The Diet Plan Checklist

How to Choose Diet Plan that works

Countless books have been written on different diet plans that promise faster and faster weight lost if the prescribed diet plan is followed; each one with its own recent scientific finding to back up its claims. More and more books on the topic will be published in the future, but how do we know if any of these diets will work for us. There is no one plan fits all when it comes to dieting. What works for you may not work for me and vice versa, but diet plans must pass certain standards for it to be effective. Check your current plan if it fulfills the requirements in this check list and find out if it will last or if it will fail just like the ones before it.

Your Plan Must: 

1. Be Affordable and Available

                The best diet plans have lists of recipes of their suggested food group to be consumed in every meal. The ingredients of these recipes must be both affordable to the average Joes and Jane’s and available in common sources of food like supermarkets and restaurants. A diet plan with a regular need for lobster for example, is not very flexible to the budget or available in certain locations. Successful diet plans must take availability of every ingredient in certain regions in to consideration. If one item is not available in some places, a substitute must be provided without compromising the quality and the taste of the food.

2. Be a Lifetime Plan

                Diet plans must be easy to maintain for a lifetime. They must not be seasonal. Searches on the web for crash diets and popular diet fads trend upward just before bikini seasons; like summer vacations and spring breaks. This paradigm towards diet must be changed. Most diet plans give too much attention to weight loss that the minds behind the plan fail to equally emphasize on what should be done next after the enough weight have been lost. For a diet plan to be successful, it must have a maintenance stage. At this stage food intake must be kept at a level where we do not gain or lose weight and where we are kept active throughout the day.

3. Be Safe and Healthy

                The last thing you want to be is a guinea pig of nutritionist wannabes and end up seriously ill because of taking their experimental diet plan challenge. Only start diets that have good names and credentials to back up their claims. Use more reliable sources than “some guy on the net.” Don’t rely on testimonials too much because they are easy to fabricate. Read and take time to learn the principle behind the plan before starting. If you’re worried about the technical stuff, don’t be. The best diet plans are easy to understand. Just remember: if you can’t understand it, it won’t work. If you can understand the principle behind the plan and you are still not sure if it’s healthy for you or if you think the plan will radically change your usual diet, consult a physician first.

4. Not Include Hunger

                If you’ve started a diet plan and you’re always hungry, chances are you are starving yourself with that plan. This can be avoided by eating frequently in small amounts. The amount of calories consumed will be the same but eating small snacks in between meals help prevent having very low blood sugar levels making us less likely to over eat on the next big meal. Keep in mind though to include snacks in the calorie count. This is easy to do because most snack foods have calories/serving in their packaging labels. I personally limit my snacking calories to 100-150 calories per snack. I snack twice a day.

5. Have No Banned Food

In most diet plans, the foods that are often banned are those that we love to eat. This is the reason why they are banned; because we love them so much we are often tempted to have a second serving or more. Totally blocking out certain foods from our system makes us more vulnerable to temptation and lapse from our diet plan. This can lead to the total failure of the diet plan. Successful diet plans aim to achieve a balance on the food that can be eaten frequently and those that should be eaten scarcely.  

There is no perfect diet plan. The most successful diets today will be challenged over and over again until it will be made obsolete by more recent findings in nutritional science. Knowing how to judge a diet plan will arm us in dealing with the constant change in the landscape of diet and nutrition. Hope this helps. Enjoy fitness.

Tips on developing a fitness mindset

Start Young       

The sooner we condition our bodies for fitness, the easier it is for us to continue being fit as we grow older. In past generations, physical activities tend to decrease as a child starts formal schooling at age 7 or below. In the start of formal education, children begin to spend long hours sitting in the classroom and less time playing outdoors. Nowadays the age where children’s activities are decreased becomes younger and younger. The emergence of numerous technology based entertainment and labor saving devices promote sedentary lifestyle in the present and future generations. At home, hours spent climbing trees and running in the yard have been replaced by longer hours sitting in a desk in front of a screen with a mouse and keyboard in hand, or even worse laying in a couch in front of a large screen with a bowl of chips an arm length away.

                For most of us, this tip is no longer applicable. A great portion of our youth have been spent, but we can still promote fitness among the younger generation by encouraging and supporting child friendly fitness experiences like sports and martial arts for kids. For those who haven’t started a fit lifestyle, its betters to begin sooner than later.

