Don't Lose Sight of Your Purpose (Diet Talk)

 It seems like everyone today is either going paleo, vegan/vegetarian, or doing some crazy version of IIFYM. I see new diet trends popping up all the time, and while part of me thinks its great that people are even making the effort to be more health conscious, I also see people tending to lose sight of the whole reason they began these diets in the first place.

 If you’re a vegetarian or a vegan and you chose that lifestyle because of religion or moral reasons, then this really doesn’t apply to you. I’m talking to those of you who began a new diet to become healthier or lose some weight. Also, if your doing any diet in a safe, healthy way and it’s working for you-keep doing what you’re doing; I’m proud of you! This is meant for people who flip flop from diet to diet wondering why it’s not working.

As a fitness nutritionist, I have people coming to me all the time and the first thing they say to me is “I wanted to lose some extra weight, so I decided to go vegan”. I’m always so baffled by this- you wanted to lose weight…so you basically decided to start a diet consisting of almost solely carbohydrates and fats? Let me know how that works for ya!  Don’t get me wrong, the vegan/vegetarian diets can work and they can help you lose weight, if you’re very careful, but are you really being that careful? If you’re one of those dieters trying to find vegan butter or going out of your way to find vegan pizzas and vegan burgers on a regular basis- I can promise you, you’re not being all that health conscious and you’re probably not losing any weight either. This draws back to my point- what was your purpose? To be healthier and lose weight! In order to do that, you don’t need to worry about making the vegan choice, you need to worry about making the healthy choice! I promise, those are not always the same things.

Paleo people; why did you decide to begin the paleo diet in the first place? More often than not, when I ask this question I get something like: “ I wanted to start eating healthier” or “I want to eat a diet of only whole, unprocessed foods”. Those things are both GREAT! But what I don’t understand is people going above and beyond to find new “paleo” processed foods! It seems insane to me-if you’re gonna walk around telling the world that you’re paleo and you only want to eat whole foods then what the heck are you doing buying a paleo bar and protein powder? Real primal eaters didn’t have those things anyways. And if you think about it, you really haven’t changed your actual eating habits at all; all you’ve done is decided to spend twice as much on processed foods that are allowed to call themselves “paleo”.

IIFYMer’s, I feel like this subject has already been beaten to death. You and I both know that unless you’ve got the metabolism of a 12 year old boy, there’s no way you’re actually fitting all that crap into your macros on a daily basis and seeing real results. The people who are truly successful with this "diet" are the ones who eat a lot of healthy protein rich foods with the occasional treat. 

Moral of this rant:
1. Don’t be vegan or paleo or fit food into your macros only when it’s convenient for you- for ANY diet to work, you really need to be consistent more than anything.
2. And don’t lose sight of the purpose of your diet-to be a healthier version of you!
3. Diet to be healthy and fit, not to follow a trend