Why I won’t give you a diet plan to follow.
Let’s talk about why you need to stop looking for that perfect diet plan.
You can watch the video I made about why I won’t give you a diet plan and what to do instead, below. Or keep scrolling if you’d rather read the blog.
“Can you just give me a diet plan to follow?”
People ask me all the time if I can give them a diet plan. They say “I just wanna eat better and lose weight and I just want to follow some kind of plan”. I get why they do this because you just wanna make it easy for yourself don’t you? That’s perfectly understandable and yeah I could give you a diet plan. I’m technically a registered dietitian so I could get super specific. I could work out what you could eat based on your weight and your activity levels…
BUT I purposely don’t! I would never give you a diet plan to follow, because basically it would just end up being yet another diet for you to fail. It’s so much easier to look at what you’re eating normally, then focus on tweaking it.
Tweak your normal eating habits.
Think about what your normal eating habits are and look at how you could make small, but significant changes to what you’re doing day-to-day. Make sure they’re changes that you could stick to forever, because you need to stick to it forever! Those little changes will become new habits if you keep persevering with them. It might be slower to get to your target this way. If you’re trying to lose weight and you’ve done all the diets before, then you’ll find that when you tweak things it’ll take longer to reach your target. But if you’re focusing on building new habits then any weight you lose will stay off – unlike the weight you lose quickly on that crash diet, that you pile back on as soon as you stop the diet, right!?!
Dieting doesn’t work, lifestyle change is the key.
The more you practice at those new habits, the more it will become a new way of life. It always comes back to your regular day-to-day habits that makes a difference. This is why diets don’t work, because you follow the diet, then at some point you stop. Then you put the weight back on again because you go back to your old habits.
Stop punishing yourself!
Tweaking it is so much kinder as well, rather than punishing yourself on yet another strict diet that tells you you’re not allowed to eat all the food that you love. If you tweak your normal eating habits you can still have all the food that you love like cake and chocolate, crisps or wine. Whatever it is you love you’re absolutely allowed to have! Forget looking for the perfect diet plan to follow and instead just tweak what you normally do.
“So what do I eat?”
The dieting industry is full of rules and most of them are bullshit! You’re not gonna get lists of good or bad foods from me, because that won’t help you. BUT I will give you a rule, which isn’t really a rule, more of a structure for putting together balanced meals.
The rule of three
If you focus on each individual meal then healthy eating just slots into place. It’s all about making healthy eating easier for you. Healthy eating is about eating a range of different foods so you’re more likely to be giving your body all the different nutrients. Eating a balanced meal that gives you a variety of foods makes it more satisfying. When you’re satisfied at each meal, you’re less likely to pick or snack between meals. If you’re giving your body what it needs, you’re less likely to have cravings as well. The rule of three is about aiming to get food from three different food groups at each meal or snack. Whether that’s breakfast, lunch, your evening meal or if you’re having a treat like some chocolate – try to have a couple of other types of food with it to make it more satisfying.
Make your meals satisfying with a variety of food.
When you’re putting together a meal, always start with something starchy. The starchy foods are things like bread or potatoes, rice or any cereal grains. Try to go for something wholegrain to give you plenty of fibre, that makes it more filling. Then include some kind of fruit or veg or you could have both! Go for whatever fruit and veg you like. You don’t have to force yourself to eat salad if you don’t like it! I don’t like salad – there’s plenty of other fruit and veg so pick something that you enjoy.
The next thing to include is either something protein-rich or something from the ‘dairy & alternatives’ group. Your protein-rich foods include the obvious things like meat, fish or eggs, but there’s also beans, pulses, nuts and seeds. Then the diary foods include milk products or the fortified alternatives to milk.
Once you have three out of those four foods, you’ve got a nice well-balanced meal – easy peasy! Don’t make it complicated, just have a think about how your meals compare to that. Are you getting three different food groups? If you’re not, what’s missing? What do you need to include? And remember that a bit of planning can make all the difference with this so go grab my free anti-dieting meal planner to help you.
Ditch dieting forever – you deserve better.
Need help to ditch dieting forever?
Want to eat normally again AND lose weight healthily? While still enjoying the cake & chocolate? Hell yes!
I will help you ditch dieting forever, either with my 1-2-1 support. Or if you prefer to work independently, you will learn all the skills I teach my 1-2-1 clients, on my ‘No More Diets’ online course.
Freebies!
My Weekly Round-up! AKA; what I’ve been up to recently…
- This week’s blog post has been brought to you by Vanilla Chai tea and it’s perfect as Autumn is well and truly here!
- I’ve been loving my daily walks along the brook after the school run, but I really need to get back into doing some other exercise too. I’d been doing quite well keeping up my morning exercise routine at the start of the summer holidays, then somewhere along the way it’s disappeared. So that is my current goal to get back into doing that – so far I did a short version of it today to get started… watch this space for my progress!
- At the weekend we went up hill #16 for our family challenge ’22 Hills In 2022′. We meant to go up Stapeley Hill, but somehow managed to go up Corndon Hill instead – oops! Bit of a tough one as it’s been a few weeks since we’ve been up a hill and it was steep! But we all managed it despite quite a bit of whingeing from Genevieve (that’s the challenging part of this challenge – getting the 7 year old to keep up!). That’s 16 hills down, 6 to go – woohoo!
- Bird Nerd Report: I completely forgot that I saw a heron on our camping trip the other week until we saw a heron the other day flying up from the brook! I’ve not seen many kingfishers this week, but LOADS of long-tailed tits again – love them!
