What is a diet?

First thing I want to do in this article is clear up what I mean by the term “diet”. When I say diet I mean what you eat on a regular basis. “I sometimes make exceptions but my normal diet is...” Many people think of diet as what they are eating for a short time period followed by going back to their normal foods as in “I am going on a diet TILL after my cousins wedding”.

You need to eat less calories to lose weight then to keep it the same. Also if you add muscle then you will boost your metabolism and can eat more calories. So if you are overweight and you get down to where you want then you can get away with eating more then you did when you lost weight. But all in all your should be striving to make permanent healthy changes to your diet, diet just like in anything else you should be trying to get better.

Trying some crazy diet plan for a short period of time in order to lose weight isn't a good idea for a couple of reasons. If it is a diet plan that is bad for you like something that neglects important nutrients then you probably shouldn't be on it at all even for a temporary period. Even if there is nothing unhealthy about the plan, many people gain their weight back as soon as they go back to their normal eating. As I have stated you may have a little room to splurge once you are no longer actually trying to lose weight. But if you eat the same as you did when you gained the weight in the first place then what do you think is going to happen this time?

I believe in the power of forming a habit. I also believe that it is easier to stick to easy things then hard things and that when it comes to diet small changes are easier. Put all this together and I think that making permanent improvements to your diet is easiest done by picking one or two things and sticking to them for a month (I believe they say it takes 21 days to form a habit). Eventually you will just make it a habit, from there you can pick something else to do and the previous issue will just be a habit that no longer takes effort to keep. You can just keep doing this your whole life.

When you get discouraged you will have several previous milestones to look back on and say “I accomplished this, I know I can do it!”. I used to love candy, soda was ok but I didn't like it nearly as much. Had I tried to cut candy out it would have been very hard and I likely would have quit. Instead I quit drinking soda, it wasn't nearly as hard for me though there were some times when I was tempted. Once this was a habit it wasn't hard to keep anymore. It was automatic to order something else and the few times when I was tempted I didn't want to end my streak of X long without any.

From there I cut out other sugarier beverages, like sports drinks and orange juice which I preferred and was harder for me to cut down on. I still have them sometimes but not as much. Then I started on the big one for me, candy. This was harder but when I went to the store I tried to get things with what I considered “useful” carbs instead of empty ones like candy. Way I figured it was that I was lifting weights and trying to gain muscle. Sometimes my body needed simple carbs (like the sugar in candy) but most of the time it didn't. Other junk foods contained proteins and complex carbs my body would need later. These alternatives (like pizza) weren't exactly health foods but they at least had some good things in them besides the bad.

Eventually I was just in the habit of avoiding things I considered pure sugar with no other calories. It wasn't so hard anymore. My cravings were reduced and when I did want some, once again I didn't want to ruin my habit of avoiding them. I did eat them sometimes but not as much.

After this it wasn't so much about what I had to eat as I was doing good here, but just a matter of picking off the few bad things remaining in my diet and I did this one by one. I don't think you should ever reach a point where you say you shouldn't better yourself anymore. But I have never looked at it as I can never eat such and such a thing again. This would just make me depressed. I am in good shape with low body fat and occasionally if I want to splurge then this doesn't mean a full blown dive back into a terrible diet. Just knowing I can occasionally have something and haven't shunned it for life makes it easier to pass on it.