Create Your Own Fitness Blog

                This tip is based on personal experience. I’ve created this blog for exactly this purpose. It doesn’t need to be a professional looking blog. The more personal your blog is the better. A blog has many advantages; first it allows you to tell the world what you aim to achieve. Let’s say you aim to lose 10 pounds before your next birthday, write about it in your blog and share it with your family and friends. A lot of management and self help books suggest that goals must be declared to the world to make sure that we will achieve it. After declaring it, use your blog to record your progress. People following your blog will be a great part of your success.

Other fitness advantages of creating a fitness Blog

Influence others to be fit

                There is no greater feeling than having someone embrace a fit and healthy lifestyle because of your influence, but this is easier said than done.  I’ve personally experienced how difficult this is with my mom. She has been living a sedentary lifestyle for so many years that walking long distances in moderate pace gives her shortness of breath. She’s a school nurse so information is not a problem.

At first there was denial. I had trouble convincing her to work out because she believed there is nothing wrong with her and she doesn’t need to do it. Then there are all the reasons; “I have menstruation this week”, “I haven’t eaten yet”, “I just ate.” The list goes on. Then there is her negative mindset towards exercising. She thinks that exercising is something vain people do and she is not a part of that group. No matter how many times I try to remind her of the importance of exercise, she would just shrug it off and change the topic.

                It wasn’t until she blacked out in a supermarket one sunny day and more recently a terrible pain in both of her legs which restricted her from standing up that her attitude towards fitness changed. Luckily these health attacks haven’t occurred again and it also scared her into working out (sadly at her own slow pace.) I am there continuing to encourage her to improve, she is not overweight so improving does not take a lot of effort. Slowly but surely she is making progress.

Different people respond differently to an invitation of working out or starting a healthier diet challenge. Only they themselves can change their paradigm towards fitness. No amount of lectures or scare tactics will change the flow of an adamant mind, but when they do change; when their fitness paradigm has shifted, we must be there to cultivate and to support their new found way of seeing things.

How Blogging can Improve Your Health

      Creating a fitness blog can go a long way in improving your fitness. I’ve created a blog specifically for this purpose. It doesn’t need to be a professional looking blog. The more personal your blog is the better. It can be monetized or it may be done for this purpose alone, but regardless of you true motivation, I suggest monetizing it to prevent you from abandoning the blog in the rough roads of your fitness journey.

      First it allows you to tell the world what you aim to achieve. Let’s say I aimed to lose 10 pounds before my next birthday, I will write about it in my blog and share it with my family and friends. A lot of management and self help books suggest that goals must be declared to the world to make sure that it will be achieved. After declaring it, use your blog to record your progress. Your blog becomes your medium of declaring what you want, and every time you opened your blog, you are reminded of your goal.

      Second, declaring goals to a watchful public has another upside. It makes backing out from that goal more difficult. In working out, laziness procrastination and other negative behavior can break the mindset of the less experienced. Even I, who have been working out for many years, sometimes give in especially on bad days. In dieting, temptation of gluttony in unplanned occasions can ruin your diet. A surprise party and a spontaneous get together with high school friends are among the few situations where I let my guard down and failed to follow my diet plan.

                It is in these situations where I find blogging to be most useful in motivating myself. Even after minor setbacks in my fitness journey, blogging makes getting back on track easier. In a few instances, people who follow my blog remind me of the goals that I set for myself.

      Third blogging gives us a chance to learn new information about fitness. As a blogger, part of promoting blogs is reading other people’s blog and commenting intelligently in their pages. This will not only promote your own blog and create new relationships (because great bloggers always reply to comments) but also makes us learn what problems other people are encountering in their fitness journey. We can apply their solutions to ourselves or give advice if we are well versed with the topic.  Reading blogs also keeps us updated on the latest fitness trends. It’s like having a free magazine subscription where we have the freedom to praise or criticize the content. 

      Lastly, blogging lets us meet other fitness enthusiast. Other bloggers are more than just sources for inbound links. Successful fitness bloggers are mostly heath buffs themselves. Some manage blogs for personal purposes while others have monetary reasons. Regardless of their motivational sources, beginner bloggers can learn a lot from them, from technical blogging skills to detecting fitness trends. Joining communities of other bloggers and interacting with them are fun ways of learning and building your community at the same time.