Choosing a diet that works and that you can stick to can be challenging, especially with so much confusion about the best diet. With so many types of diet in the market claiming to be highly effective in helping you lose weight, such as low carbs or fat diet, which one truly works? Read on to find out more.
How does a diet work?
If all diets, such as low carbs, low fat, and intermittent fasting, work in helping you lose weight, is there a secret formula behind each one?
The truth is, there is nothing special about each diet, but there is an underlying principle behind their success: achieving a calorie deficit. A calorie deficit means eating less than you burn.
- A ketogenic diet works because restricting carbohydrates and, with all else equal in other parts of your diet, creates a calorie deficit.
- A low-fat diet work because by reducing fat, you often reduce a considerable amount of calories in your diet
- Intermittent fasting works because there is a limit on how much you can consume in a short period of the eating window; therefore, you consume fewer calories.
This means that so long as you eat less than you burn, you will be able to lose weight, regardless of what kind of diet you follow.
So with that being said, what is the best diet for you? The following are the key consideration in helping you choose a diet that works for you.
Which diet suits your lifestyle
Everyone has a different lifestyle.
- Some of us eat more during the day, and others eat more later in the evening
- Some of us eat more on our main meals, and others may tend to snack
- Some of us may consume our calories from drinks, and others may tend to eat more food
- Some of us tend to eat more when we socialize, while others may eat more when they are stressed
Knowing that we all have a particular lifestyle habit, we should choose a diet that causes minimal disruption to our lifestyle so that it is easy to start and make it into good practice!
Which diet suits your taste preference
We all have our taste preferences, such as savoury or sweet food. If you like sweet food, your favourite food will likely be higher in carbohydrates, such as cakes, sodas, ice cream, etc. If you prefer more savory, you would like food that is high in fats commonly found in food with a lot of sauce or oil. The above is a generalization as an example to show that we all have different taste preferences. Finding out what we like to eat and keeping them in our diet while we work on others make it easy for us to make incremental changes that are not too restrictive.
Which diet is the most sustainable
When done well, all diet works, so long as it is being done consistently over time long enough. So the key question is, is it sustainable? We can easily lose weight with a lot of determination to exercise and eat less than we burn, but if we cannot sustain the efforts, we may give up easily or bounce back after reaching our goal. Unless your goal is to lose weight only for a few weeks or months, most of us want to be able to lose weight, keep it off, and look great all year round. To achieve that, we need to find a diet that, ironically, doesn’t feel like a diet so that we can sustain it to achieve long-term success.
Conclusion
All diet works, but finding a diet that works for you by understanding your lifestyle and taste preference and one that you can do for a very long time will make the diet work for you rather than forcing you to go into a diet. Remember, the key to success is consistency, and the key to consistency is finding something that you can make into a long term habit.
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