If we want to start a new and healthy lifestyle to lose weight, get fit and feel better it has to be a lifestyle change. The reason that most diets don’t work is because they are not sustainable. We cannot spend our lives counting calories, measuring out everything, counting points or eliminating total food groups.

To be honest yes there are a lot of high profile diets that do work and you can lose weight but once you stop them you just pile the weight back on.

Why you ask?

Many diets today encourage you to eat less calories than your body needs for everyday function of your vital organs. Our bodies are very smart so if they don’t get the right amount of calories that they need they go into starvation mode so your metabolic rate goes down which is responsible for burning calories and fat. Once you start to eat normally again your body remembers that it was starving itself and will store the calories in case the starvation period starts again.

These are just some of the physical damages.

What are the emotional damages?

We get hungry, we overeat, we make poor choices about what to eat and then we feel guilty. Has anyone found themselves in that vicious circle?

Diets to avoid:

• Diets that encourage you to eat calorie controlled breads, pastas, popcorn, muffins and pizza every single day. Food that you know is not healthy. As soon as you go off this diet you still want to eat all these types of food but guess what they are not calorie controlled so you end up eating way too many calories.
• A diet that consists of mainly eating shakes and taking pills, again who wants to live off shakes? We need food to nourish our bodies.
• Any diet that suggests you do not need to exercise at all. Diet is only going to take you so far, we need exercise not only to help us burn fat but to improve our heart health.
• Any diet that makes you feel unhappy, depressed, deprived or hungry.

What do we need to do:

• Make sure we are eating the right foods to fuel our body at the right times for example eat your carbs before and after your workout, not before you go to bed.
• Learn to stop when you are full, you don’t need to eat everything on your plate.
  Educate yourself on what foods are healthy and unhealthy.
• Eat a wide range of foods and don’t leave out any of the food groups unless you are intolerant towards a certain food group.
• Listen to your body, if you are hungry then eat, don’t starve yourself.
• If you head for mid-afternoon slump and feel like sugar then you probably have not eaten enough food throughout the day.

Just remember everybody is different and you need to work out what is right for you.