I've always been an advocate for learning to eat healthy instead of learning to "diet". Diets teach most people to eat in ways that they can't sustain forever. It can be easy to lose weight, but as soon as you go back to eating normally, the weight comes right back. Learning to eat a healthy, balanced diet means that you make good choices most of the time. You learn what kinds of foods are important parts of your daily nutrition, and which ones should be eaten in moderation. When you first start eating this way, it can take some time and label-reading. But eventually, it becomes an easy way of living. For years I've tried to convince my mom to adopt this style of eating. But she says she's someone who needs structure and something that tells her specifically what she should and should not eat. She's always gone the route of dieting (which is probably why she's always struggled with her weight), but it seems that not all diets are created equal. New research is looking at what makes some diets more successful than others, since weight loss isn't quite as simple as just eating less. A new study, published in the journal Appetite, found that the complexity of diets has an impact on how much weight is lost. The study compared two diet plans: one provided shopping lists and meal plans for participants to follow, while the other assigned point values to foods and required dieters to eat within a certain points range. 390 women answered questionnaires during an 8-week period, and researchers found that the more complex the women found the diet to be, the sooner they were likely to give up on it. The scientists concluded that "Even if you believe you can succeed, thinking that the diet is cognitively complex can undermine your efforts." Although some diets are more attractive than others because they allow more freedom (versus following a specific meal plan), if it's hard or time-consuming to do calculations, people are less likely to stick with it. One of the biggest complaints I see on SparkPeople is that it's too time-consuming to track food. The SparkDiet encourages members to track their foods for a while, but eventually they can start to make healthy choices on their own without needing to track everything. I think that's a great strategy to follow. It would be nice if you didn't have to track foods, but if you never did, it's difficult to learn what's going wrong with your diet and where you need to make changes. Tracking food gives you the knowledge and experience to be able to progress to a point where you no longer need to track (unless you really like to for accountability purposes.) What do you think? Have you gotten to a point where you don't need to follow a "diet" but just eat healthy? |
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