There are a great deal of different options when it comes to dieting, every day there seems to be a new one out that a celebrity is pushing, from the 5:2 diet to the Atkins diet and vegan detox diets – the question is though, are they any more effective than a traditional calorie-controlled diet?
Obviously, everybody is different but dieting and then maintaining weight once you have lost it comes down to being able to sustain it and having it as part of your overall lifestyle. If you’re a meat-lover and you go on a vegan diet for a month you are going to be craving meat by the end of it and no doubt you will fall off the wagon in spectacular fashion at some point before piling that weight you had lost back on again.
The Benefits of Calorie Control
The beauty of a calorie-controlled diet in comparison is that you learn what are the good things to eat, the bad things and what you can eat to either put on weight, maintain weight or lose weight and it often requires only small changes to achieve weight loss. Let’s say for example to maintain your weight it would require you to consume 3,000 calories per day then by simply cutting out a snack or a few glasses of wine you could reduce this by 500 calories, this would result in a 1lb loss per week. Obviously, by cutting 1,000 calories per day you could lose up to 2lb per week. The beauty of calorie control is that you can have days where you have more calories but as long as you are aware of how much roughly that is you can control your diet effectively and it is sustainable with your lifestyle.
How to Have a Structured Diet
Everybody has a vice, some people love snacks like chocolate and crisps, others prefer alcohol and some like takeaways because of the convenience they provide. If you know that a bag of crisps has 1,000-1,200 calories, a bottle of white wine has 500 calories and a beer has 200-250 calories, it is much easier to control your intake. Takeaways are the hardest as the convenience factor isn’t easily replaced so a healthy alternative to this would be to get healthy ready meals delivered instead. Order a calorie-controlled meal and you’ll get it delivered to your door each week and all you need to do is stick it in the microwave – a few minutes and you are eating a much healthier meal.
Summary
The single most important thing when dieting is discipline, it is easy to eat well for a few days then binge at the weekend because you feel like you deserve it but this is actually way worse for you than what you were doing before. You are better eating a reasonable number of calories, something that doesn’t leave you feeling hungry and that way it will be far more sustainable, within a few months you’ll be down to your target weight and you can start to enjoy yourself occasionally again (just try not to make it every day!).