Every single day for the rest of your life you have to:

• Stop eating all the food you enjoy and only eat brown rice, bland chicken, and steamed broccoli
• For breakfast you can have oatmeal with no flavor
• You can only drink water so no alcohol or any other drinks with any sort of flavor
• If you must go out for a special celebration you must bring your own food as stated above
• You have to measure everything and document it super accurately so that you only consume 500 calories a day. 1 Calorie off is unacceptable

I’ll be honest…I wanted to kill myself just from writing out that diet. However, this kind of diet is what is typically given to the average person that wants to lose weight and get healthy. Essentially you have to eat very little food and it all has to be very bland. Other diets typically known as “fad diets” follow a similar protocol, but they typically demonize particular foods or food groups. Let’s break this down and understand why these methods are typically unsuccessful.

Flaw: Too much at one time

The average diet that is given to clients that want to lose weight basically completely flips their entire way of eating upside down. You are expected to do all these new things, eat different foods, and dedicated a lot of time to prepare and follow the plan accordingly. In addition to eating very little food you’re expected to perfect your sleeping habits, make time for breakfast, and workout 3-5 days a week. Implementing all these new habits at one time is an extremely challenging ordeal. The typical trainer see’s these habits as simple and part of their everyday life, and something that they may have already done in the past so it must work for everyone. THIS CRAP IS HARD! It is simply way too much at one time and will be an overwhelming venture.

The psychological backfire of these diets is the biggest reason these diets fail. When you fail to keep to the program you’re met with discord by the trainer and yourself. Sayings like “try harder”, “do better”, and “you don’t want this enough” can be enough to make you feel like a failure and give up. After enough failed attempts you feel that being a healthier person is just something you can’t do.

Correct: Baby steps, Little bit at a time

Find the small habits that you can accomplish easily. Take these new habits one step at a time and make sustainable progress. It is much easier to implement one new habit at a time than taking on a lot at once. Consistency is key to creating a healthy lifestyle, and it is easier to be consistent with easy habits. As each new habit becomes easier then you start adding new habits to the mix. Each baby step you take becomes giant strides to your success. All these habits become building blocks for your new healthy lifestyle.

Flaw: Doesn’t teach better habits

I could tell you to take a multivitamin, but if I don’t tell you why then why should you care? When you see an advertisement on TV for a pan they don’t just tell you “buy this pan it’s great!” They spend a great deal of time explaining why this product is the best and is going to benefit you. Setting up a program for you to follow isn’t the same as actually educating you on why these new habits are important. The education that comes with nutrition is far more important than the nutrition program itself.

Understanding food and healthy eating habits helps you continue far past the 3 month transformation. Learning the reason behind all the different habits that are taught to you, and the affect that food has on your body will help you stay healthy long after you have reached your goal. When you understand nutrition on a more intricate level you can enjoy food to its fullest without the stress of gaining weight. Enjoy the foods that bring you nostalgia and foods that are strongly part of your culture without worry. Just following a program or “fad diet” takes all the joy out of food and places you inside a box, and if you step out of the box you’re told you will be fat. Become educated and roam freely eating foods that make you happy but having an understanding of those foods that keeps you healthy for a lifetime.

Correct: Learn the importance of the new habits

“I did then what I knew how to do. Now that I know better, I do better”. – Maya Angelou. Educating yourself on the real reasons why we would want to incorporate certain habits into our lives helps with consistency. For example, I want you to eat more protein. By itself this task doesn’t really doesn’t give you a whole lot of reason to actually do it besides the fact that I told you to do it. So let’s add the following statement. “Protein is the building blocks of our body and if we don’t give our bodies enough then we won’t have the building blocks to grow our muscles. A good target is about your body in grams of protein. Protein also has a satiety effect and helps us feel and stay full for longer periods of time.” Now that you know a couple of the reasons why you should eat more protein the chances of you actually incorporating are much more likely.

Flaw: All-or-nothing paradigm

“I already messed up my diet for today so I might as well have my fill of cake and ice cream”. “F#%@ it!” These situations happen all the time to everybody! We give up on the rest of the day, or the week, because we’ve already fallen off the cliff for one day or one meal. This sort of thinking creates a bad relationship with food which makes it very difficult to stay consistent. We often end up saying things like “I’ll get back on it tomorrow” or “I’ll restart everything on Monday”. This turns exercising and eating healthy into a punishing activity. These binges do impede your progress but they also make you feel as though you have failed.

These all have bigger psychological affects than you would think. Not only do you feel like you’re letting yourself down but you feel like others are looking down on you too. This can cause a bad relationship with yourself and your body. All these added stresses are difficult to overcome, and the stress causes your hormones to become unregulated.

Correct: Find what is sustainable for you to stay consistent

The biggest reason that this fails is because of the relatively extreme level of deprivation. This deprivation will inevitably lead to a period of binging. When you feel completely deprived of things that you once enjoyed you will be driven to over consume these foods. The biggest thing to overcome are special occasions. Food is normally the central item that pulls everyone together. Personally, coming from a family that follows a lot of the culture from Hawaii food is a staple. There’s no party at a Hawaiian household where there isn’t an over abundance of food, and you eat so much that you go into what we call “Polynesian paralysis”. Everyone experiences this with events like Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years. These events create an enormous amount of happiness which is important to our health. So what do we do? How do we become healthier without completely depriving ourselves of the foods that make us happy?

We need to slowly work our way towards a diet that we find sustainable. By finding a diet that is sustainable we won’t feel the need to over consume on foods that we crave. We will be able to enjoy the foods we crave without the guilt that tends to follow. However, these cravings will come less and less frequently. Since we are nourishing our bodies with the whole foods that it desires our craving for processed foods is something we think less about. We become much more satisfied with only a couple slices of pizza or a small bowl of ice cream instead of the pizza or the entire carton.

What is the best diet?

The best diet is the one that you can eat for the rest of your life. You can allow all the “bad” foods that you love and crave without the guilt. You stop labeling foods as good or bad because you understand food on an entirely different level. Sorry to say but there is no one diet fits all approach. There is no secret formula to becoming healthy. If you were looking to see if veganism, keto, paleo, and any other fad diet was the solution I am sorry to disappoint you. You have to find the diet that works for you, because everyone is different and comes from different backgrounds. The food that I eat and the way that I eat isn’t necessarily what will work for you. But, in general you want to work your way to whole minimally processed foods.

Take baby steps to slowly eliminate processed foods and eat whole foods. Don’t take on too much at once and overwhelm yourself. If you do happen to fall off don’t consider yourself a failure and continue rolling down the hill. Pick yourself back up and stay the course! Not every day is going to be perfect there will always be an obstacle that will try to nudge you from the path. Don’t be discouraged and take a moment what happened or is happening at the moment that there are obstacles. Understand what is happening and why it is happening. This education will help you become more self-aware and propel you forward even faster.

STRIVE TO BE BETTER THAN THE PERSON YOU WERE YESTERDAY EVERYDAY