Dieting, in my opinion, has developed a negative connotation. When people think about dieting, they think about how much it is going to suck, how much they will dislike it, how they are going to be miserable, and how they are going to starve, all negative thoughts attached to dieting. When people think about dieting, they also know that it has a start date, an end date, and a detailed plan.
What happens when it ends?
If you want to maintain the weight lost from a diet, or sustain lifelong healthy body weight, you must change your eating habits!
Diets are very structured, and they work for what they are designed for, to help you lose weight in an allotted time frame. While undergoing the diet, everything is very structured (at least it should be). When ending your diet, you lose this structure. When you lose this structure, the possibility of going back to your old eating habits increases. If this happens you can gain all of the weight you lost, back.
If you want to maintain the weight you lost, you must look at the way you eat. Like I said earlier, during a diet, everything is very structured, and you have an easy-to-follow plan. When that plan is gone you are left with whatever eating habits you have developed.
So, in order to maintain that healthy weight, you must look at your eating habits.
I feel that a lot of people view healthy eating as dieting and thus think negatively about it. Eating healthy is something that everyone should do and is not the same as dieting. Eating healthy all the time is how people with healthy body weight, maintain healthy body weight. They are not on a diet that starts and stops. They just eat healthily as much as they can.
When you develop healthy eating habits, eating healthy becomes second nature and no longer something you dread doing.
Think of any positive habit you have; you probably don’t dread it every time you do it. When you first started, however, you might have. If you eat fast food 2–3 times a week every week, switching the fast food every meal for chicken and broccoli immediately can be hard, but if you make subtle and more small changes to that bad habit you can change it. If you make small changes over time, you will slowly look forward to eating healthy, and this can lead you to wanting to avoid unhealthy food. When this happens, you have effectively incorporated new healthy eating habits.
Like any other habit, start small! Changing your eating habits can be a lifelong process, so make small healthy changes over time.
Remember, eating healthy is more of a long-lasting lifestyle change, while dieting is more of a short-term plan to help you lose weight in a certain amount of time.
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