Britons are consuming 600 fewer calories a day but are actually getting fatter because of sedentary jobs and a lack of exercise, a respected think-tank has found.
Despite consuming less fat, sugar and alcohol Britons are getting largerPhoto: PA
On average adults weigh up to 30 pounds, 14kg, more than they did 30 years ago despite a 20 per cent drop in daily calorie intake.
Although they are consuming the equivalent of a burger and chips or three pints of Guinness less they are also less active than those of the same age were in the 1980s, the Institute of Fiscal studies claims.
Expanding waist-lines are also explained by the fact that as you get older it is harder to keep your weight down and you become more susceptible as to the effects of some sugars and fats, the five-year study found.
The full study is to be published later this summer, but details disclosed on Monday show that the average adult has cut calorie intake by around 600 a day.
This is almost entirely attributed to better habits in the home, as the amount of calories consumed outside has risen by 15 per cent over the same period.
At home we are opting for cereal over fried breakfast, using semi skimmed milk, eating more fish and less red meat and drinking less alcohol.
But people are also more likely to have a desk job during the day and more likely to spend time in front of a screen when home in the evening.
The average adult is putting on weight at an average of just over half a pound – 0.25kg - a year.
A man in his twenties weighs around 15 lbs, 7kg, more than a man in his twenties three decades earlier, while someone in their 50s weighs 30 lbs more.
Report author Professor Rachel Griffiths told industry journal The Grocer: "The drop in calories consumed would have been expected to have caused a weight loss of 1kg per year over the period."
The IFS will look at why certain age groups are more susceptible to weight gain.
Chia seeds are among the healthiest foods on the planet.
They are loaded with nutrients that can have important benefits for your body and brain.
Here are 11 health benefits of chia seeds that are supported by human studies.
1. Chia Seeds Deliver a Massive Amount of Nutrients With Very Few Calories
Chia seeds are tiny black seeds from the plant Salvia Hispanica, which is related to the mint.
This plant grows natively in South America.
Chia seeds were an important food for the Aztecs and Mayans back in the day.
They prized them for their ability to provide sustainable energy… in fact, “chia” is the ancient Mayan word for “strength.”
Despite their ancient history as a dietary staple, only recently did chia seeds become recognized as a modern day superfood.
In the past few years, they have exploded in popularity and are now consumed by health conscious people all over the world.
This is what chia seeds look like:
Don’t be fooled by the size… these tiny seeds pack a powerful nutritional punch.
A 1 ounce (28 grams) serving of chia seeds contains (1, 2):
Fiber: 11 grams.
Protein: 4 grams.
Fat: 9 grams (5 of which are Omega-3s).
Calcium: 18% of the RDA.
Manganese: 30% of the RDA.
Magnesium: 30% of the RDA.
Phosphorus: 27% of the RDA.
They also contain a decent amount of Zinc, Vitamin B3 (Niacin), Potassium, Vitamin B1 (Thiamine) and Vitamin B2.
This is particularly impressive when you consider that this is just a single ounce, which supplies only 137 calories and one gram of digestible carbohydrate!
Just so that we’re all on the same page, 1 ounce equals 28 grams, or about 2 tablespoons.
Interestingly… if you subtract the fiber, which may not end up as usable calories for the body, chia seeds only contain 101 calories per ounce.
This makes them one of the world’s best sources of several important nutrients, calorie for calorie.
To top things off, chia seeds are a “whole grain” food, are usually grown organically, are non-GMO and naturally free of gluten.
Bottom Line: Despite their tiny size, chia seeds are among the most nutritious foods on the planet. They are loaded with fiber, protein, Omega-3 fatty acids and various micronutrients.
Whether we’re trying to find a way to fit into that bikini, or just look good when we’re working out at the gym, there are always a few pounds we wouldn’t mind shedding from time to time. Sometimes we want to get rid of the extra weight extra quickly because we have an event, such as a beach vacation or a wedding that we want to look our best for. Whatever the reason, there are a number of ways you can shed as much as 10 pounds in a very short time. Follow these tips and you will be lighter and healthier in just a week’s time.
