The "Magic Diet"

One of the biggest issues I faced when I was starting out on my journey was how to change my diet; I had heard of Weight Watchers, Nutrisystem, South Beach, the list went on and on.  The common theme in all of these was that you could still eat the foods you loved, but they had the solution for helping you keep everything you were eating well balanced.  For me though, I didn't want to spend the time (or money) that went along with keeping track of how many points a food was worth.  It seemed a lot simpler to just eat less of the bad stuff and more of the good stuff; I know that to anyone who has ever tried dieting this sounds ridiculously oversimplified, but if you think back to when you started dieting, wasn't this essentially what you did?

My biggest pet peeve is when I hear about a diet that is "all juice for a week and then you drop ten pounds" or, my personal favorite, "the Special K Diet".  Now I have nothing against Special K products, I eat the granola and pastry crisps all the time, but here's the question you need to ask yourself about sticking to one diet: what happens when you start eating real food again? Great, you just ate Special K products for breakfast, lunch, and your in-between snacks for two weeks and you dropped a jean size....but what happens when you go back to eating other things for breakfast, lunch, and your in-between snacks? It doesn't even have to be bad food that you go back to, anything different is going to be a shock to your system and the weight that you just dropped is going to come back twice as fast.  The key that I've found to dieting is to be realistic.

It took me an extremely long time to realize that eating a cookie wasn't going to make me gain twenty pounds overnight.  As long as you do things in moderation you'll see results, simple as that.  It's okay to have a piece of birthday cake at the party, just cut out having ice cream along side.  Don't sacrifice the donuts you look forward to every Friday at breakfast, just have ONE instead of three.  Try replacing a milkshake with a fruit smoothie.  Doing these simple things and trying to do some form of exercise at least three times a week will give results, I promise.

Weight loss is a combination of a good diet and exercise.  Even the simplest change counts as exercise; one thing my sister does is use the steps at work instead of the elevator.  Go use the second floor bathroom instead of the first.  While exercise is a key part of weight loss, it's not a miracle worker.  If you go for a three mile run and then get home and eat potato chips all night, everything you just did is ruined; you'll be at a stalemate for years this way.  Find a system of diet and exercise that works for you and is easy to manage and you'll start to feel way better about yourself.