Finding Your Perfect Diet Match
Finding a diet that works for you is the holy grail for anyone looking to lose weight or gain health. Countless books, programs, and products exist to help you lose weight, and yet the one universal is that most of them don’t work for most people. This isn’t because dieting is pointless, it’s because the only thing you have in common with everyone else on the planet is that you are unique. Your unique set of habits, health concerns, preferences, and peculiarities mean that there can never be a one-size-fits-all diet plan. You need to find the plan that works for you, and the truth is that plan might not exist yet.
Health Match
First of all, you want to make sure that your diet meets all your health and nutrition needs. Supplements you might have heard about from Thrive reviews and other sources can absolutely help to fill the gaps, acting as a kind of nutritional safety net, but it’s important to keep your diet varied and make sure that your essential needs are being met. Starting a diet on the recommendation of a friend or even a single medical professional isn’t always a good idea. The field of nutrition and weight loss is riddled with bad advice and harmful practices, so it’s important to trust what your body is telling you and consult as many reputable sources as possible before committing to a dietary plan.
Preference Match
However, it’s equally important to consult your own preferences and inclinations. A lot of diets and weight loss plans talk about discipline and self-control, but you’re only human. Especially when it comes to food and self-care, what you like is just as important as what you need. So when you’re looking at a potential diet plan, ask yourself: do you like this plan? Can you still eat the foods you love? Is this diet plan built on foods that you’ve always hated? Remember, if your diet is making you more miserable than happy, it’s not the right diet for you.
Endurance Match
Dieting is a marathon, not a sprint. If a diet promises to help you lose a ton of weight quickly, it is misleading you at best and dangerous at worst. With that in mind, it’s better to make small changes that will stick than make radical changes that you won’t be able to maintain. This comes back to your preferences, but it also includes budget, time, and other personal constraints. If you can’t afford to buy pricey fresh produce, you need to find a way to build a healthy diet of cheap, shelf-stable foods. It can be done! Similarly, if you have a busy job or a large family, you probably can’t take hours off for long exercise regimes. Be realistic with what you can do, not just in the short term, but in the long haul.
Expectations Match
Maintaining realistic expectations isn’t just about endurance and what you can do; it’s also about results. Motivation and expectations play a key role in the success or failure of a diet plan, and if your diet isn’t helping you reach your set goals in the time you expect, you can quickly find yourself unmotivated and lost. Some people prefer to shoot for the moon and see if they can land among the stars, but for the vast majority of people, lowering the bar is actually more beneficial in the long term. If you want to run a marathon, you start by walking a mile, and dieting works on the same principle.
The best diet for you is the one that you can stick to. The number one reason that most diets fail is that the dieter can’t stick to the plan they set out at the start. It’s sort of like finding the right life partner. However attractive they may seem at first, what you need is someone that you can live with for the rest of your life, and that is a simple bar that most fad diets have trouble clearing.
