doesn't matter how you exercise, just make sure you elevate your heart rate a few times per week. By exercising you strengthen your muscles, elevate your metabolism, increase your cardiac health and burn the additional calories which will ultimately lead to weight loss. Exercising will also increase your appetite, making it easier to eat your healthy foods, if you haven't yet learned to fully appreciate them.

Successful Diet tip #5: Know that the diet plan will become easier

At the very beginning of your diet you may find it very hard to stick with the healthy food. You might think it doesn't taste as good and you might crave the junkier food. This will change after a while when your body had time to detox and lose the junk food addiction. Indeed, junk food is filled with additives, high-glycemic carbs and other products that make you addicted to them. The more you crave junk food, the more food companies will profit.

Just one note. You don't have to follow one of those detox diets. Your body has the ability able to clean itself from all the additives and toxins when you stick to a healthy diet with clean foods. You can't follow one detox diet and then continue eating junk food all year long and expect to be living healthy.

from Detox-guide.com:

Therefore, the way to detox your body starts from the knowledge of proper diet, nutrition, and stress relief programs to clear and prevent absorption of these toxins in our body.

I can still remember how I used to be addicted to junk food. When your body is addicted to sugar and filled with toxins, healthy food doesn't taste that good. When your body is clean, you learn to really appreciate the natural unprocessed foods. Stuff like broccoli made me puke in the past, while now I think it tastes great.