How Easy is a ‘Sustainable’ Diet?

Firstly, allow me to clarify the title:

Diet means the food that you consume on a daily and weekly basis. It does not mean banning or forbidding foods.

Sustainable means from now on, not just for the next 6 weeks.

 

To make your diet sustainable forever (and I do mean forever) you need to look at what you currently eat and probably (I’m sure if you are reading this you are looking for ideas) change a few things that you eat.

All ‘fad-diets’ do the same thing; they forbid certain foods or types of foods in order to reduce the amount of calories that you eat. The only (well not the only problem) is that as you are forbidding foods, you will miss them and that is not something that will be sustainable.

I believe that a reasonably easy way of looking at what you eat on a weekly basis is that I have set out below. Aim for:

70% of your weekly food consumption coming from whole/minimally processed foods (fruit, vegetables, lean meats, fish, brown rice, wholemeal pasta, etc) that you really enjoy

10% of your weekly food consumption coming from whole/minimally processed foods that you neither enjoy or dislike (neutral to taste)

10% of your weekly food consumption coming from ‘questionable/semi-junk foods’ that you like

10% of your weekly food consumption coming from anything else you love

 

It is better to be eating healthy food for 80% of the time, rather than cutting out the questionable and junk foods totally for a short time and then binging on them when you realise how much you miss them.

This allows you to factor in those meals out with family and friends, the odd packet of crisps or small bar of chocolate.

The biggest thing that you can do is just to cut down on your portion sizes. Just eat slightly less each meal, stick to the percentages above and, combined with some enjoyable exercise (yes there is fun enjoyable exercise for everyone) you will see a sensible and sustainable weight loss that you will be able to maintain for life.

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