Society is constantly bombarded with new diet trends, each promising rapid weight loss and transformative results. However, there is no one-size-fits-all diet that will magically lead to lasting success. Rigid diets often impose unrealistic restrictions, making them difficult to maintain. Instead of chasing quick fixes, adopting a healthy lifestyle provides a sustainable and fulfilling approach to long-term well-being.
The Illusion of Quick Fixes: Why Diets Often Fail
A diet typically focuses on short-term goals, often involving strict rules and limitations. While some diets may yield temporary results, they can be restrictive, regimented, and difficult to sustain. Many traditional diets often reduce the number of calories, reduce/eliminate certain food groups and often deprive the body of certain nutrients detrimental to one’s health. With that being said, there is a greater chance of returning to previous eating habits and possibly gaining more weight.
Restrictive diets often lead to frustration, deprivation, and an inevitable return to old habits. When individuals return to “normal living” after a diet, they often regain lost weight, creating a cycle of yo-yo dieting. This pattern is exhausting and discouraging. There are numerous studies showing that individuals who diet typically regain most, if not all, of the weight they lost.
Embracing a Healthy Lifestyle: A Holistic Approach
In contrast to dieting, a healthy lifestyle emphasizes long-term habits that promote overall well-being. This includes maintaining a balanced diet rich in nutritious foods, prioritizing optimal sleep, engaging in at least 150 minutes of physical activity per week, and managing stress effectively. Living a healthy lifestyle is about moderation, balance, and making mindful choices that support your well-being. Rather than feeling trapped by restrictions, you empower yourself by choosing to nourish your body and mind. When you embrace a lifestyle centered around health, it becomes a natural and enjoyable part of your daily routine.
The Power of Purpose and Support
Purpose is the strength behind any goal and is tremendously important as it helps you remain focused, cognitive and true to your goals. The most important part of a lifestyle change is that there is purpose behind it because it can increase the chances of not giving up when life gets hard. The purpose can be more of a help to keep motivated with a positive mental attitude.
Read also: The Hoxsey Diet
Along with purpose, it is best to have a support group to be there along the way. Whether the support is through a friend, family member, or someone who shares a similar interest/goal, this will be very helpful to success. Professionals such as dieticians, doctors and psychologists too, can be very strong sources of support.
Key Components of a Sustainable Lifestyle Change
When you decide to take a lifestyle approach to weight loss and wellness, the first change to make is in the way you think about what you are doing. Instead of simply thinking about losing weight, you need to think in terms of reducing cholesterol, blood sugar and blood pressure and ultimately, becoming fit.
- Nutrition: This means introducing lots of vegetables and fruit into your diet. You will also eat more lean meat and low-fat dairy foods (assuming you are not vegetarian) and stay mostly away from fast food.
- Physical Activity: There are dozens of ways to add physical activity to your daily routine, from taking regular brisk walks to learning yoga, Pilates or some form of dance. Any increase in physical activity is desirable, and patients can follow the specific recommendations from their physical therapists, doctors, or trainers.
- Stress Management: Aside from being generally bad for your health, stress can be a big barrier to weight loss. Emotional eating is a habit formed by many people with high degrees of stress in their lives. Stress can also make it hard to focus and be successful in making healthy lifestyle choices. That’s why stress management is a habit to develop as part of your lifestyle change.
- Smoking Cessation: Becoming a non-smoker is essential for a wellness lifestyle.
- Moderate Alcohol Consumption: One alcoholic drink per day maximum, if you are female and two per day if you are male, is the objective for a change in drinking habits.
- Nutritional Supplements: Getting all the nutrients your body needs, directly from the food you eat, is sometimes easier said than done. Your lifestyle change might involve the addition of some nutritional supplements, depending on your circumstances.
The Ornish Program: An Example of Intensive Lifestyle Change
Physician and researcher Dr. Dean Ornish is a pioneer of intensive lifestyle change. His program emphasizes nutrition and exercise, as one would expect, but it also addresses psychological factors like loneliness, isolation, depression, and anger. Research shows emotional and social health is associated with a reduced risk of disease and premature death. He emphasizes the importance (research-proven) of connection, intimacy, and love.
Here's how it works: nine weeks of nutrition and meal prep instruction on a plant-based, low-refined-carb and low-trans-fat diet, as well as shared meals with the group; recommendation for and guidance in three to five hours of moderate physical activity, along with two or three strength-training sessions per week; stress management, communications skills, and relaxation instruction; and a support group. The overall message for physicians is this: an intensive lifestyle change program won't work if it's just "ordered" by docs, or if patients are expected to engage with it based on threats and warnings. Any lifestyle change has to be meaningful and pleasurable. If it's meaningful and pleasurable, people will do it. For these changes to be most effective, people have to want to continue them for the rest of their lives.
