With a slew of trendy diets floating around the internet and spreading by word of mouth now-a-days – low fat, low carb, Mediterranean, Keto, Paleo, just to name a few – it can be hard to tell which one is best, especially when different websites will tell you very different things.
Everyone seems to have a very strong opinion on the different kinds of diets, and that might be because dieting is very personalized.
Just because someone did Keto and lost 70 lbs and made a website about it, doesn’t mean that if you do Keto you will lose 70 lbs too. No matter what nutritionists and dieticians say, dieting all depends on you.
“The success of your diet relies entirely upon your body, mind, and attitude.” How old are you? What are your genetics? What do you do for a living? Are you married/children? How much do you exercise? What is your general diet? Do you have any illnesses or physical limitations? Are you depressed? The list of individualized questions could go on and on, but the point is, that dieting is going to be different for different people at different points in their lives.
A study published in the International Journal of Epidemiology had 1607 adults from seven different European countries grouped into four different diet groups. Three of the four groups were also instructed to utilize a website called Food4Me, which is a personalized nutrition tool. Each group was told to abide by varying degrees of a personalized diet plan for a total of six months, some being more ‘strict’ than others, with one group being a control group. At the end of the experiment period, 80% of the participants had completed their diet and study requirements, and were all eating less red meat and more fruit and vegetables.
“Those randomized to the personalized nutrition treatment groups had significantly better and bigger improvements in their eating patterns; they experienced double the improvement when it came to overall healthiness of their diets measured using the Healthy Eating Index compared to those in the control group.”
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Even more interesting, researchers found no connection or evidence that DNA or blood markers made any difference to the personalization outcome.
“What is exciting about this study is that we now know the Internet can be used to deliver personalized nutrition advice to large numbers of people…People find this approach convenient and it is better at improving people’s diets than the conventional ‘one size fits all’ approach. We would expect this to translate, eventually, to bigger improvements in health and wellbeing.”
So, how do you make a personalized diet plan?
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There are five basic things to consider when creating your personalized diet plan.
- Determine your Goals:
Are you training for a marathon? Trying to lower your cholesterol? Want to lose belly fat? Be specific!
- Take Workouts Into Caloric Consideration:
Always keep your workouts in mind and correlate your food to your exercise.
- Consider Your Lifestyle:
If you work 12-hours days with a long commute, it may be impossible to fit in an hour workout five days a week. Instead, work with your schedule and try to do weekend workouts, or short, high-intensity interval workouts instead.
- Think About Your Personality
It may be the smartest and most-economical choice to do Sunday meal prep for the whole week, but if you are a terror in the kitchen or hate leftovers, then that might not work best for you. Instead, maybe plan your meals ahead of time and place that list on your fridge to give you a sense of grounded stability (instead of running through the drive-thru for a cheeseburger).
- Journal Your Food and Exercise
Journaling can reveal patterns and weaknesses that may otherwise go unnoticed. After several days of journaling, you may discover that, “maybe you drink a few too many beers during the week, skip breakfast, or overeat late at night because you don’t have healthy meals or snacks at work.”
Article Curated from:
Men’s Fitness
