Showing posts with label different healthy eating diets. Show all posts
Showing posts with label different healthy eating diets. Show all posts

Tuesday, November 17, 2009

How To Succeed With Your Healthy Eating Weight Loss Plan


If you need to lose weight, you’ve probably looked at some healthy eating weight loss diets and groaned in disappointment each time.  Most of them were probably fad diet plans. You’ve looked at diets that are supposed to be good for you while letting you lose weight. 

Some claim you can eat things like fatty cheeseburgers and even fatty milkshakes (made with sugar substitutes).  While other diets claim that you can eat whatever you want as long as you keep your fat intake low. But chances are that they all restrict or forbid something you really enjoy, and you’re not looking forward to going without that favorite food.

What some people overlook is that you don’t necessarily have to follow a healthy eating weight loss diet that someone else claims is the best.  You can figure out how to eat on your own. The first step is to look at how you’ve been eating.  Obviously, if you need to lose weight you’ve been following a diet that provides you with too many calories.  If your diet is healthy overall but you’ve been eating too many calories, then you might not even need to change the way you eat much at all.  Increasing your daily exercise could be enough to help you lose weight.

If your diet needs an adjustment to become a healthy eating weight loss plan, though, you should look at the parts of your diet that seem unhealthy and adjust them. If you make too big a change from the way you like to eat, you’re setting yourself up to be unhappy with your new diet plan.  Instead, try to incorporate the things you enjoy into your new plan.

Your healthy eating weight loss plan might not be able to include doughnuts 3 or 4 times a week like you’ve been eating.  But the occasional doughnut as a treat might be acceptable if it fits within your allotted calories for that day.  You might be able to have a substitution for a doughnut a couple of times a week, though.  A whole grain bagel with fruit-flavored low-fat cream cheese, for instance, is a sweet treat that you could enjoy instead of a doughnut.  It might give you the same satisfaction while remaining healthier and truer to your healthy eating weight loss plan.

If you eat a lot of sweets like chocolate, you can still enjoy them in moderation.  Dark chocolate can be part of a healthy eating weight loss plan.  Dark chocolate contains more antioxidants that many fruits and vegetables.  So try dipping some of your favorite fruits like bananas, pineapple or strawberries in some high-quality melted dark chocolate for a powerful anti-oxidant punch that should satisfy your sweet tooth and keep you on your diet.

Almost any unhealthy treats you’re use to having can be substituted with a healthier food that gives you at least some of the satisfaction of the unhealthy treat.  Mashed cauliflower instead of buttery mashed potatoes, thin-crust vegetable pizza instead of take-out and other tricks can make your healthy eating weight loss plan more enjoyable.

Go to: How To Lose Weight Calories for many more tips on healthy eating plans.

Monday, October 12, 2009

Benefit From Different Healthy Eating Diets


Looking at all the different healthy eating diets can get confusing.  One diet might say you should never eat bread, while another diet says that whole grain bread is a healthy food.  One diet says to avoid fat wherever possible, and yet another diet says that some fat is really good for you.  They can’t all be right, so how do you know which diet is really the healthiest? How do you know which to choose for your own healthy eating plan?

The truth is that the healthy eating diets that are most popular today might not contain the answers.  Many people eat a very healthy diet without following a popular diet plan.  They use parts of several different diets to make up the one that works best for them. 

A low-carb diet might be very healthy for someone who tends to have high blood sugar and is a little insulin resistant.  But that diet might be so low in carbohydrates that it leaves the person feeling deprived.  Some very low carbohydrate diets can even make you feel ill after a few days of eating only fat and protein.

Many healthy eating diets aren’t necessarily low in carbohydrates, but they focus on only a certain type of carbohydrate.  “Good” carbohydrates like oatmeal and whole grains that have a lower effect on blood sugar might be perfectly all right for a borderline diabetic.  But other parts of those diets that allow for too much fat or require more meat intake than a person wants make the diet unsuitable. 
 
Here’s where you can vary from these healthy eating diets and come up with a good compromise on your own.  A person in that situation might avoid most carbs like flour and refined sugar, but incorporate some whole grains and slow-digesting carbohydrates.  This might help the person achieve a good balance that is best for them. 

A very low-fat diet might be one person’s choice, while another feels that the lack of good fats isn’t healthy.  They might also feel hungry and deprived on a very low-fat diet.  A higher-fat diet plan might not be ideal either, if most of the fats are animal or saturated fats—most very low-carbohydrate plans are higher-fat, for instance.  The best thing to do would be to take the healthiest points from both of those diet plans, and maybe a few others, and make up your own healthy eating diets.

Most of the diets you’ll find in books or those popularized by celebrities are, for the most part, healthy diet plans.  But when part of a diet makes it unpleasant for you to stick to—things like no caffeine or coffee ever, no sweet treat at any time—then it’s very easy to just ignore all the good points of the diet and cheat.  If you’ll choose the parts of different diets that work best for you, however, you can combine them.  By using the best parts of different healthy eating diets, you’ll have a plan you can live with.