Tips for Resolution Dieting
Tips to Meet Your Dieting Resolution
It’s the start of the first week of the year and it’s time to start putting those New Year’s resolutions into action! If you made a dieting resolution this year, chances are that it’s been tough to stick to it as you finish up the holiday leftovers and enjoy a few days of vacation. Today is a great time to start, though, as you get geared up to get back into work and your daily routine. To help you get a good jump into finally resolving your dieting resolution, here are our Top 3 Dieting Resolution Tips:
1. Make a Weekly Menu Plan
Since people often get into ruts and routines, start by mapping out what you usually eat in an average week. See where your problems days are – maybe you have a dozen different activities every Wednesday, so you always end up eating fast food. You can start making adjustments to what you’d normally eat in order to make a healthy diet plan moving forward. For those busy Wednesdays, for example, you do something easy; then, eat healthier when you have time to cook something different on another day.
Another great thing about having a plan is that you can shop for everything all at once and avoid the common trouble of finding yourself with nothing healthy to eat in the house. People often break their diets when they don’t have any convenient healthy options on hand, so making a menu and doing all your shopping can make dieting easier.
2. Take Small Changes, Turn Them into a Lifestyle
One of the worst things you can do when it comes to dieting is try to get it all done at once. If you change your entire diet at once and remove everything you love, you’ll be bored to tears and done with dieting in just a few days. A better option is to start making small changes gradually and then allow them to add up to your overall lifestyle change. Instead of removing all red meat if you eat a mainly red meat diet currently, simply exchange one of those red meat dinners for salmon or tuna.
The great thing about dieting this way is that if there’s a part of your diet that’s driving you nuts – like you get tired of eating salmon every week to get your recommended Omega 3 – you can adjust that part of your diet without giving up on the whole thing (i.e. you don’t eat salmon for that week, but you substitute walnut-encrusted chicken instead).
3. Healthy Grilling, Anyone?
As cooking techniques go, grilling is one of the healthier cooking options you have – frying is obviously one of the most fattening cooking methods, but people don’t usually consider the unhealthy aspects of others. Baking, for instance, often asks you to add fattening additives, such as butter to sauté, cooking spray on a casserole dish or creams for sauces. While each of these by itself might not be bad, add them up and you have a less healthy meal as a whole.
On the flipside, indoor grilling doesn’t really require you to add anything at all. An electric grill with a good nonstick coating doesn’t require you to add oil, butter or cooking spraying to prevent food from sticking to the plates as it cooks. As a result, you don’t have to add any extra calories with additives to make your food cook better.
In addition, flavorings and seasonings that you add to grilled food to enhance flavor – like rubs and marinades – don’t typically include a lot of fat-laden items like creams, butter and milk. Instead, they use things like spices, herbs and citrus juices to add flavor – none of which add a lot of fat and extra calories. In this light, it’s easy to see how a good grilled chicken dish would be healthier than an equivalent baked alternative.
For more information on daily recommended food servings and portion sizes, please visit fda.gov for a free PDF file of their Dietary Guidelines for Americans.