Avoid Fast Food At All Costs
Stay away from Burger King, McDonalds and all the rest. These foods are loaded with transfat but they also have a ton of salt, which can pack on pounds quickly.
Drink Lots Of Water
Drinking lots of water helps the body in a number of ways. The water powers your metabolism has no calories and drinking lots of water will make you feel full. You’ll also feel better overall if you’re well hydrated.
Get Your Weight Training In Too
Cardio burns more calories in the short term than weight training does, but lifting weights will get your body in better shape overall and that will help you burn more calories when you’re doing your cardio.
Take In Fewer Calories Than You Burn
This might seem like a no-brainer, but the fact of the matter is you should eat less calories than you burn over the course of the day. You should do this every day if you’re looking to lose weight quickly. You’ll also want to take in quite a few less calories than you burn if you’re looking to lose 10 pounds in a week.
Combine Workouts
By combining workouts, you are doing workouts that work a number of different parts of the body at once. These form small muscle tears at different parts. The body burns quite a bit of calories trying to repair those small tears.
Avoid Liquid Calories At All Costs
Liquid calories, in the form of sugary sodas and juices are a no-no. These are the very definition of empty calories because they won’t fill you up the way food will. If you’re thirsty, drink water.
Burn Over 5,000 Calories More Than You Take In
In order to hit your goal of losing 10 pounds in just seven days, you’ll need to burn a tonne of calories per day. You don’t want to starve yourself but you will need to burn approximately 5,000 more calories that you take in.
Eat Breakfast Every Day
Lots of people decide they shouldn’t eat and that will help them burn more calories than they eat. The fact of the matter is you need to start off the day with some food, in order to get your metabolism running.
Cut Down Or Cut Out Simple Carbs
If you want to lose weight quickly, you should cut down or cut out treats like cookies and cakes. You should also avoid simple carbohydrates you can get from honey and molasses.
Go With Complex Carbs Instead
Instead of cakes and cookies in order to get your carb intake (you shouldn’t go completely without) you should switch over to rice or other healthy grains. Fruits and veggies work too.
Eat Lots Of Lean Protein
Lean proteins are great because they’re obviously low on fat but because they will fill you up and keep you from overeating. Go with skinless chicken breasts, eggs and lean beef.
Get Your Cardio
Cardio burns calories, whether you’re doing jump rope, running on the treadmill or biking. The harder you go and the longer you go the better the burn.
Get Plenty Of Sleep
Lots of good sleep will lead to weight loss for a number of reasons. If you’re getting healthy amounts of sleep, your body will work more efficiently. There are also studies that indicate that those who sleep less, eat more. Sometimes it’s because they’re awake and bored. Some studies say sleep deprivation can lead to being hungrier over the course of the day.
Eat Smaller Portions Than Usual
One way to make sure you are taking in less calories is rather simple. Don’t load your plate up with food — eat smaller portions at every meal.
Go For A Walk
Walking, either speed walking or just going for a stroll will help your metabolism keep going. Sometimes you aren’t in the physical shape to run or bike, but you should walk whenever you can.
Eat Low Glycemic Index Foods
Lower Glycemic Index foods are going to have less sugar levels and will allow your body to shed the pounds quicker than higher Glycemic Index foods, across the board.
Cross Training
Using a cross training machine and doing cross training exercises gets you the calorie burn of a cardio workout while also working other muscles, driving up the metabolism.
Eat Light Whenever Possible
No eating light isn’t the same as eating less. This means you should go with a light version of some of your favorite foods such as ranch dressing.
Go Dancing
Dancing gets you plenty of cardio, and works a tonne of other muscles. This doesn’t mean you should be doing a bunch of slow dancing. Rather get yourself into the most rambunctious and active dancing you can find.
Don’t Snack Late At Night
The more you snack closer to bed time, the more weight you’re going to put on. Late night snacks aren’t metabolized as quickly because you’re sleeping right after you eat. Most people say you should stop eating at 7:00 PM on average.
