What’s with the Diet?

Everyone has heard the term diet at one point or another, and everyone thinks about diets as this restrive phase in life. Mainstream media has done an excellent job in creating this huge negative connotation in the term diet by making most programs focus on 90 days or less of very strict eating rules and very rigorous activity goals. In short, these programs are designed to give you quick results that are not sustainable so that in a year or two you come back and buy their products again because you had good results in the past.

Let’s get down the the truth about diets!

The term diet refers to the food we eat on a daily basis. Diet does not mean that you are cutting calories or restricting food groups. There are so many sustainable diets on the market that the average individual can feel overwhelmed when trying to decide what’s the best diet for his/her goals, you can visit my article on Making the Right Diet Choice to help determine what will work best for your situation, but at the end of the day, a diet can be completely clean and healthy or loaded with processed junk and fast food.

Diets come in 4 major categories that all consist of numerous subcategories:

1. Weight Loss – Weight loss diets consist of maintaining a caloric deficit and reducing and/or eliminating all processed foods. These are also the number one market diets that can be found everywhere.
2. Health Eating – Healthy Eating diets consist of eating food from fresh unprocessed sources in the most simple forms. There isn’t much concern of caloric intake with these diets, as the calories in clean source foods are far less than their processed counterparts.
3. Weight Gain – Weight gain diets are not common, but for some individuals the issue that they face is the inability to gain adequate weight for whatever reason. These diets are closely monitored by healthcare professionals to meet individual goals.
4. Performance – Performance diets are for athletes of moderate to professional level sports that must maintain optimal body performance and improvements. These diets are heavily monitored based on macro and micronutrient intake and performance levels.

Picking the category for your diet depends on your personal goals, but it is very important to check with your healthcare provider before making major diet changes, especially if you have any underlying conditions or concerns.