Should You Change Your Diet?

Do you want to know one of life’s abysmal truths? You gotta diet to shed fat. It sucks, I know.

As nice as it would be to just take a pill and shed 10+ pounds of fat overnight it just isn’t possible (yet). Many of us want a quick fix and aren’t willing to put in the work that it takes to see sustainable results. Therefore, we decide that staying as we are is easier than making the effort to change our habits, even if we’re not as content with ourselves as we’d like to be. See, it’s easy to stay in your comfort zone where will-power and self-discipline is rarely exerted. However, you have to ask yourself if you really are the best version of yourself that you can be.

Additionally, your diet should be one that reflects your lifestyle and behaviour. If you like going out for a drink on the weekends your diet should allow you to do that (depending where you are in your fitness journey). If you don’t like eating meat you can find other sources of protein. If you find yourself snacking at night you should ask yourself if it’s actually a hindrance. There are numerous ways to find a diet that suits you but let me tell you, none of them involve a magic bullet approach. In that same vein, choose an approach that best fits with your personality and lifestyle and not just because someone else lost 20 pounds with it. This will massively help your adherence and even your progress.

When it comes down to it, fat loss is a result of burning more calories than you are consuming. There’s no special secret or quick fix.

However, here are some popular approaches to dieting:

–Intuitive eating: involves eating as much as you feel gets you satiated and stopping just before you’re full. It means being in tune with your body’s hunger signals and responding to them. However, this may not be as useful if you’re a stress-eater or emotional-eater since emotional cues can drive overeating.

–Calorie counting: which involves managing how much food you eat according to how many calories you expend on a day-to-day or week-to-week basis. However, miscalculate their calories and the amount of food they eat, making them lose confidence in their approach and progress.

–Flexible dieting/IIFYM: involves making dietary choices based on their macronutrient profiles i.e. how many carbohydrates, fats and proteins the food source contains (within the calorie budget). This is useful if you’re looking to improve your body composition since you make choices based on how they fit with your macronutrient requirements. Although it sounds like tedious work, it enables you to have flexibility with the food you eat, how much you eat and when you eat. However, some people may find it time-consuming since you are required to weigh your food and track your calories and macronutrients.

–Ketogenic diet: is one that’s primarily high in fat and protein. It can help achieve rapid weight loss results that come with immediate deprivation of carbs and water loss. However, the results can be unsustainable if calories aren’t managed adequately or the diet does not fit within a person’s lifestyle.

Remember, it’s important that, regardless of which diet you choose it’s one that you can adhere to for weeks at a time because sustainable results don’t happen overnight. You should also adjust your calories as you get closer to your goal weight. Recognize your internal motivations and consider auto-regulating certain behaviours (like eating at the same time every day, having weekly weigh-ins, at the same time during the same day of the week, etc). The goal is to assess your progress over time.

Additionally, having an accountability partner (or someone who wants to help you progress) can be a huge factor with your results. Although easily overlooked, it’s imperative that you assess your life outside of the gym. Are you dealing with work/family stress? Are you getting enough sleep? Are you feeling low in energy or just deprived all the time? Do you get really bad cravings? All of these factors affect the likelihood of you adhering to your diet and need to be accounted for (also check with your doctor if you experience these symptoms regularly).

Flexible Dieting: The Truth

On a slight tangent here, my fondness for flexible dieting comes from the fact that it looks at food from an objective lens. No food is good or bad. No food groups are excluded (always be weary of excluding entire food groups if you don’t have an allergy/intolerance). Each food item is seen in terms of how many carbohydrates, proteins and fats are provided, ultimately making up its calorie content. This enables you to budget your food so you can keep the food you like to eat while making sure you’re also getting calories from nutrient dense sources. The goal here is to keep feelings of deprivation to a minimum. Although weighing out food and tracking every calorie seems time-consuming and monotonous it doesn’t stay so for long. As you progress, it becomes easier and you don’t have to think about it nearly as much (if at all). The beauty is that, it teaches you how to manage your food so that you can manage your nutrition on a long-term basis and adjust it when (and if) you need to.

However, ask yourself this. Are you truly unhappy with your diet? Are you seeing results? If the answer is no, you need to make some changes. Be in tune with how your body responds to certain food over periods of time. Assess how you feel, how much you like the food, what do you prefer instead, etc. Make changes until you find alternatives that work for you. Remember, there are a few variables to consider, but dieting doesn’t have to be completely soul crushing, especially if you’re driven by a fiery internal motivation and a long-term goal in mind.

Marie