Thursday, January 17th, 2008...6:20 pm
Finding the Diet That is Uniquely You
(This post is a continuation of our How to Lose Weight Effectively Series)
There are hundreds of diets on the market that promote good eating habits and all of these diets describe to a tee someone else’s ideal way of eating. These diets do not necessarily describe your ideal.
The thoughts and beliefs you have about food and eating were created by you based on what you heard, saw and observed growing up. They were influenced by relatives, friends, television, culture, geography and thousands of other components unique to your life. Therefore, if you try to follow someone else’s ideal; you will quickly become frustrated because it requires you to create too many new habits.
Just because a diet is popular doesn’t mean it is right for you, it simply means that the author figured out another way to lose weight, wrote it down and promoted it well.
A common belief I see in clients is that if you don’t follow every detail of a diet plan then you have failed and may as well give up because obviously that plan didn’t work. In reality, the diet didn’t fail and neither did the person, the diet simply wasn’t a good match for the thoughts, beliefs, habits and behaviors of the person trying to follow it.
For simple and effective weight loss you must find a way of eating and exercising that appeals to you and works for you allowing you to always move toward your goal and reduces or eliminates any backward stepping. This is done by establishing boundaries.
Boundaries assure that you don’t go outside a certain range yet allow freedom to move within those boundaries. When we try to adhere to hard and fast rules we give up that freedom and feel very restricted.
For instance, if there is a fence around a schoolhouse playground, the children are kept within the boundary yet they are free to run and play anywhere within that area.
This is the best way to lose weight effectively. Boundaries work to automatically control the amount of food you eat. They can be set up in many different ways; this article will discuss four common ones that you might want to consider: calories, carbohydrate grams, portions and time.
To create boundaries using calories you must first find out how many calories you can eat in a day before you begin gaining weight. This is easily found by going to a site called Free Dieting.com. On the sidebar click on daily calorie needs. By entering the few bits of information you will get an estimation of the number of calories you can consume and still maintain your current weight. This becomes your upper boundary, by eating fewer than this number each day you will lose weight over time. If you would rather count carbohydrates you can go through the above process and then click on “Get Macro Nutrient Ratios” at the bottom of the calculator. This will calculate the number of carbohydrate grams you can consume in a day without gaining weight.
If counting calories or carbohydrate grams seems too meticulous for your lifestyle you can also keep track of portions. The KISS Principle of Dieting which is available to you for free through Weight Loss without Worry uses this method. It recommends eating three meals per day with two snacks. The meals consist of a protein portion, carbohydrate portion and vegetables. You will have to play with this until you find how many portions your body can handle but once this is established it is easy to track. You can download your free copy of this diet by clicking here.
One other boundary you can use is a time boundary. The most common is to declare a certain time of the evening to stop eating, for instance, you commit to not eating anything after 7 pm.
You will need to find the boundary that works for you and feels right but when you find it you will experience a new sense of freedom that is not found when trying to adhere strictly to the rules of someone else’s diet.
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