Not Diet, Lifestyle - Kolan British Hospital

Not Diet, Lifestyle

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As the summer is approaching, it might be that some of you have already reached your goal of healthy weight and healthy eating habits, some of you are still trying and or some gave up thinking it would never happen. This article is for all those who gave up for a reason or another. For those whom have lost their motivation and went back to their old eating habits thinking they would never be successful. This article It will be less about what you should eat and more about how you should think. We now know that the amount and type of foods going down your throat are greatly linked to your psychological state and your emotions. At times, this even overrides the sensations of hunger or fullness.

In almost any magazine or newspaper you pick up, any website or instagram account you log onto (including mine), there are suggestions and thoughts about diets and dieting. These have been, and will continue to be out there for a good while.  There is no point in re-inventing the wheel, so I thought I’ll look at it from a different perspective. I hope it proves to be useful for you all.

Monday Diets

One of the things I frequently encounter with my clients is that,  a mindset of having to go on a diet on Monday makes people eat more than they would usually eat on days before they start the diet. Since those foods eaten around this time tend to be those that would be ‘forbidden’ during the period of dieting they tend to be high in fat, sugar and consequently higher in calories.  The thought of ‘deprivation’ will lead to eating more than you usually would and possibly lead to more weight gain before the start of the diet.

If you find that you haven’t lost any weight after following a healthy and balanced diet prescribed by your dietitian, there is a good chance that your body was busy trying to burn off that half a chocolate cake, litre of ice-cream and that huge fish and chips you had the week prior the start of  your diet. At this very moment, the biggest mistake you could do would be to loose motivation, go back to your old eating habits, gain another kilo or two. Why? Well, because at the end of these couple of weeks you will probably decide to go on a a diet again, this time with more weight. At the end of the week you will again not be able to loose weight (due to the same reason I mentioned above) and probably think that your metabolism is too slow to loose any weight. It’s a vicious cycle with not way out. For this very reason, don’t wait for Monday, don’t wait for tomorrow . Start straight away. Start with a healthy and balanced diet not with deprevations and prohibitions. If you want to loose weight that much why spend any more time?

Shock Diets

We, as humans, are impatient. However, you have to realize and accept that any success will not come easy. You will have to put a lot of effort, try very hard and be patient. How healthy and how sustainable can a diet promising a weight loss of 5 kilos be? Yes, you may really loose 5 kilos (of which most would be fluid loss) at the and of the week, but then what? After a week long of psychological and physiological deprevation (and because 1  week is not enough for you to learn any healthy eating habits) everything will go back to how it was and you will most probably gain all the weight plus even a couple of extra kilos as you would have damaged your metabolism. So, to cut the story short; stay away from shock diets!

Let’s make a change.  Instead of going on a diet let’s start by changing our thoughts, our beliefs and our attitude towards food. The rest will just follow.