Here’s a fact I’m uncomfortable admitting: I could tell you, in order, every single food item that I have ingested in the last 72 hours. I could also, with a fair amount of accuracy, tell you how many calories each of those meals contained, and how I felt while eating them. (The Cheesy Wotsits I had on the way to a party the day before yesterday? Guilt. One hundred calories but, hey, I needed something to line my stomach. The lentil and Quorn sausage stew last night? Fine, but I made sure I didn’t have too many bits of sausage. The Marmite on toast I had at midnight because my stomach wouldn’t stop rumbling? Awful.)
There are things I couldn’t tell you. I couldn’t tell you how many times I looked in the mirror, for instance, or indeed in any reflective surface (the dry cleaner’s window, the door of the bus as it passed me at the traffic lights), in the hope that the body looking back at me would be somehow different from the reality. I couldn’t tell you how many times I pinched the fat on my thighs and thought “crap”. I couldn’t tell you how many times I thought about my weight, or my waist measurement, or just about my body generally, which seems to have ceased to be a vessel that carts me around through life and has become, to borrow a phrase, a battleground. It is too many.
The above, I recognise, sounds strange and obsessive. It is. But I do not believe it is unusual. So many women I know in their 20s – I am 27 –describe similar anxieties, the obsessive dieting, the skipping of meals. But even so, when I blogged about it earlier this year, after I read a celebrity magazine that promised to reveal “What the stars really weigh” (spoiler: much less than I do), I was surprised by the response. I wrote about it in a rage, having been sent into a tailspin of insecurity that led to me, once again, Googling “Lose 10 pounds in seven days”. I set out upon yet another ridiculous diet, this one involving a strange combination of cottage cheese, Ritz crackers, beetroot and frankfurters. The regime is, according to nonsense internet mythology that my rational brain did not believe for a second, one they give to patients who need to lose weight rapidly before surgery.
You may wonder why I allowed a celebrity rag to affect my self-esteem so negatively. But I do not believe it is a question of intelligence. As Millie Benson, a 23-year-old lawyer who “stares at other girls’ thighs constantly”, tells me: “No matter how much feminist literature I read and no matter how much I tell all the other women I know how beautiful they are and how much they shouldn’t worry, the next minute I will stop myself having a slice of cake in case my bum gets any bigger.”
The messages are everywhere, and being told that you’re too clever to fall for this kind of media manipulation does nothing to solve the issue at hand: that many women, of all different walks of life, are going about their lives hungry or hating themselves, or both.
Naturally, after a few days on the diet, I nearly passed out at the doctor’s surgery during a routine checkup. I was embarrassed, and furious, that I couldn’t seem to escape the cycle of self-loathing that I have railed against so often as a writer and editor. I feel embarrassed about writing this now, as a feminist who has co-authored a book about the pressures the media, and women’s magazines specifically, place on young women today. I feel guilty that I hate my body to the extent that, in my mind, it detracts from anything else I might achieve, meaning that I have turned down television appearances for fear of looking fat, and that it has preoccupied me far more than my own career in terms of energy. I am aware of how it limits me, but I hate my body nonetheless.
“You have an eating disorder,” some readers of my blog informed me, and I felt affronted. An unhealthy relationship with food, maybe; perhaps even disordered eating. But an eating disorder? I don’t think so. I am a healthy weight, as are many of the women who contacted me to describe their own struggles, their food obsessions, flaws and feelings of being just “too much”. This is despite these women having made significant real-world achievements: a PhD in astrophysics, two beautiful children, a successful career, a loving partner. This is despite, for many of them, being slim. Slimmer than me.
There are undoubtedly those who will say that, in the midst of an obesity crisis, “skinny bitches” feeling fat is the least of society’s problems. I can sympathise with that viewpoint. It is how I feel when I speak to those who are thinner than me. “What’s your problem?” I think. “I would love to be that thin.”
I know I have been socialised to compete with other women – to size them up, to envy those who are slimmer – but I believe their suffering is as valid as mine, and that body image problems can manifest themselves even when, from the outside, you’re seen to embody the media-approved feminine ideal.
