A diet plan often doesn’t just mean changing what you eat, but changing your thinking about and your lifestyle. We explore what habits may need to change.
How a Diet Plan Means a Change of Lifestyle
At The Youth Fountain, we have years of experience in coming up with diet plans for clients who are looking to lose weight. Diet is a huge factor in your weight but, unfortunately, just having a diet plan isn’t as simple as it sounds. Long-term, healthy weight loss isn’t just about cutting out certain foods for a length of time, but also changing the way you think about food.
Changing your relationship with food can be extremely difficult, especially if you feel that a lot of your bad eating habits are the result of comfort eating or even just lifelong unhealthy eating. Whatever the reason, before you start your diet plan, it’s a good idea to assess how you see food in your daily life.
Cutting Out Comfort Food
Comfort eating is a major factor in weight gain for a lot of people. There can be a huge number of situations in which someone is led to seeking solace in snacking or overeating, and once the cravings are indulged it can be hard to get out of those habits. Very often, our team at The Youth Fountain will speak to someone who says that, on top of their initial problems, they also find that the lack of confidence they feel due to weight gain leads to more comfort eating, creating a vicious cycle.
In order to tackle this, it’s important for you to identify how much of your unhealthy eating habits are due to emotional problems, rather than simply being hungry or bored. If you can identify what these underlying problems are, then, with help of both professionals and loved ones, you can separate emotional fulfillment from food.
Learning to Like New Things
Lots of people throw around the term “picky eater”, often with very negative connotations. Typically, someone who is identified as a picky eater is essentially being called difficult, or even childish. The problem of having staunch and insurmountable aversion or preferences to or for certain foods, however, goes much deeper than that.
Many people who lack variety in their diet have done so their whole life. If you’re not introduced to, or encouraged to try new food as a child, there’s a good chance it will end up being much harder as an adult. Lifelong behaviors that have gone unchallenged are extremely difficult to break.
Fortunately, that doesn’t mean they’re impossible to move away from. Having a varied diet plan that’s been thoroughly thought through, that allows you try less adventurous new foods and work your way up, is a great way to open up your palette. A varied diet isn’t just an essential part of losing weight and maintaining your health, it also makes life a lot more interesting.
Having a Support Network
While what you do is important to your weight loss efforts, having a good support network of family, friends and professionals is essential. Losing weight alone is hard enough, diet plan or no, and facing setbacks by yourself can turn minor bumps into major hurdles. Friends and family who encourage you, or even join you on your journey, will boost you to your goal – while professional intervention and advice will give you the expertise you need.
How The Youth Fountain Can Help You With a Diet Plan
At The Youth Fountain, we know how important it is to feel good about yourself. We also know how important it is to lose weight in a healthy, structured way. Starving yourself or overdoing it on the exercise won’t help, but having a mapped-out diet plan, a goal, and a team of people ready to help you the whole way most certainly will.
