So you aren’t happy with what you see in the mirror and you want to make changes. You are in the same position as hundreds of thousands of other individuals, some of whom have never exercised or dieted, and some of whom are very serious or even professional trainees with years of experience behind them.
No matter how much or how little you need to lose to be happy, one of the most difficult aspects of beginning to lose the weight that you want to lose, is picking the diet that you are going to attempt it with. Literally hundreds of different diets spring up if you browse the net for options. They all tend to have complex biological theories behind them. And all of them claim to be better than the others!
So which diets actually work?
There is one thing that all diets that work will have in common. They will all supply a number of calories which is lower than the number of calories the individual burns off on a daily basis.
Fortunately, the way our bodies work is very simple, and once again we can come back to the simple formula:
Calories in is more than calories out = gain weight
Calories in is less than calories out = lose weight
It doesn’t matter whether you follow the Atkins diet, the Zone Diet, the Weight Watchers diet, the South Beach diet, the raw food diet, the no carb diet, the Mediterranean diet, or any other well known diet. All of these diets are simply ways of reducing calorie intake until it is lower than energy output.
Any effective weight loss diet will find some way of getting you to eat less calories than you burn off.
The first mass market diet was the low fat diet that became popular in the 1980s. Did it work? The answer is yes. If you make an effort to remove fatty food from your diet then the calories that you consume will go down. If you were eating desert with your dinner, and you skip it due to the fat content, there goes 300-400 calories per day. Hence you lose weight. Simple.
The second major phase in mass market weight loss has been the low carb diet, which began in the first years of the 21st century. Does it work? Again, the answer is yes. On your breakfast plate you have toast and an egg. On your lunch plate you have rice, prawns, and salad. On your dinner plate you have chicken and potatoes. But you have heard that removing carbs is the secret to fat loss so you ditch the toast, the rice, and the potatoes from now on. There goes a significant portion of the calories from your daily intake Again, you lose weight.
All that any effective weight loss diet does is finds a new way to persuade you to reduce your total calories significantly.
More recently still, we have had the raw food craze. The various raw food diets are very effective because they cut down calories such a lot. Look at the plates of people on raw food diets. There are very few calories there. This is why these diets work.
So is there no benefit at all of one diet over another, as long as they contain the same number of calories?
The reason that some diets seem to work better for some people than others comes down to hunger management. Some people simply experience much less strong food cravings on certain diets than others. This results in much better adherence to the diet, and ultimately to sticking to the diet for much longer.
Match your diet to the demands of your life. If you have a very demanding job, or you are studying hard, you are much better off on a low fat than a low carb diet. You will need the ready supply of energy that comes from including carbs in your diet. Even if you are only working hard “at a desk”, you will still need carbs if the work is demanding. The brain is very demanding of energy. You will find that your performance just will not last on a low carb diet, that your energy becomes too low. It is better in this situation to remove fat, which is only a secondary source of energy, than carbs.
Other people are intolerant of insulin. They will find that including carbs in the diet leads to all kinds of mood swings and cravings. They will consume a lot more calories if they include carbs than if they removed them.
The only way to know which diet will work best for you is to give a fair trial to more than one.
The final key thing
The majority of commercialised or mass market diets do not require you to count calories. They just stipulate eating or not eating certain foods.
But the only thing that is guaranteed to bring you success in dieting is to make sure that you are consuming less calories each day than you burn off. And the only way to do this is to record everything that you eat, or plan your meals for the day in advance and stick to the plan.
Most people are not over weight because they are too lazy to try and lose weight or because they do not care about their weight. They are overweight because they will not do the only thing that guarantees success. The reason people are prepared to exercise and to cut out their favourite foods but not to record calories is probably just that they do not see writing in a notebook as something that is directly related to weight loss. Whereas the gym they automatically associate with weight loss, even though it is much less effective than simply counting calories.
Find a diet that you feel comfortable on, and make sure you are consuming 100-500 calories less per day than you need. Even if it is just 100, that is fine. If you do this, then weight loss success will inevitably be yours.