Take Liz, a 27-year-old researcher who at one point became “obsessed with the scales” and still fixates on “bad foods” to the point where occasionally she makes herself sick. “I often catch a glimpse of myself in a window or a mirror and my heart sinks. I try to avoid walking past rows of shops for this reason,” she says. “I find myself making excuses if I know there are going to be cakes at work, because I don’t trust myself. I feel worse when people have made them themselves. The rational part of my brain knows I’m being stupid, too: I’m a size eight, for Christ’s sake.”
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‘The young women I speak to do not desire the label of an eating disorder. They hide their food issues like a dirty secret. They’ll even preach to others about the dangers of restriction.’ Photograph: Desmond Muckian/Guardian
From the girls in the office chatting 5:2 to the teenagers on the bus mimicking Towie’s “no carbs before Marbs” – it’s everywhere. So often eating disorders – most frequently anorexia nervosa – are claimed to be a middle-class, white woman’s problem, a disease born of privilege and perfection. But a study conducted by King’s College London this year, which surveyed 1,698 multi-ethnic individuals (a general population sample) in south-east London, found that the majority of participants who believed themselves to have disordered eating patterns were of an ethnic minority. Low-level food issues (as one woman I spoke to described them) are not simply the preserve of the white middle classes. The culture of slimming and dieting, of bingeing and purging, of “fat chat” with your friends (“I’m so chubby”, “No, babes, I’m the one who’s chubby”), does not discriminate.
But many of the women I spoke to who admit to a preoccupation with food verging on the obsessive balked at the notion that they might have an eating disorder. “There’s a real fear of trivialising eating disorders,” says Sabine, who is 24 and works for a startup. She charts her eating patterns as having developed when a teenage boyfriend told her she had gained too much weight. She regularly skips meals and once, along with her flatmate at university, devised a diet that consisted solely of prawns, cocktail sauce and apples. “Every time you do eat, you think, ‘Oh, if I eat this now, then I don’t have to have dinner.’ It’s a constant balancing, constant worrying about calories and trying to tally them up in your head all the time,” she says.
“It’s a female issue that doesn’t get enough coverage and it ruins people’s lives, it makes everything so much harder,” she adds. “You can’t get away from food… it’s everywhere, and if you love food, which I do, it really impinges on your life because you’re constantly worrying about it.”
She also engages in regular fat chat with her friends. “I have one friend, and about 50% of what we talk about is what we’ve eaten. ‘Oh, I’ve had a baguette for lunch – is that really bad?’ ‘No, it’s not that bad, just have a salad for dinner.’”
How would you begin to describe these kinds of obsessive thought patterns and behaviours? Where does the division between anorexia and what some call “almost anorexia” lie? An infographic created by private American healthcare group CRC that was circulating online described “almost anorexia” as affecting one in 20 women, and as involving frequent restriction, mild binge eating, infrequent purging and negative body image. Some women were uncomfortable with the label, thinking it pathologises a problem that is hugely widespread (and, let’s be honest, it may be in the interests of some groups to do exactly that); others felt it was a new, nuanced approach to a common problem and that the threshold for an anorexia nervosa diagnosis is too high. “This could describe 85% of my friends,” one girl told me.
Others pointed out that there was already a diagnostic term for these kinds of food issues: EDNOS (eating disorder not otherwise specified), for those who do not meet the diagnostic criteria of other eating disorders. In 2013, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), which is published by the American Psychiatric Association and aims to offer standard criteria for the classification of mental disorders, removed EDNOS, because it was so widely applicable, in favour of OSFED (other specified feeding or eating disorder). This is a clinical diagnosis, and far from being a description of a less serious eating disorder than anorexia or bulimia, it is a recognition of the fact that disordered eating can incorporate symptoms of both disorders, and others.
