The longest diet I ever went on was a vegetarian one for four weeks, but I can’t do any diet that long now.

The longest diet I ever went on was a vegetarian one for four weeks, but I can’t do any diet that long now.

Many people think of a diet as an uberrestrictive thing. They say “diet” and they think 1200 calories, eating only chicken and salad, absolutely nothing sweet, or also sticking to the rigid and totally unscientific rule of certain fashionable fad diets that cause more problems than they solve. Usually the result of these fads is that one starts the diet, loses quite a bit of weight in the first couple of weeks, then gets too tired of it to follow it any longer, meanwhile his or her metabolism has fallen from the near-starvation, and as soon as this person starts eating normally he or she gains more weight than they have lost. Bummer.

A good diet is nothing the like. In first place, it’s not too restrictive in terms of calories. Eating too little is not a good idea, if you burn in total 2000 calories per day, eating 1200 calories will not be enough to keep you healthy and content. What if you ate 1800 calories and maybe exercised for an average of 100 calories per day (that’s a short walk)? Suppose you are growing fatter by eating 2200 calories per day, by reducing then to 1800 and increasing your activity by just a bit you would start to slowly lose weight. And do you know what to cut to avoid those 400 calories?

One candy bar and one soda can are about 400 calories.

One of these is over 550 calories!

You don’t even need to cut these completely off. Suppose you have one fast food meal each day at work, so five days a week, and one chocolate bar as a snack each afternoon. If you opted for a salad and a yogurt for three days a week (keeping the fast food meal for two days a week), and substituted the candy bar with a fruit on the days you have the fast food meal you would already be cutting substantially back on calories, maybe enough to start losing weight slowly. Along the same lines, if you are a soda drinker, limiting yourself to a glass of soda per day and drinking water when you are thirsty would remove loads of calories.

This would not make you lose a huge amount of weight each week. Indeed, a reasonable weight loss is just a kilo per month, or even less. This is produced by a moderate diet that leaves you ample space to eat at least some of what you like, does not completely change your habits, leaves you energetic and satisfied, and produces some pretty stable weight loss. It’s also the kind of diet you can keep going for years without suffering.

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