Food and Diet: Dieting to lose weight

Dieting is the most essential component of weight loss. Regardless of nutrient content of the food eaten, weight loss occurs when there is a decrease in total caloric intake as opposed to the caloric usage of the body. There are no real diet food. Dieting in an overweight person has the same principles for all healthy normal weight people. That is, a diet low in fat, high in complex carbohydrate, high in fibre and some amount of proteins. Minimise on nutrition-less calories like alcohol.

Most people who are unable to lose weight are people who have higher intake of calories. Most of these comes from fats which are tasty and easily available in fried food or fast food. The overall aim of dieting to lose weight is therefore to reduce calories while keeping enough nutrient and vitamin content. In particular, care must be noted that completely avoiding one class of food (like fats) may need to malnutrition as fats are necessary for absorption of fat soluble vitamins like Vitamin A, D, E and K.

In general, a food diet plan that creates a caloric deficit of 500 kcal a day less than the usual diet a person is taking will produce stable weight loss. The easiest way to do this is to replace 1 meal of high fat diet (eg fast food) with 1 meal of food high in nutrients and fibre (keeps you full) like salad with fruits, banana, or low fat yogurt with oat cereals. The usual problem is weight loss is not attempting the diet programme, it is maintaining it. It is therefore important that anyone who wants to diet should keep the regime simple (no heavy cooking) and continue to enjoy food they love eg.ice cream) but in lesser quantity.