So, while OSFED incorporates, for instance, a diagnosis of atypical anorexia nervosa as applying to an individual who meets all the criteria for anorexia, with the exception that that person’s weight remains within the normal range, it is still a diagnosis of a serious condition. Earlier this year, Cosmopolitan magazine and the eating disorder charity Beat co-authored a report entitled The Secret Illness, which highlighted how EDNOS sufferers are being denied treatment because their symptoms aren’t serious enough. The campaign urged GPs to be less fixated on diagnostic criteria, because EDNOS sufferers can, on the outside, appear to be a healthy weight. On the inside, however, their lives can be a daily struggle.
The latest edition of the DSM has also changed several of the criteria for anorexia nervosa, including the stipulation that the patient must have stopped menstruating in order to be considered anorexic. Then there are the non-clinical labels, which seem to be cropping up more and more often. In June of this year, food blogger Jordan Younger came under fire from vegans when she wrote of how she was abandoning veganism due to an eating disorder called orthorexia nervosa, a severe obsession with eating healthily. She had become addicted to juice cleanses. “I was living in a bubble of restriction,” she wrote.
Rachel is a recovered anorexic whose eating disorder manifested itself in an obsession with healthy eating. “[I was] over-thinking food choices,” she says, “and trying to get more protein, more energy density, the correct macro-nutrient ratios… after which I got so exhausted I just chose nothing because it was easier than feeling guilty about the ‘wrong’ choice.” She continues: “The current obsession with health, image and fitness is way out of kilter [with] self-care.” It raises the question: in our seemingly flaxseed and clean eating-obsessed Instagram culture, just how many women are hiding an eating disorder behind a healthy lifestyle obsession?
Reading Kelsey Osgood’s memoir How To Disappear Completely: On Modern Anorexia, I came across yet another label, wannarexia, often used by eating disorder sufferers to disparagingly describe someone who actively and flippantly seeks out an eating disorder. An exhibitionist, or fake anorexic, in other words. (It is worth pointing out that many anorexics fail to believe in the authenticity of their own illness, lamenting that there will always be a “better” anorexic out there.) Wannarexics may have been diagnosed with OSFED, or they may not. Perhaps we’re living in a society in which there exists a spectrum of disordered eating, ranging from my low-level food issues to full-blown eating disorders, with orthorexia and wannarexia and God knows how many other potential labels in between. As Osgood points out, regardless of motivation, wannarexics are still trying to starve themselves. She describes wannarexia as “a gateway drug for teenagers”, but points out that its symptoms are not to be taken lightly. Self-starvation is self-starvation.
The young women I speak to – friends, acquaintances, teenage girls, strangers – do not desire the label of an eating disorder. They are the opposite of the so-called wannarexic. They hide their food issues like a dirty secret, are ashamed of them, or simply regard them as a part of the workaday diet chat so common in offices up and down the country. They’ll even preach to others about the dangers of restriction.
Cat, a student who describes herself as an “uber-feminist”, tells me: “I’ll often be found loudly denouncing skipping breakfast or eating nothing, shouting at my friends about how ‘your brain just doesn’t work if you diet! It doesn’t work! Have a goddamn biscuit!’ And yet none of my friends knows that I’ve been bulimic for six years and borderline anorexic for six years, too. Nobody would be able to tell, because while I’m certainly not fat, I’m quite curvy with a big bottom and I really don’t look as if I have an eating disorder. I’ve managed to keep it secret from even my closest friends for years and years because I function extremely well. But I obsess about my weight constantly, and I really hate myself for it, especially for being such a hypocrite. I preach self-love all the time to my friends and can’t seem to find any for myself.”
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‘There are those who say that, in the midst of an obesity crisis, ‘skinny bitches’ feeling fat is the least of society’s problems. I can sympathise. It is how I feel when I speak to those who are thinner than me.’ Photograph: Desmond Muckian for the Guardian/Desmond Muckian
Another young woman, Alexandra, tells me that she began having what she describes as negative thought patterns when a teenage boyfriend told her that she had cellulite. “I wouldn’t actually say I had a problem with food or diet at all, although I don’t think I have ever sat down to a ‘sinful’ dessert without a little voice saying, ‘You’re being naughty!’ which says something in itself,” she says. “I don’t drastically cut calories or go on crash diets, or anything like that. What I do is fitness related. I don’t believe I’m obsessive, but I do exercise every single day, and I scrutinise myself for minuscule changes brought about by my latest challenge (this month it’s the ab challenge).”
