In today’s lesson we’re covering – and it may seem like a strange question to ask – “What Is a Diet and What Does a Diet Do?” … Surprisingly… The answer isn’t the obvious answer that you thought it would be!
Take care…
For a more detailed answer see Ross’s written response below.
… And it’s not the obvious answer that you thought it would be!
On the surface these questions seem like they should have obvious answers, but the concept of a diet actually causes a lot of confusion for people. Technically, a diet simply refers to what you eat and drink on a daily basis, so it is a very general term that does not refer to any specific goals.
Many people follow diets to lose weight, but diets can be used to maintain or gain weight, increase muscle, improve heart health, etc. A diet can do any number of things, depending on how it’s designed.
Of course, when most people hear the word “diet,” they think of weight loss and more specifically decreasing the number of calories consumed in a day. Diet has basically become synonymous with cutting calories, which is unfortunate.
When people think about a diet, they often focus on just eating less or following one of the weight loss programs that is popular at the time. The problem is these strategies usually only result in short-term progress, if they are beneficial at all. In the long run, most people end where they started or worse after traditional weight loss dieting.
Personally, I think people would be better off if they eliminated the word diet from their vocabulary. It has too many negative connotations (people hate dieting) and causes people to focus on the wrong things. As a replacement, I encourage people to adopt the concept of a nutritional program.
Instead of dreading dieting (or hoping for it to be over) or trying to figure out the right diet to follow, work on improving your current nutritional program. Healthy eating is not something that can be done part time (on and off) and you need to develop good eating habits if you want to achieve long-term success.
Diet plans are rarely sustainable indefinitely, especially if they are significantly different from your normal eating behaviors. Most people end up going back to their old (unhealthy) eating habits and lose the progress they made. A better approach is to gradually change your eating behaviors to make them healthier.
Action Step: Make small and consistent nutrition improvements at your own pace. This way they are easier to handle and over time you can transform your nutritional program (diet) from an unhealthy one to a healthy one that also improves fat loss. Best of all, healthy eating behaviors become your normal routine instead of being a diet that you can’t wait to stop following. This way the positive changes can be maintained indefinitely.
By Ross Harrison
VFT “Awesome” Fitness Expert 
VirtualFitnessTrainer.com
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