Articles > Balanced Living > Dieting

You should always avoid fad dieting, virtually every ‘diet’ excludes important nutrients that your body requires.

But the real danger of dieting is that for many people regular dieting becomes an eating disorder. You treat yourself to a roller coaster ride of weight gain and loss, where you eat a very strict (and often unhealthy) diet, lose weight, stop the diet and put the weight straight back on again - often by binging on junk food.

One thing you should remind yourself is that this behaviour effects more than you weight. When your weight and you nutrition is messed about with in this way, it can also effect your hormones, your sense of self esteem and your relationships with other people. Essentially you begin to act like an addict - erratic, irresponsible and ill.

If you are so overweight that your size badly effects your life then one of your best options is to join the Scottish Slimmers (or a similar reliable slimming group near you). They have the experience and knowledge to support you to lose weight in a healthy manner, and to help you to establish sensible eating patterns that will ensure you keep the weight off.

If you are like most people, you may be a little over weight, but you are aware that your diet could be more healthy. What you don’t have is the time to do anything about it.

Improving your diet

• Actually it takes no time to improve your diet, here are some guidelines to get you going

• Drink water or pure fruit juice. Flavoured water, soft drinks and pseudo juices contain high levels of refined sugar that are bad for your teeth, your weight, and you health generally.

• Cut down on caffeine, particularly in coffee. Vary your intake of hot drinks with green tea and herbal teas. Many of these have the added benefit of detoxifying your body and keeping you calm.

• Do try to drink 4-6 glasses of water or cups of herb tea a day, but don’t drink more than half a glass of anything with your meal as this pushes the food through your system before it can be properly digested.

• Do snack. Scientists from all fields agree that it is most natural for humans to “scatter feed”. Have fruit, carrot, pepper and celery sticks, nuts (preferably non salted), olives, bowls of cereal, rice cakes, oat cakes, ‘riveta’ rye crackers, low fat cheeses like cottage cheese and goats cheese.

• Cut down on refined sugar in your diet. Refined sugar creates free radicals in your body that attack all your cells and lead to premature aging and the complaints and illnesses we associate with old age.

• To keep your life sweet use dark and light brown sugar - these are partially refined and still contain loads of goodness, or use honey as a sweetener. When you do indulge make sure you eat cakes and sweets before mid afternoon, after this time your body is unlikely to need the calories for energy so they are stored as fat.

• Change the way you season your food. Table salt is not particularly good for you. I recommend Bio- salt which includes a range of nature body salts, rather than one, or that you use sea salt. If you use herbs and spices you will find that you can easily reduce your salt intake - Plus the herbs and spices themselves are very good for you in many, many ways.

Two ways to get ready for spring - mini detox and Ayurvedic

Detox

If you are just needing some revitalisation or to shed a few pounds, try a two day internal cleanse. It is quite simple to do - only takes a little willpower. And it helps if you like fruit. I recommend that you try it over a weekend or whilst on holiday because your energy levels may be very low for the two days of detox. First select four different fruits that you really like and make sure you have plenty in the house. On day one eat only two types of fruit. Have as much water, juice of your two fruits or herb tea that you like. Give yourself lots of time to rest and relax. Day two, do the same thing with the other two types of fruit. Day three you should wake up feeling a new person.

Ayurvedic Spring Cleaning

The Ayurvedic way of internal cleansing is to change the type of food that you eat, to help your system recover from the winter.
They suggest eating foods that are spicy, easy to digest and warming. Have loads of soups, and teas. And add hot spices like cinnamon, ginger, chilli peppers and basil to your diet.