What interests me about Alexandra’s case is how she hides her hang-ups from her friends. “Because I am so thin and muscular, I actually don’t talk about these issues much with my friends. [I] am acutely aware that I look how some of them desperately want to look.”
She believes that the rise in fitness culture is linked to this tendency towards extreme dieting and calorie cutting. “The disordered eating and obsessive dieting goes hand in hand with the meteoric rise in fitness programmes. Some women do faddy diets, some women do ridiculous fitness regimes, some do both, and all are risky.” Fitspiration – slogans and images of fit, attractive women that are common online and that aim to inspire you to achieve the perfect body through fitness – “is not that far from the pro-ana thinspiration that is so dangerous and damaging,” she says, referring to websites that post “inspiring” pictures of thin people.
Am I part of a generation of young women hung up on their body image but unsure where to turn? “One thing I have noticed is that it’s not cool, sexy or attractive for a girl to worry about her weight or watch what she eats,” Millie says. In this society saturated with diet tips and fitness blogs, with “bony boasters” showcasing their ribs on Instagram and bikini selfies on newsfeeds, our food neurosis seems explicit, on the table for all to see.
Such neurosis is familiar to me in a way that it isn’t to my mother, though I know an unhealthy obsession with food can be passed down. (Sabine, for instance, mentions a friend’s mother who used to survive on a can of tuna a day.) But Millie says her mother doesn’t recognise the sheer level of self-loathing her daughter suffers.
“As a feminist in the 1970s and 1980s, she fought and campaigned for equal pay and women in the workplace, and for sexual freedom for women, and they saw some big advances and big wins. She then got married and had children, feeling like the world was heading in the right direction and that, to some extent, the world had been righted. But she then said that suddenly, she had two teenage daughters who were worrying about their armpit hair and their teeth not being white enough and their figures not being nice enough, and wondered what the hell had happened.”
I asked Susie Orbach, clinical psychologist and author of Fat Is A Feminist Issue, what had changed. I’m nervous because I haven’t ever really articulated the depths of my food obsession verbally before. “I’m curious as to where one would draw the line between unhealthy eating patterns and an eating disorder,” I tell her, and when I listen back to the tape of me recounting my food anxieties, I sound small and pathetic, like a child.
“Of course it’s an eating disorder,” she says of my eating patterns. “To me it’s more that we have a culture that’s so disordered towards eating and bodies that how could it be otherwise? How could it be when you’ve got plastic surgery games for nine-year-olds? [The apps in question caused uproar in January and were swiftly removed by iTunes.] When you’ve got mums obsessing about their bodies, in front of their kids?”
“But what if…” I say, weakly, “these girls don’t tick all the boxes?”
“I think if you read the DSM they’d tick a hell of a lot of them. But that doesn’t really matter, does it? It doesn’t matter whether it’s diagnosable or not, what matters is that we’ve gone mad in our relationship with our food, and it’s a new form of violence against girls and women.”
We have gone mad, I agree. At times, I feel that I have gone mad. And “absolutely it’s getting worse”, Orbach says. “Everything’s a trigger. There are huge, huge industries riding on this. It’s one of the most successful assaults there is, and because we all want to feel comfortable, we don’t even know that we’re doing bad things to ourselves. We think we’re being good to ourselves when we decide not to eat.”
But what can we do about it?
“I guess the question I’d ask you is: how long are you going to put up with it?”
This question stuns me. I wasn’t aware that not putting up with it was even an option. “Become a refusenik!” she says, and I want to: I really want to. Orbach’s work is an attempt to create a social movement to challenge the body fascism that surrounds us. “The fashion industry is hugely powerful, the beauty industry. They make a lot of money out of making every little surface of our bodies feel uncomfortable,” she says.
