Reducing the amount of caloric intake and adopting healthy eating habits are vital for being able to overcome obesity.
Although crash diets initially allows for quickly losing too much weight, a sustainable diet that can ensure slow but permanent weight loss is essential for permanence. For this reason, unrealistic and unsustainable crash diets should be avoided.
A reasonable weight loss program should include at least a 6-month process and then the reduced weight should be maintained for a period of at least 1 year. There is no such thing as an ideal or “most effective” diet. The best diet is the sustainable one that you can apply without difficulty. In a diet, it is more important to adopt certain principles rather than focusing on the amounts of foods items by items:
-Calorie reduction: The extent of reducing your caloric intake is the key for weight loss. The nutritionist will evaluate your typical eating and drinking habits, determine the amount of calories normally you need to consume, and calculate how much calories you need to reduce. This amount is roughly 1200-1500 calories per day for women and 1500-1800 calories per day for men.
You have to reduce daily caloric intake by 500-1000 for losing 0.5-1 kg per week. In general, taking daily 1000-1200 calories for women and 1200-1600 calories for men enables them to lose weight safely. These calorie levels are a guidelines.
If you intake 1600 calories a day and you cannot lose weight, you can reduce your caloric intake to 1200. You can do this reduction in the course of time by taking 100 or 200 less calories a day. Diets with excessively low (800 or less) calories are unfavorable and should not be eaten unless you are under the supervision of a physician.
-More feeling of satiety with less food: Comprehending the concept of energy density will enable you to feel satiety by consuming less calories. All foods contain calories at certain rates. Sweets, breads, cakes, and oily and processed foods are energy-dense foods. This means that small amounts of such foods contain high calories.
Vegetables, fruits, and legumes are low energy-dense foods. Larger portions of such products provide lower calories. Consuming low energy-dense foods in larger portions will suppress hunger attacks and will also enable you to feel satiety with lower calories.
-Making Healthy Choices: You should consume more plant-based foods such as vegetables, fruits and legumes, to make your whole diet healthier. You should also prefer high-protein foods and make a habit of consuming fish once or twice a week. Besides these, you should reduce the amount of salt and sugar in meals. Adding healthy oils such as olive oil, canola oil or hazelnut oil to your diet at certain rates will enhance the feeling of satiety.
-Staying Away from Certain Foods: Many diets limit the amounts of high carbohydrate or fatty foods. Beverages containing sugar or sweetener may lead you to unintentionally intake undesired amount of calories. Permanently eliminating these foods and beverages from your diet will help you limit your caloric intake.
A healthy eating plan should include all the nutrients that your body needs; however, it should provide calories in amounts that do not lead you to gain weight. It should contain low amounts of saturated fats, trans fats, cholesterol, salt and refined sugar. Low fat yogurt, cheese and milk, lean meats, fish, legumes, oats and whole wheat, fresh or frozen fruits and all kinds of vegetables should be the basics of your diet.
-Dietary Supplements: You can prefer high protein and healthy snacks as snack meals. Although many companies have products in this field, it would be the healthiest to prefer medicinal ones.
It is the most important thing to understand clearly that there is no such things as miracle foods or miracle diets. Especially in the media, almost every day we witness exaggerated advertisement of a miracle product or a type of diet. Remember that such shock diets or unsustainable uniform diets based on certain products cannot provide long-term weight loss, and they rather adversely affect your metabolism by causing repeated weight loss and weight gain processes.
We mentioned that determining realistic goals will increase your success in weight-loss. You can set a goal to lose 5-10% of your current weight within 6 months. Just this alone has been proven to reduce your risk of getting coronary heart diseases. If you lost 10% of your body weight, maintained your new weight for 6 months but you are still in an obese group, you should consider other methods as an option.