What’s the best diet out there for me?

What’s the best diet? This is the most common question I have gotten over the years and especially over the holiday season. This is common, partly because people know they’re overindulging. It feels good to talk about eating healthier or planning to do better after the holidays. These plans have what they’re going to do, or try to do to off set all the extra weight they gained eating everything in front of them for 2 months.

Unfortunately, there’s many answers that are correct for this question. There’s not just one specific diet that’s best for everybody. If your goal is to lose weight, then there’s a specific way of doing it. Is your goal to get stronger, there’s a different way to eat for that. Do you want to have better endurance and pick up a new recreational sport like tennis, triathlons, or run half or full marathons? There’s a different way to eat for those.

When I get this question in the middle of the holiday season, I find more people want to simply lose weight. Fortunately, this has an easy answer. Most people can pick a diet, whether it’s the Atkins diet, keto diet, South Beach diet, or intermittent fasting. It doesn’t really matter which program you pick. If you pick one of them and truly stick to it, it’s most likely gonna work. But, I want to make it even simpler when it comes to weight loss. It’s very easy. You have to take in less calories than you burn per day. If you’re active and go for a 20 minute run you can eat 200 more calories. Being active utilizes more energy, calories than sitting all day. That means you can eat a little more. If you sit around and don’t do anything all day, you have to eat 200 calories less.

But how do I figure this out?

First, you can come to professionals like us at Pinnacle Fitness, and start off with our Inbody body scan. This will tell us your BMI (body mass index) exactly how many calories your body needs per day to maintain itself. Plus it gives us information like muscle mass, body fat, and water levels. Once we have all this information, we can lay out the path and make it very simple for you.

This is a great starting point, The first few days of this new eating style could be challenging. It’s a lot easier to say this and I understand but, it’s OK to feel a little hungry, especially in the beginning . In the beginning stage, you are retraining your body to taking less calories than it’s used to. The human body doesn’t understand why it’s taking in less calories, so it triggers you to be hungry so you will take in the same amount of calories it’s used to. We have to break that cycle and change or re-create a new setpoint (normal). We’ll come up with strategies like taking the dog for a walk when you get that 4 o’clock in the afternoon hunger. Maybe call a family member or friend that you’ve been meaning to call at that 11 AM snack time that you used to take. Whatever trick we can do to make this a new pattern and routine.

Happy holidays and stay strong!

In our next article, we will get a little deeper into the quality of the calories we take in.