Words: Team THINKWELLNESS360
You’ve often been lured to go on a diet ‘plan’ with grapefruit, or cabbage soup — to lose weight quickly. The motto is: eat grapefruit for breakfast, lunch, snacks, and dinner. Grape fruit has a measly 80 calories per cup — small wonder, you’ll lose weight in a jiffy.
Remember, the pitfalls too. It isn’t a well turned-out idea to eat just one type of food, even if it is grapefruit — a popular weight loss recipe. Agreed that grapefruit is an excellent source of vitamin C, but it is awfully deficient in calcium, iron, zinc, vitamin B, vitamin E, and many other vital nutrients.
Eating just grapefruit will, therefore, have negative effects on your body — it will lead to nutritional deficiencies.
This holds good, or bad, for several other so-called miracle foods and diets available on the market. On the other hand, the purpose of eating a variety of food enables us to stay healthy, not just delight our palate, or taste buds. It is also, at the same time, something that can be easily abused. When this happens, you are subject to the inevitable — obesity.
- Food is like ammunition for the body. It provides for a host of nutrients and vitamins and minerals, including nutraceuticals, antioxidants, and so on. It supplies energy too
- Never miss the victual for something else, and vice versa.
Take this, for example. When you follow dietary regimens that exclude certain foods, you feel out of sync with yourself, and your weight loss plan. Why? A lack of variety leads to craving for other foods, which only add more weight to your calories and do not provide you with all the nutrients your body needs on a regular basis.
Besides, it is only a healthy diet that can promote balance in tune with our bodily requirements for good health. More importantly, a complete food plan provides us the range of taste you’d naturally like to derive from healthy foods. Also, when you eat food in the right proportion, it will help you reduce your total caloric intake and thereby encourages weight loss.
Focus On Logic. Not Emotion
Most advertisements and endorsements claim that someone, most often a celebrity, has lost weight quickly — so can you. It isn’t so simplistic. Fad diets are a dime a dozen, and they cannot work for everyone. What’s more, they can change, for example, your blood sugar levels, or elevate your cholesterol.
This is true of high-protein diets too. High protein diet is not a suitable diet plan for high blood pressure, or hypertensive, individuals.
Also, remember — we are human beings. Not mechanised gadgets. One type, therefore, does not fit us all.
The best thing to do is to speak to your physician and nutritionist/dietician who understand your health and medical status — and, recommend a diet and exercise programme that is appropriate for you. They can also estimate what can work for you, or may not work for you. In so doing, they can help you avoid false diet traps that could only bring you distress and danger — instead of healthy, or sensible, weight loss.
Self-Help
- First, there is no need to be harsh on yourself. You need to be harsh on the casual food habits you have gotten yourself into
- Get hold of your unhealthy eating habits. Initiate self-control
- Say ‘no’ to too frequent potato chips, burgers, or pizzas — your ‘addiction’ for years
- Keep a track of your daily eating habits, and slowly establish new healthy eating practices and habits
- When you get the urge to chomp your chips, cookies, or sweets, go out for a walk, or watch a fun movie, instead.
