Browse Our Eating Healthy Breakfast Recipes
I need to clear some misconceptions about healthy diet – I specifically need to talk about what diet isn’t. Many people often wear a surprised look and ask: “you mean I can eat a wedge of pizza?” They somehow sound so disappointed as if they expected the diet to go along the lines of “you can’t eat anything… you can only drink water” kind of thing. Thanks various fly-by-night-out-of-the-hat diet sellers, the word “diet” has come to mean drastic weight loss, health loss, energy loss, loss of happiness and most importantly, loss of sanity.
Diet has become a cuss word that it isn’t.
I for one strongly believe that diet is not starvation. Nor is diet about weight loss. Weight loss or rather fat loss is one of the wonderful advantages of eating right – and diet is all about eating right. If your diet has a one point goal – that of losing weight, than your diet is doomed to fail. Diet is not a boot camp that you enroll into, kill yourself over a period of four days and then come back home and put on twice the amount of weight that you lost.
Also, there is no such thing as a ‘compensation diet’.
Browse Our Sugar Free Salad Dressing Recipes
For example, you binge at a party and then starve yourself the next day in compensation for the previous day’s binge. Nor is there such a thing as a ‘detox’ diet. You first eat anything you like in quantities that would kill an elephant, ruin your plumbing and then do a detox. If good health was just a detox away, instead of going through the pain of improving public health care system, President Obama would have made Detox compulsory, don’t you think?
Finally, let me emphasize that diet isn’t exclusive.
What I mean is that diet and exercise are two parts of the same coin. Just as you can never use a one sided coin in real life commerce, you can’t diet and not exercise. The good health equation has diet on one side and healthy lifestyle on the other. One of the key components of a healthy lifestyle is exercise.
A lot of dieticians are popular because they promise weight loss (not fat loss) without exercise. Of late I’ve seen ads that go even further and promise a no diet, no exercise, and no pill weight loss. I’m sure professor Dumbledore from Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry would be suitably impressed. Use your common sense. If any of this were remotely possible do you think there would be so many obese people in America?
Yes, diet is a miracle – but only if you follow a common sense approach to food and balance it with exercise.
In my next blog I shall expose myths about body composition, low fat alternatives and sugar free alternatives. In the meantime, check out the menu planning worksheets we have in our store – it’s a good start to get on track with your healthy diet 😉
Portion Control Guide and Menu Planning Placemats