Which Diet Is The Best?
Diet is probably the most difficult issue we face in health and fitness. It is challenging, all of the worst foods taste the best, and if you ignore it bad things happen. The use of the word diet is more commonly understood as what someone should or shouldn’t eat to lose weight, since that’s the point at which most of us decide it’s a good time to care. A better understanding and definition of diet is as follows: the kinds of food that a person, animal, or community habitually eats. My point of bringing this definition to you is because picking any of the diets you read or hear about may work, but can you make that a habit? For the rest of your life, can you sustain eliminating one of the three macronutrients? Sure, it may help some people initially for a drop in weight, but what happens when you give up your “diet” and decide you miss eating breads. For any of you that have tried this approach you know what happens when you give it up.
The best diet (the kinds of foods you habitually eat) is a balanced diet for your individual self, and losing weight will require controlling the amount eaten inside of that balanced diet. Body fat is how the body stores energy for the winter… soooooooooo, if you consume less food (energy) than your body uses, it will need to get the energy elsewhere, like from body fat! Body fat has a calorie value just the same as anything else you eat, 1 pound of fat is 3500 calories (energy). Let that sink in for one of those light bulb moments if it hasn’t hit you yet.
What we eat has a huge impact on how we feel, which will also effect how we act. Can you survive on your bodies stored fat without eating anything, yes; Louis Zamperini survived 47 days on a raft at sea during WWII with very little to eat if anything at all (and so many other amazing stories of survival like it). But trying that intentionally and living your normal life would make for a cranky and irritable person and nobody would want to be around you because of constantly being hangry! The goal is to lose weight and still maintain feeling good.
Your body has a calorie usage number known as your resting metabolic rate (RMR). This number represents the calories (energy) your body uses at complete rest for 24 hours, and is the minimum required daily to stay the same weight. The factors are age, height, and weight. If you weigh 150 pounds and your RMR is 1200 calories, eating 1200 calories would keep you at that body weight for the day. If you only eat 700 calories, your body would need 500 more calories, the puzzle is coming together! Thats right, body fat, stored energy would be used for the remaining calories (remember that 1 pound of body fat is valued at 3500 calories). Thats how it works, there is no secret to it! The only variable in diet is you and what works best for you to make it something you can sustain into habit.
The most important things are making healthy choices for your body so you can live to be 112 and if you need to lose weight, cutting back on how much food you eat. Controlling the amount of food you consume will force your body to get the energy elsewhere, and thats how you lose the stubborn body fat driving you crazy. The body uses all of the macronutrients, and eliminating one of them isn’t necessary. Carbs are the bodies preferred source of energy, complete protein is necessary to build and maintain muscles, and healthy fats keep the heart and organs operating like well oiled machines. They do all have different effects on individuals and cutting out one of them may be a good way to get a handle on correcting bad eating, but focus on how you feel (after a meal) and find what works for you to create a livable habit.
Ryan Sensenig