How To Achieve a Healthy Lifestyle Without Following a Strict Diet Plan

The US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention put out a study showing that diet is not just more important than physical activity, but it’s far more important. After spending a lot of time at the gym, this will make sense. You can jog on the treadmill for 30 minutes at a decent pace and expend 300 calories for this. Those 300 calories can be used up on four McVitie’s digestive biscuits (284), Twix Xtra Twin Bars (370), or one Krispy Kreme (200-405). Considering these snacks are eaten in mere minutes, compared to the 30 minutes of moderate exercise, it goes to show that what you’re eating is the key to staying a healthy weight. However, that doesn’t mean exercise is useless. Those 300 calories could be the difference between maintaining or putting on a little weight. Working out should never be relied on, only used as a little boost to your progress.

There is a vast choice of diets to pick from out there on the internet. So many of them have gone viral, with influencers promoting them on social media. One of the main reasons people fail to lose weight is because they have diet fatigue. It can be mentally tiring to consistently eat food you are not the biggest fan of. I’m here to tell you that you should not follow these rigid diet regimes. Recent research shows that 95% of diets fail, with 65% of those people gaining the weight back over three years. The best diet is one that you built yourself. How do you build a diet you ask?

The boring but key to a good diet is to simply learn how many calories are in the things you’re eating. Studies show only 35% of people understand how many calories a person should be eating. Further studies reveal that 63% of people can’t estimate the number of calories in a meal. Much research over the last few decades have shown how most people underreport the number of calories they intake. I’ve done this test with a few of my friends who are trying to lose weight. I ask them how much they’ve eaten, they usually say “not much”. Yet, when I ask them how much they have eaten and add up the calories, almost always they’ve gone over their intake for the day. Often they are shocked by the number of calories in the food they’re eating. Most people do not enjoy the idea of counting calories for the rest of their lives, and yes, it does suck at the beginning. Though, this is the foundation for losing weight in the best way. Eventually you’ll learn how many calories are in the things you eat, and it’ll become a subconscious calorie count.

This may sound like a lot of effort, but all research shows calorie counting helps people lose weight. After two months of calorie counting, I stopped. Yet, I continued to lose a lot of weight because I understood what I was intaking without much thought about it. Education around calories is essential to being healthy. To see if you have a good understanding of what you could be intaking, try to guess how many calories are in these pictures, and I’ll add how much exercise you’d need to do to burn it off after the images.

Konjac Noodles

Lindt Balls

Small Brownies

The answers:

Konjac noodles - 26 calories. A five minute walk.

Lindt balls - 80 calories for one ball. 15 minutes on an exercise bike.

Brownies - 310 each. Uphill walking with a 15% incline, at a moderate pace for 35 minutes.

Muffins - 453 each (wow). Fast, near running pace for 50 minutes.

I’m sure some of these were as much of surprise as they were to me when I first began calorie counting. One of the truest sayings in the dieting community is simply don’t intake the calories in the first place, because it’s a lot harder to burn off than simply not eat it. Many people report different results from eating lower calorie diets such as still gaining weight. Though, most people are wrong when it comes to metabolism. Typically, skinnier people have slower metabolism. Which is the opposite of the common “I can’t lose weight because my metabolism is slower than others.” Another is being unable to affect your metabolism, but this is also untrue. There are little things you can do to help it out. Drinking less sugary drinks and eating more protein are two ways that studies show can improve your metabolism. The final “myth” is half right, but it’s not quite how people believe. Yes, when you age your metabolism slows down. But that’s mostly because older people tend to be less active and have less muscle mass. It’s also not as impactful as many would have you believe. The way people talk about it, it would seem that at 25 years old you must cut half of their diet away to lose weight, but this is far from the truth. At 18 years old a sedentary male can eat 2400 calories and maintain his weight. At 25 years old, a male can eat eat 2400 calories and maintain his weight. It isn’t until this sedentary male hits 41 his maintain drops to 2200. Which means one less Kit Kat a day, essentially. Then at 61 is drops to 2000. So, in reality, aging isn’t the cause for gaining weight, it’s the lifestyle that people tend to lead as they age.

As someone who has lost 25kg/55lbs in the space of five months, I still eat fast food, chocolate, and doughnuts. I am simply aware that if I do eat these things, I may need to not overindulge and eat a whole pack of doughnuts in one day. Or hell, if I do, I’ll need to go to the gym and burn off a few hundred calories. Some days it’s not so bad to gain a little weight if you know the next day you can cut it back off, anyways. Eating food should be fun, there is no need to put yourself through a painful diet which you end up hating. There is no need to hit the gym 5 days a week to lose weight. Simply learn how many calories you’re intaking, be honest with yourself, and you will lose weight.

Chocolate Muffins