Will a healthy diet guarantee weight loss?

Healthy eating is still often considered a necessary evil to achieve a lower weight. For many, it's the idea of just a few weeks to change their eating habits, swap their favourite processed foods for a healthier version, and then go back to their usual diet once the desired result is achieved. In the second case, we are willing to follow a healthy diet for a long time, but we don't keep track of our caloric intake (and expenditure), and it often happens that even when we follow the principles of healthy eating, we don't achieve the expected results. Why is this and what do we really need to do to lose the excess weight?

Eliminating unhealthy, processed foods from our diets is inherent to a healthy lifestyle and the diets associated with it. However, to be able to get rid of the excess fat on our bodies, we need to do more than just swap a white roll for rye bread. I would first focus on the overall composition of the diet. If we've been carrying around unhealthy eating habits for a long time and our daily bread is pate or mayonnaise spread, I would start with eliminating these processed foods from our diet first. Let's start gradually, i.e. let's cut out those foods that at first glance don't belong in a healthy diet, or at least try to limit their quantity. In today's modern age of nutrition, it is also easy to replace popular drinks such as sweetened CocaCola with the Zero variant (sweetened with sweeteners). It's not that Coke is a good drinking plan, but if we've formed some sort of addiction to sweetened beverages over the years, it's probably going to be hard to break. Therefore, it's better to choose a more suitable alternative that fits better into our new and improved diet and doesn't unnecessarily create an appropriate higher calorie intake.

I would do the same with other foods and try to find a lighter version of them. If such a variant of eating is tolerable for us, it is time to embark on a healthy lifestyle to the fullest and replace most of the processed foods from our diet with unprocessed, more nutritionally valuable and more beneficial for the body variants of food.

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When we're ready to dive right into a healthy diet and know which foods are appropriate for our diet, it's important to determine it's daily caloric intake. In the case of dieting, the calorie deficit comes into play (i.e. our caloric intake must be lower than our caloric expenditure). To calculate our caloric intake, we can use a number of formulas that can be found on various nutrition websites, etc. If we don't feel like setting the right calorie intake for our goal, it's time to reach out to a nutritionist or a coach who can help us set our calorie intake or help us choose the right foods to include in our diet.

However, to get to the heart of the matter, healthy eating in itself does not always have a slimming effect. Why is that? As I mentioned above, you need to keep track of your caloric intake. If we eat healthily and eliminate processed foods from our diet, we may not see a weight loss result (hence, even if we are trying to gain muscle mass and need to be in a caloric surplus in this case). In the case of not keeping track of our caloric intake (or expenditure), we may be in the very situation where we are trying to eat healthily but the number on the scale stays the same and we can't move it. This is the very situation mentioned above, where we need to set our calorie intake at a point where the amount we eat puts us in a calorie deficit and starts the weight loss process. To start with, it's good to set a moderate calorie deficit, to which we add physical activity (walking at a faster pace, cardio activity, strength training or simply swapping the car/bus for walking or cycling) and then work with the food depending on the results.

Healthy eating is key to feeling better, our health, digestion, but it is also an integral part of the weight loss process. However, it is important to set our daily caloric intake according to our goal, to set a diet that is sustainable and not just a matter of a few weeks of necessary evil. It is not for nothing that healthy eating is associated with a healthy lifestyle, and the name alone implies that it is not a matter of a few weeks. You simply have to love a healthy lifestyle.

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