Feel like you’re ready to start the right diet that will be the one that will finally help you shed those extra pounds? Are you sure that you’ve chosen the right strategy to reach those goals and keep the weight from coming back?
Unless you’ve asked yourself the following questions, you might not be as ready as you’d believed yourself to be. Give your answers and discover your understanding of your approach to weight loss and how you can tweak things to get the very most out of it. Answer these questions honestly and see how many you’ll answer as a “yes” to see if you’ve chosen the right diet.
• Does the diet you’re considering allow you to consume a minimum number of calories to ensure that you will receive healthful nutrition? That is, no fewer than 1,000 per day.
• Does your strategy take satiety into account by allowing for some consumption of healthy fats (ideally between 20 and 35 percent of your daily caloric intake)?
• Does your diet encourage you to eat an appropriate amount of protein (at least 0.4 grams per pound of your current body weight, but no more than twice that amount)?
• Will you be allowed to eat an adequate level of carbs to spare your protein so that your body won’t start burning your muscles instead of your fats and won’t stop your liver from running out of glycogen (around 100 grams of carbs per day)?
• Are you encouraged to eat a variety of foods for the best nutrition and to avoid getting bored with your meals and snacks?
• Are your snacks and meals made up of “normal” foods that you can find at your local grocery store, and not ingredients that you’ve never heard of and that you need to buy at a specialty shop halfway across town?
• Are the foods you’ll be eating offering you a good balance and variety of vitamins, minerals, and other forms of nutrition that are primarily from whole foods and not packaged products or supplements?
The more “yes” answers you gave, the more likely the diet program is to give you the opportunity to achieve your goal and keep the weight off for good. If you barely had any “yes” answers, you might want to rethink your strategy as the right diet plan. If you had mostly “yes” answers but not all, see what you can do to tweak your program a little bit in order to make sure that you will have the best possible successes.
