Make your Diet Succeed: Love the Diversity of Food

Many people get excited to lose weight, and jump onto the latest trendy fad diet.  South Beach, Atkins, Flat Belly, Juice Diet, Chocolate Diet; fad diets often don’t work!  They all sound good in theory, but in practice it can be very difficult to follow their prescribed foods.  The main reason is that fad diets set people up to consume the same or very similar foods day after day.  How boring could that possibly be?  The beauty of food is its diversity and richness.  Dieting shouldn’t be about sticking to three or four low calorie meals, but instead about enjoying the diversity of food and giving your body balanced and healthy fuels.  The key to staying on a successful diet plan is to give yourself the wiggle-room to enjoy foods.  By providing your body with all the nutrition it needs, it can be safe and exciting to try different foods.  Remember, when you enjoy what you eat – you will keep eating it.  

The key to having flexibility in your diet is to know how to find the nutrients your body needs in different places.  Knowing that you can find vitamin C in red peppers, kiwifruit, broccoli and papaya can help you avoid eating oranges every morning.  In fact, knowing that there is MORE vitamin C in kiwifruit and papaya than oranges can encourage eating less and getting more.  Almost everyone knows that having an orange or grapefruit in the morning is a good source of vitamin C, but imagine how much fuller your life can be if you enjoy exotic and delicious flavors like kiwifruit and papaya.  

Another way to increase your wiggle room is to maximize the food you are eating.  Avoid empty calories!  An empty calorie is a wasted calorie.  Be sure that all your pasta and four products are made with whole grains.  Drink fruit juices rather than sodas.  

Sharing recipes with your friends and other dieters can be another great tool towards encouraging a diversity of food.  All of us have our own cooking ruts, so trading recipes is a great way to push us to cook with foods that are new to us.  This helps keep the fun in your diet, because you will be able to experiment and try new things.  If cooking with different foods is intimidating, make a party out of it.  Let your friends teach you how to cook with new foods and spend time learning about food.  

Taking a multivitamin is another way provides super flexible wiggle room.  Hearing about a great new low-calorie meal can be a great way to keep your interest in food and dieting; but it will hurt you more than help if you aren’t sure that you are getting enough vitamins.  Taking a multivitamin gives your body everything it needs each day, and provides you with the flexibility to explore the food diversity on the planet.  

The best part of a multivitamin is that if you take one, you can be less concerned about the nutrition of each individual thing you eat, and more concerned with following your diet. Rather than waste time worrying about getting enough Vitamin B, you can worry about what new and exciting low-calorie meals you will prepare next.