WHAT IS THE MEANING OF THE WORD 'DIET' ?

Hi everyone, welcome to my new blog titled “Eat Healthy Keep Healthy”. In this blog I will be writing on what exactly is a healthy eating lifestyle & how best to maintain it, so we can eat healthy & keep healthy in the long run. Most often when we suddenly find ourselves gaining weight, we want a miracle to happen. We want a superfast method of weight & tummy reduction. So, we watch some YouTube videos or read through some information on the internet that promises weight reduction in just 15-20 days & we begin to follow the same.

After successfully losing weight, we again begin to follow our otherwise daily food routine which includes consuming excess junk food & other bad food habits. And the impact of the temporary diet regime is lost and a person becomes his or her former self. So, in my blog, I would like to explain why a temporary weight loss program is not useful & just a waste of time and money. What is rather required is both a ‘Healthy Diet’ & ‘Lifestyle’ i.e. a permanent change in the eating lifestyle is required, so that our health itself is simultaneously improving and maintaining.

My first post in this Blog is titled, “What is the meaning of the word ‘diet’”? In this post we shall see the complete meaning of the word ‘diet’, so as we proceed further we can understand better how to develop & maintain an excellent diet and lifestyle. The dictionary meaning of the word diet means, “the kinds of food that a person, animal, or community habitually eats”. So, in general, all that humans and animals eat can be termed as food or diet. The kind of general diet that humans consume differs from person to person across communities, countries & regions.

In the world of nutrition and fitness, the word ‘diet’ has a more specific meaning. Diet here means following a specific diet program or regimen for improving health. It implies a change in food and lifestyle for a specific period. The several reasons why people follow a specific diet regimen could be weight loss, weight gain, or recovery from diseases such as PCOD, cancer, thyroid, hypertension, mental disorders, diabetes, etc. But, what is important to understand is that every person needs to follow a healthy eating lifestyle to avoid future health issues because, at some point in our lives, everyone has to face the negative consequences of an unhealthy eating lifestyle.

As mentioned previously, the daily food that we consume is also called ‘diet’. But all that we need to do is make some changes in the daily food and make it a part of our lifestyle. So, that we are not unduly conscious & bogged down with the thought that we are strictly following a certain diet pattern. If we have been eating excessively from outside, we should stop this slowly, and make this also a part of our altered lifestyle.

So, when we start coming to terms with this lifestyle, we don’t need to tell anyone that we are on a specific diet regimen. This helps us to be at ease. People in today’s world in general struggle to follow a specific diet pattern by avoiding certain foods like sweets, ice cream, etc. Most consider following a diet program as impossible and very taxing. As, a result they fail to inculcate a good diet regimen and thus don’t follow a healthy lifestyle. This further result in various kinds of health issues in the long run for such people.

So, I am drawing your attention once again to the meaning of the word ‘diet’. Diet is a pattern of eating, a routine that we follow with your food. This pattern or routine cannot be the same for months or years together; it needs to change from time to time according to the weather, one’s health, health goals, nutritional deficiencies, body activity, stress levels, moods, and very importantly one’s likes and dislikes. That’s one reason why trend diets don’t work. And that’s why, when we follow certain diets, we stop losing weight after a particular point.

Each person is different, and that’s why one person’s diet plan might not suit another person. And that’s why we hear people saying that their diet plan did not provide the expected results. It’s not the diet plan itself but the wrong pattern of eating that doesn’t suit one’s body.

So, we need to develop a diet that we very much like and we should make this our lifestyle. It should be a diet that makes us feel fit, healthy, peaceful, and happy. It should be a diet that we follow in and out of season. It should be a diet that we try and follow every day, irrespective of the circumstances, just like we used to have our food every day. This should be a diet that we follow consistently during our breakfast, lunch, dinner, etc.

So, this leads each one of us to be our own nutritionist. In the upcoming posts of this blog, we shall see how this is possible. Meanwhile, given below is a checklist to know whether or not we are really following a healthy lifestyle diet.

✓ I am not overtly bogged down following up the diet plan but I am happy, peaceful & confident.

✓ My lifestyle diet does not feel like a forced routine anymore.

✓ I don’t feel like I am following a structured diet regimen.

✓ My weight is reducing consistently & I am on my way to the desired weight.

✓ I am no longer obsessed with tracking my weight on the weight scale.

✓ I can understand what food suits my body very well.

✓ Eating healthy has become like a hobby for me.

✓ Once in a while, I can have outside food as well.

✓ I feel energetic throughout the day.

✓ I have developed glowing skin & thick and shiny hair.

✓ I have now figured out my ideal lifestyle & easily adapted to it.

So, what is the lifestyle diet and how does it work? The lifestyle diet is a diet that can be a part of our everyday life. It takes care of our physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual health. Every individual’s lifestyle diet is unique. We need not follow someone else’s lifestyle diet but instead work out what diet best fits us and adopt it as a lifestyle. In this blog, Eat Healthy Keep Healthy, we will try and figure out what diet lifestyle works best for each of us.

We will also see how to deal with different situations in life in a healthy way. We shall also see different kinds of healthy diets, healthy foods, and healthy food lifestyles. We should make efforts to imbibe these healthy food lifestyles and habits in our daily lives which would in turn make all the difference in improving and maintaining our health in the long run. Indeed, as the blog title suggests, we can Eat Healthy and Keep Healthy.

In the next post, we shall see how we can adopt a more practical approach towards developing and following up on a healthy eating lifestyle.

- by James J.