In life, it’s easy to feel like you need to make a significant change to your body and your lifestyle. If you feel like this is the case, then you might consider the importance of changing quite a few things about yourself. However, it’s easy to conflate a change in your diet to a change in your entire lifestyle.
For example, if you change up your diet to be healthier but you don’t change up your lifestyle to exercise more and be more outgoing, nothing will change. By the same token, if you were to start working out like a demon but still just powering your body with fried food and cheap snacks, then you will not see anything like the body changes that you want.
Here are some ideas to help you determine what might be a dietary change, and what might be a lifestyle change.
Going on a diet – worth your time?
Many experts in the health industry are rapidly moving away from working with the diet ideals that many use. Put simply, going on some kind of restrictive eating pattern for a period of months won’t do quite as much for your body as you might have first assumed. Instead, it’s important to make major lifestyle changes and begin to work away on the kind of food that you take in as well as general lifestyle changes.
If your diet is going to be very low calorie-based, then you might find that your hormones and metabolism are very much out of sync. Therefore, simply going on a calorie cutting diet is not enough: there is a lot more to it than stopping those calories going in your mouth. A healthy lifestyle will still see a balanced range of calories, carbohydrates, proteins and fats: cutting out too much via dieting is a negative lifestyle change, not a positive one.
Why does dieting not works so much?
One of the main reasons why dieting tends to be a bit of a failure is that, put simply, many people put all of their stock in the art of the diet. However, according to various expert bodies such as the American Council of Exercise, you are likely to struggle to keep your weight off from dieting. In fact, as research from hcg injections shows, a mere 1 in 20 (5%) of dieters manage to keep he weight of for a prolong period.
Most dieters will, within a single year, put on a third of their lost weight. Within a three to five year period, it’s expected that 19 out of 20 dieters will have put on the majority of the weight they worked so hard to lose. Keep that in mind, as it’s a very important part of why dieting is something you need to look at very carefully.
Remember that by going on a diet you are making a temporary, forced change to your living circumstances. Most of us treat it like a boot camp: something that you do for X time, give it up and then go back to normal. Suffice to say that such thinking will often produce a poor standard of results. If you are serious about making sure you can lose weight, then you have to look at your whole lifestyle instead of just what you eat.
Upping your protein intake
One of the biggest changes that you might consider making is taking in more protein: it’s seen as the first step to a healthier quality of life.
Of course, protein is one of the biggest changes that we can make. For many people, eating more protein is both a lifestyle and dietary change. For when you commit to taking in more protein, you are often committing to looking after your body better. You will need to do more exercise and body work to care for your system as you take in more protein, but it will become an essential part of your long-term development as an individual.
This is very much a change that will be acceptable for both those who want to make lifestyle and dietary changes. Done right, it should lead to a significant change in the way that you live your life, leading to much more reliable results as time goes on.
Maintain weight, don’t lose it
The biggest change that you need to make, then, is psychological. Take a look at how you presently try to combat dietary problems. You likely try to do it all in one major burst – a huge period of total transformation to your life over a short-term period of time.
This does not work. It simply does not provide a sustainable model of change. If you are someone who wishes to lose weight, then the biggest problem you will face stems from keeping it up. Losing weight is not the hard part: maintaining and keeping it is the major issue that you face. Indeed, you should look to try and make some changes to the way you look at weight loss. You should try to make changes such as:
- Try and eat your breakfast on a more regular basis. Many people skip meals thinking that it will help them to stay in better shape: eating breakfast gets the metabolism going, though, and will make sure you can get the energy needed to avoid a calorific quick snack to beat the hunger pangs.
- Exercise on a regular basis. Try and add in around one hour of exercise on a daily basis. This might be tough at first, but it’s a lifestyle change worth making concessions for. If you do this, you should find it much easier to get the weight off and keep it off at the same time.
- Look after your mental health. Our mental wellness matters as much to our weight as anything else. Care for your mind, and you will be less likely to slip off and fall into negative eating habits or break from the lifestyle changes you are in the process of making.
Weight loss isn’t the challenge: weight maintenance is. If you find it hard to keep the weight off and to ensure it stays off, then you should definitely look to change your lifestyle as much as your diet.