Orbach wants to work at every level – from the government report she published in June on how to help new mothers with not passing on their body difficulties to their kids, to advising schools on how to teach young girls body confidence. But what about those of us who are already grown?
One of the things I find most dispiriting, I tell her, is how resigned all the young women I speak to feel about this, how resigned I feel. “It’s so heartbreaking,” she says. “We don’t want women to have a full-time job managing their appetites.”
And that’s the crux of it, really. My full-time, unpaid, job is managing my appetite, and in between that I write for the Guardian. I so want to become a refusenik, as Orbach suggests, and by going into schools and talking about these issues with teenagers, I am attempting to fight back. But I know that when this article is published, I won’t focus on the career high of having a feature published in a national magazine. I’ll focus on the photographs, and how much I hate them. And I’ll think of all the other girls out there hating theirs – on Facebook, on Instagram, everywhere – and ask myself: how long are we going to put up with it?
•Costumes by Kirsty McKenzie. Hair and makeup: Laurence Close at Carol Hayes Management and Sophie Higginson at Frank. All footwear: Carlo Pazolini
I’ll let you in a little secret the diet companies absolutely do not want you to know: the bottom line is, it doesn’t matter what diet plan you follow! Take just about any diet plan, figure out the calories in one of their typical meal plans and chances are you’ll see a daily calorie count of around 1400 - 1800 calories for women and around 1800 - 2100 calories for men. That creates a nice moderate calorie deficit to lose weight for just about anybody.Now, does this mean that I think diets don’t work? Nope! I’m going to go against the latest trend and say that diets DO work, IF you find one that works FOR you. As long as you don’t let yourself get crazy about a diet, to the point where you’re stressing about what to eat, a diet plan can be a great teaching tool.
With a good diet plan, you can learn about:
macronutrients (carbs, fat, protein)
empty calories and how “bad” carbs (like sugar) affect your body
how to make healthy food choices
how to plan for and cook healthy meals
how to control your portion size
The key is to choose a diet plan that’s pretty close to how you think you could eat for the rest of your life—and then take the elements that work for you (and you can live with) and incorporate them into your life. It’s all about making changes you can live with for the rest of your life.
Let’s face it, if you love pasta and bread, the Atkins diet just isn’t going to cut it for you, right? But maybe something like the Mediterranean diet would work better, if you like fish.
Different Types of Diet Plans
Most diets and weight loss programs fall into the following categories:
Fixed-Menu Diet
A fixed-menu diet gives you a list of all the foods you can eat. The advantage of this kind of diet is that the foods are already selected and it’s easy to follow. The disadvantage of this type of diet is that there is, by definition, a limited food selection and boredom can set in. But you can get creative or, if you’re using a popular plan, there will be lots of recipes to find online.
An exchange diet works for many because it is a meal plan with a set number of servings from each of several food groups. The structure enables you to plan ahead and offers convenience and it offers enough variety such that boredom generally isn’t an issue. Within each group, foods are about equal in calories and can be interchanged as you wish. Additionally, with this type of diet you learn lifestyle skills that enable you to keep your weight off permanently.
Prepackaged or Meal Delivery Diet Plan
These diets require you to buy prepackaged meals, which is a great convenience and a structure that most people can handle successfully. However, purchasing three meals a day plus snacks can be very challenging. You do learn how to portion your food but again you don’t want to eat the prepackaged food for ever, so you’ll have to learn how to maintain your weight once you’ve reached your goal.
Calorie restricted diet
Calorie restricted diets work by lowering the amount of calories you eat (which is, as I said, how most diet plans work). You eat healthy, nutritious foods – just not as much, through portion control. This type of diet can teach you lifelong habits to lose weight, and keep it off permanently. Keep in mind, your body needs a minimum amount of calories – typically, 1200 for women, 1800 for men. Depending on your activity level, body composition, height/weight, you will most likely eat more than that amount a day. A calorie restricted diet plan will take that into consideration when telling you how many calories a day you should be eating. Stay away from any plan that has you going below those numbers. Starving yourself will only hurt your body!