Avoiding Fad Diets and Exercises
Fad diets and exercises (along with other gimmicky weight loss strategies) are often seen as a “magic bullet” to losing weight and improving health issues, but there is mixed evidence to support this claim. For example, fad diets typically restrict the consumption of key nutrients that your body needs to function. Most importantly, the research is clear that fad diets are unsustainable due to their unrealistic and restrictive rules. In other words, the stricter your diet, the harder it is to follow it. Like fad diets, fad exercise routines can be difficult to sustain and are often not scientifically studied. In general, it is important to remember the difference between an exercise trend and an exercise fad. One key feature all these fads share that makes them unsuccessful is that they are too short-sighted. These methods prioritize achieving weight loss as fast as possible. This all-or-nothing mindset can also be harmful to both your physical and mental health. The reality is that it takes time to cultivate safe, sustainable habits that help you lose weight and eat better in the long run.
Read also: Walnut Keto Guide
Shifting Your Mindset: Approach-Oriented Goals
It’s easy to emphasize habits that promote only physical and emotional well-being. However, there are many more domains of health and wellness that require moderation to build a healthy lifestyle. Notice that all the goals listed above frame change in terms of adopting positive behaviors, rather than avoiding unwanted behaviors. Research has found that “approach-oriented” goals (e.g., “eating at home more”) are much more successful than “avoidance-oriented” goals (e.g., “never eating takeout again”). This is because you are encouraging yourself to practice behaviors that support your health-and enjoying the benefits in the process-rather than simply avoiding behaviors that may not be the best for your health. Approach-oriented goals can also serve as an alternative to less healthy behaviors. They are also associated with better self-esteem, more happiness, and less stress. Next time you set a goal for yourself, try to frame it as an approach-oriented goal.
The Importance of Gradual Change
Lifestyle change can be discouraging because it takes longer to see results. However, the results achieved last, and you are more focused on your overall health and wellness rather than just weight. When you change your focus to more of a long-term lifestyle mindset, you tend to be kinder to your body. You will most likely experience less hunger, exhaustion, mental stress and food deprivation. Additionally, when you make lifestyle changes with a focus on weight loss, it may take longer to see the weight come off. However, the weight is more likely to stay off because it’s not a sudden change for your body.
If you tend to eat takeout frequently, the first step is to set a goal to simply eat at home more times than you eat out each week. The key to this strategy is moderation, or finding a balance between two behavioral extremes. Once you are comfortable maintaining small lifestyle changes such as the above, you can slowly begin to incorporate new goals that you want to achieve.
The Role of Medical Professionals
Several studies suggest that counseling is a key component of successful lifestyle change, especially when offered by a medical professional. An intensive lifestyle change program won't work if it's just "ordered" by docs, or if patients are expected to engage with it based on threats and warnings. I have learned the importance of avoiding guilt, shame, and scare tactics, and getting away from labels such as "good" or "bad."
Examples of Popular Diets: A Critical Look
Rapid weight-loss diets may produce quick results, but most are hard to stick to over time, so the pounds often come back. Some can also be unhealthy - especially diets that limit important nutrients by restricting certain food groups.
Read also: Weight Loss with Low-FODMAP
- Ketogenic (“keto”) diet: A diet high in fat and low in carbohydrates (sugars). This causes the body to break down fat into molecules called ketones. Ketones circulate in the blood and become the main source of energy for many cells in the body. Pros: Very effective for short-term weight loss and for reducing epileptic seizures. Cons: Not enough research that proves it works and is safe over long periods. Extreme limits on carbohydrate consumption, which can cause digestive problems, headaches, and other side effects.
- Intermittent fasting: An eating pattern that includes hours or days of little or no food consumption, but without limiting essential nutrients. Pros: Many dieters find it easier to not eat during parts of the day rather than following portion control and calorie restrictions all of the time. Cons: May limit intake of vitamins and minerals.
- Atkins diet: Similar to the keto diet with its focus on burning fat, the Atkins diet was modified in 2002 to the four-phase New Atkins Diet Revolution. Cons: May decrease nutrient intake.
- Mediterranean diet: This diet follows the traditional eating habits and lifestyle in countries along the Mediterranean Sea. Pros: It is the most extensively studied diet to date, and research shows that it can have a preventive and therapeutic impact on many chronic health conditions. Cons: Can be expensive to maintain.
The Importance of Sustainability
“Sustainability is the most important factor in diets that are designed to help you lose weight and keep it off,” Crowell says. “It’s normal for people to look for a quick and easy fix, because they naturally want results right away. Some trendy diets might help you get a few pounds off in the short run. But based on behavior that medical professionals have observed in weight-loss clinics over decades, we know that most people will not or cannot stay with those diets.
“We help our patients create plans they can stick to, and usually that goes back to calories in versus calories out,” Crowell says. “To lose weight, you need to be burning more calories than you consume. We measure resting energy expenditure. If we see that you are burning 1,800 calories per day, then we would recommend consuming 1,300 calories per day. That 500-calorie deficit should help you lose 1-2 pounds per week.
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