‘Diets Don’t Work’ or How To Control Your Eating Habits

There is a great many dieting programs out there starting with Weight Watchers and rounding out with the reality TV shows like The Biggest Loser. You can find them online or through popular fitness magazines, in people’s social networks or on video platforms. There are different formats like books, ebooks, videos, challenges, and many others and the new ones come out every single day. They all seem to have their own rules and systems but in fact each and every diet is based on a calorie deficit. While Weight Watchers use point system to categorize different foods what they really doing is teaching calorie counting. The Biggest Loser makes people eat less and move more. So when people say: ‘Diets don’t work’ what they really mean is restrictive diet systems don’t work. Why?

Ways to Control Your Appetite

Pancakes

Because your body as well as your mind doesn’t like being to be in a caloric deficit. But it doesn’t mean that diet doesn’t work. It gets you rid of extra 5, 10, 15 pounds at least at first. The problem of restrictive diets is that they aren’t manageable because they are tailored to provide fast results by greatly reducing the calories, which is most times very unhealthy. And that’s what people most often want and expect from a diet, a fast weight loss. Thing is, your metabolism starts to slow down when your calorie intake drops dramatically. That’s why you lose 5 to 10 pounds depending on your excess weight and then plateau. You will proceed losing weight if you keep at it but most people stop right there and go back to eating the way they were eating before the diet even if they hit their goal. The result? You gain weight back or even gain more and that’s because you are eating up for those diet days. There is no other reason.

Fad diets don’t teach basic principles of healthy nutrition, that’s why theore effects are temporary and you can’t really blame them. See, they upheld their end of the bargain and got rid of those a few extra pounds. It’s you who has went back to eating more than you need to maintain that new weight. That’s why calorie and macro counting work so great. You can eat what you want and maintain or lose weight. But there are also other ways to control your appetite, especially after you’ve lost weight. The first thing is to change or control your eating habits that may drive your appetite.

Portion Control

Beside calorie counting portion control is a part of many diets. It doesn’t require anything from you other than eating same foods but in a smaller quantity. You can use smaller plates or cook less. There are also specially designed plates that allow you to diversify your diet and control how much of protein, carbs, and fat you eat.

Clean Eating

Eliminating high-calorie nutrient empty foods from your diet is also a component of some fast diets. Sugar certainly accounts for lots and lots of excess calories your body doesn’t need so cleaning up your foods can be another way to control what you consume and lose weight.

Meal Plan

Believe it or not you don’t need someone else to write a meal plan for you. You may not want to do it yourself but you really can do it yourself. This involves an hour of your time and really not much else. Calculate your meals’ nutrition and just arrange them in the way that would provide you with comfortable caloric deficit and proper nutrition. Having a meal plan is handy because you won’t have to count calories every day, you’ll always know what to eat, and you will have the checklist to control yourself. Write a weeklong meal plan and then shuffle the days’ menu as you feel like.

These are all simple measures that involve a single principle – calorie control. Just by reducing your calorie intake you can either continue losing weight or maintain your goal weight. Diets work only so far, but you have to learn how to eat just as much as you need, value quality over quantity, and control your appetite. Add in working out and we’re talking some really amazing results and a tight taut dream body. Also if your appetite is psychologically driven treating those issues may help or simply taking a hobby that keeps your mind off food can also be useful.

The following two tabs change content below.

Mona Liz

Editor/Writer
Mona Liz is a fitness and healthy lifestyle enthusiast with a passion for writing, music, cats, and food.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.