There are so many ways to lose weight—as many ways as there are dieters! Whether you go it on your own, by eating less and moving more, or by following a diet plan, be sure to make changes in your diet you can live with—and have fun learning about nutrition along the way. Make your diet work for you!
If you think that a calorie is a calorie—and it doesn’t matter if it comes from kale or cookies, then it’s time to rethink what you think you know about calories. Contrary to what your Momma, track coach, or even doctor led you to believe, all calories are NOT created equal, and thinking you’ll lose weight simply by counting them or cutting them will likely leave you hungry, irritable, malnourished and not much lighter than you were when you started. So instead of slashing and burning the caloric field, let’s level it with the following food for thought:
1. All calories are not created equal.
Thinking that all calories are the same is an antiquated notion. Granted, by definition calories represent units of energy provided by a particular food, but thinking they’re all alike is like saying a diamond and a rhinestone are the same because they both glitter. With calories, as with diamonds, it’s the quality that matters most and enhances their value.
2. Crap is crap, no matter how many calories are involved.
Calories from nutrient-rich foods versus nutritionally-bankrupt ones from processed or refined carbs will have different effects on the body. Healthy, nutrient-rich foods will keep hunger at bay, help maintain stable blood sugar levels, minimize cravings, and enable your brain to signal your belly that it’s full. Nutrient-poor foods will have the opposite effect, wreaking hormonal havoc, spiking insulin, setting off cravings, dulling satiety signals and encouraging overeating. In other words: nutrient dense foods help keep weight in check naturally, no calculator required.
3. Think of counting calories as nutritional navel-gazing
Tracking every scrap that goes in your mouth may give you a feeling of control over your food but it doesn’t mean you’re getting enough of the nutrients your body needs. Take for example those who eat processed, portion-controlled, “diet” microwaveable meals. (You know who you are!)
Aside from being loaded with chemicals, GMOs, allergenic and inflammatory ingredients, these crappy excuses for food don’t deliver enough protein, fiber, good fats or even volume to make you feel full, much less healthy and vibrant. The result is that you’re hungry, mentally foggy, and malnourished, possibly setting the stage for a host of health problems down the line—but you do know how many calories you ate getting there. For what that’s worth.
4. But Jared lost all that weight eating Subway!
No disrespect, but if you’ve seen the before and after photos, you have to ask: Just what was Jared living on before he went on his infamous crash sandwich diet? Call it what you will, but all he did was classic caloric restriction, and yes, while it does work for a time, it’s not recommended. It’s hard to sustain in the long-term, and it won’t make you feel energetic or vibrant in the short-term, because you’re not supporting your body with enough essential nutrients. Worse, these crash diets actually slow metabolism, an adjustment your body makes to conserve energy and prevent starvation.
So what’s the work-around? Trade hunger, calorie-counting and denial, for filling, nutrient-dense, organic or local produce, poultry, pasture-raised meats and wild fish. Eat them until you are full, not until you’ve hit some abstract, virtually meaningless magic number. By eating these kinds of foods, your body will tell you when you’ve had enough. Eating refined carbs like wheat, grains and sugar—the crystal meth of the supermarket aisle—never will.
5. Put away the abacus and fill up on the right stuff.
To curb appetite, feed your body with foods that fill your belly, send the message of satiety to the brain and supply the body with health-enhancing nutrients. There is abundant evidence to show that low-carb diets generally satisfy far more effectively than high-carb ones. At the top of the satiety superstar list are the “good” fats like coconut oil, avocados, nuts, wild fish and grass fed, organic meats, which help balance hormonal and metabolic responses, in addition to being delicious additions to any plate.
Next up: non starchy vegetables, which are nutrient dense, while adding belly-filling bulk. And last but not least, is protein, which is extremely helpful in creating feelings of satiety and takes more energy for the body to metabolize. Bottom line, all three will help reduce appetite with little effort, blood sugar spikes and no counting. All you need to do is enjoy them. To whip your fridge into shape quickly, easily and healthfully, checkout the essentials of a fantastic diet here.
