10 tips for Dieting

By Adapt Athlete Dan Walls

Top 10 tips for dieting

With a lot of focus on general health and body composition these day’s people are finally beginning to realise that what you put in your mouth is significantly correlated to how you feel and the way you look. Realising this people start to “diet” in a specific way to achieve their goal. Individual reasons for dieting will vary from person to person, ranging from dieting for general health to maybe dieting to step on stage at a fitness or bodybuilding show. These goals are completely different, however, the principles and discipline it takes to achieve the end result are the same.

So here are my top 10 tips for achieving your diet related goals…

• Scrap the word diet!! As soon as people hear the word diet they associate it with eating less, being starved and have a negative overall impression of the word. I like to think of it as a lifestyle change to achieve a positive goal. This automatically puts you in a positive state of mind about the challenge ahead.

• Start to think of food differently. You need to start thinking of food as fuel to perform in your workouts, or think that every time you eat something healthy and nutritious you are becoming a healthier person, it may sound silly but the fact is its true.

• Get other people involved. This may be a little hard if you’re on a competition diet as not many people want to jump on stage. However if you’re competing chances are you know someone else who is, so try to surround yourself with people on the same journey as you. If you are a just on a health kick wanting to lose a bit of weight get your partner involved or your kids and encourage each other to succeed.

• Treat yourself. If you have a coach this is ultimately down to them to decide but if you’re just looking to become a healthier individual make sure you’re treating yourself occasionally. Yes that means chocolate cake, pizza, burgers anything you want or have been craving whilst eating your nutritious foods.

• Be creative. Make sure you are eating a wide variation of foods and searching for creative ways to make healthy meals. In theory you should be able to go without a full on cheat meal with the amount of tasty healthy variations of food out there. This will keep everything fresh and hopefully stop you from getting bored and potentially slipping away from your healthy lifestyle.

• Be consistent. This is one of the main reasons people fail. They will eat healthy for a few weeks, train hard and see a drop in weight. Once the weight loss stops their morale goes down, they train a few less days, eat some crap then before you know it they’ve stopped it all and their back to square one. As long as you’re consistently following your plan for your specific goal you will get to where you want to be. DON’T be one of these people that walk into the gym and say “I’m just getting back into it, it’s hard”. The key is to never get out of it, even with injuries there’s always ways to work round things, it all comes down to how much you want it at the end of the day.

• Seek help. The easiest way to fail is by not knowing what you’re doing. It’s well worth investing in a programme and getting some nutrition advice from someone who knows what they’re doing and can help you along the way with your diet and training. If your serious about getting in shape then I can’t stress enough how important this is. It will also make your life a lot easier as all you have to do is follow instruction and not think for yourself.

• Work WITH your coach. It’s important that you and your coach work together to devise a plan that will fit in with your lifestyle and the things you like to do. Also choosing foods you like and will stick to instead of just being told you must eat this.

• Learn to man up! At times it’s going to be hard, if your goal is to compete in any sort of contest it’s going to get REALLY hard! If you’re used to eating whatever the hell you want all the time it’s going to get REALLY hard. But its times like this you need to man the F@ck up, get on with it and remember why you started in the first place.

• This is undoubtedly the most important and most significant thing you must do when on ANY sort of diet designed for ANY goal. We have all heard the saying “failing to prepare is preparing to fail” well it’s absolutely true. You need to plan your life around your goals and this can be very difficult if you’re not used to it, but when you get used to it, it will just come naturally. Constant planning hours, days and sometimes weeks in advance of meals, training, sleep and other things you do day to day is essential to succeed.