What to do after your fad diet fails

man laughing at salad

Photo PHOTOCREO Michal Bednarek Shutterstock

Diets tend to fail, aAnd those who promise quick weight loss by following some weird trick are mostly doomed to failure. If you’ve just had one of these, don’t just jump on another fad diet; instead, take a moment to reflect on what you’ve learned and make a healthier diet plan in the future.

But before you even get to the tips below, consider using this eating disorder screening tool from the National Eating Disorders Association to check your relationship with food and with your body image. NEDA also has one helpline that you can call or text.

Program yourself

Each fad diet comes with an explanation of why this is the best diet for you and why it will succeed where all other diets failed. But no diet (or ‘way of eating’) has a magical secret that the others have missed

If you’ve been following the teachings of a specific diet guru, book, or internet forum for a month or two, you’re probably immersed in the mythology of that particular diet. Write down some of the assumptions you’re holding on to – sugar is toxic, or beans are full of anti-nutrients, or whole yogurt has too many calories to fit into a healthy diet, or whatever – and see if they’re based on any scientific consensus.

The actually Truths about healthy eating are boring and obvious, such as that vegetables are good and there are many ways to reduce your calorie intake. You can let go of the rest.

Set realistic expectations

Fad diets promise, and often achieve, faster weight loss than normal old healthy eating. That’s what makes them so attractive, but it’s also a sign that they aren’t really teaching you how to eat better

The scale fluctuates from day to day, and it’s not all about fat gain or loss. The food you have in your stomach weighs something; So does the water in all of your body tissues, making you gain weight the more you get hydrated. If you eat a lot of carbohydrates, you have more glycogen and water in your muscles; if you follow a low-carbohydrate diet, you lose weight due to the storage of glycogen (carbohydrates). Meanwhile, if you have a menstrual cycle, you may have a time of the month when you are heavier and a time when you are lighter.

For all these reasons,The term weight loss (or gain) is not always about fat. If you’ve lost five pounds on your crash diet in the first two weeks, chances are very little of it was actually fat-and you don’t reverse your progress if you get it back at some point.

Over weeks, if you do lost weight quickly, you may too loss of muscle mass along with fat. Muscles are important to overall health and to enable you to exercise, so aafter your diet has ended or failed,It’s actually healthy to regain that muscle when you’ve lost too much.

Start all over again

First, ask yourself if you really need to lose weight and why. And if your reason is health-related, consider whether you need professional help setting goals and coming up with a plan.

All weight loss diets work the same way, which is to give you a framework to eat fewer calories than you burn. There are a ton of different ways to do that: you can count each calorie, you can reduce the amount you eat of certain food groups, or you can eat slightly smaller portions of your usual meals, just to name a few. Choose an approach that appeals to you. When you see a steady change on the scale from week to week you know it works.

If you want to track calories or macros, we recommend Cronometer over the more popular MyFitnessPalThe database is more accurate and the interface is much more user-friendly and user-friendly.

Actually eat some protein

Many diets don’t consider proteins, however Protein is important for health and is especially important during fat lossMake sure you eat enough of it and do some resistance training to make sure you don’t lose too much muscle.

Eat all food groups

If you don’t get fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and protein foods (such as meat or tofu) every day, your diet may be missing out. Check out the basics on myplate.gov instead of trying to live on yogurt and salads (or, on the other hand, just beef and bacon).

Build good habits

Here you can think back to your experiences with the fad diet. Is there anything you found easy about it? Not things that were difficult but you liked that sometimes-things you didn’t really mind? Maybe you ate a lot of fruit, forgot how much you liked, or maybe you drank less alcohol because of the calories, but then realized you liked sleeping better and avoiding hangovers. If something is good for you and makes you happier, stick with those things.

On the other hand, you have probably also built some bad habits with the crash diet. Skipping meals, for example or that certain foods are completely prohibited. Either exercise too much (because you felt compelled to burn calories) or not enough (because you were too tired all the time). Get rid of the unpleasant or unhealthy habits and keep the good ones.

Eating healthy may be less exciting than crashing and burning on a fad diet, but you’ll be happier and healthier in the long run.

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