Is dieting healthy?
Cut your calories by just 600 a day
Maintaining a healthy weight is essentially about balancing the calories you consume with the calories you expend throughout your day. NICE suggests that the ideal diet for long-term weight loss is one that provides just 600 calories a day less than the energy you burn every day5.
The average woman burns 2000 calories a day, so a diet providing 1400 calories a day would be optimum for healthy weight loss. Alternatively, you could boost the amount of calories you burn to help create that calorie gap.
Balance is key to a healthy diet
It's important to remember that balance is key to good health. If you are planning to restrict your food intake in an effort to lose weight, it's still important to eat a balanced diet with plenty of fruit and vegetables in order to ensure that you get enough vitamins and minerals.
Eating too little food, or too narrow a variety of different foods, could lead to vitamin deficiencies, causing a whole new raft of health issues such as tiredness, headaches, skin problems, dizziness, difficulty sleeping and poor wound healing6.
So instead of hoping for a magic wand or depriving yourself of real meals, focus on eating a wide variety of healthy, wholesome food. By doing so, you can slowly reduce your weight and improve your long-term health - and that's got to be something worth looking forward to.
Summary
- Avoid faddy diets which could pose health risks
- Understand the health risks of not losing excess weight
- Only follow weight loss programmes based on a balanced healthy diet
- Aim to lose no more than one to two pounds a week
- Follow NICE recommendations for achieving a healthy weight
- Cut your calories by just 600 a day and boost your activity levels
- Eat a wide variety of food to get enough vitamins and minerals
References:
- Obesity: the prevention, identification, assessment and management of overweight and obesity in adults and children, December 2006, National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence and National Collaborating Centre for Primary Care
- http://www.nhs.uk/Conditions/Diet/Pages/Risks.aspx?url=Pages/what-is-it.aspx
Slender Bear 30/04/09
This is great - I was expecting to read all about diet drinks and sweeteners which are really not good for you and nobody really knows what effect they have on the body in the long term. Sensible healthy food and diet is the way forward and not ‘diet foods’