Barriers to healthy diets are placed into four broad categories:

1. External Barriers

2. Psychological Barriers
3. Physical Barriers
4. Dieting Barriers

This article examines only the most difficult barriers in each category. Let’s remove the barriers to healthy diets…but first, “What is a Healthy Diet?”

What is a Healthy Diet?

A healthy diet provides the recommended daily allowance for vitamins, minerals, protein, carbohydrates, and fat. Any diet that fails to meet the minimum daily allowance for any nutrient is unhealthy. Of course, providing the daily allowance for all nutrients is next to impossible given the poor nutritional value of today’s diets.

We eat on average 1.5 meals a day (not even close to the suggested 5-6 meals). The one meal we manage to eat is usually late in the evening, high in calories, high in fat, and is missing Group I Foods (fresh vegetables and fruit).

The majority of young men between the ages of 20-25 eat only 2 servings of fruit and 1 serving of fresh vegetables throughout the week! The next generation is nutritionally starved.

A healthy diet is quite simple and easy to follow. Here are the steps to eating a healthy diet:

1. Eat 5-6 meals a day.

2. Every meal should have a serving of lean protein, complex carbohydrate, and unlimited amounts of Group I Foods.

3. Eat approximately 40-50% protein, 30-40% complex carbohydrates, and 30% fat everyday. Limit sugars, saturated fats, and trans-fatty-acids.

4. Maintain a slightly negative energy balance or perfectly balance it. How do you accomplish this? Read the next few steps!

5. Calculate your energy output everyday. Energy output is the Resting Metabolic Rate plus the number of calories burned through physical activity.
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6. Subtract your energy output from your energy input — the number of calories you eat a day. The result is the remaining total energy and it determines your energy balance.

   If the result is a positive number, you have a Positive Energy Balance. Simply, cut back on the amount you eat.

   If the result is negative, you have a Negative Energy Balance. Increase the amount you eat.

7. Make adjustments to energy input (the number of calories you eat a day) so that you’ll remain with a slightly negative energy balance.

   Some weight loss experts advocate a strong negative energy balance at baseline. In theory, this makes sense but in practice it’s associated with weight regain.

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   I believe that energy should be balanced or slightly negative at baseline. The closer to a balanced energy state, the better the chance for avoiding weight regain and maintaining your ideal weight for a longer period of time.

8. Do not cut back, slow down, or stop exercising. If adjustments need to be made, it’s better to make dietary changes than to make changes to your exercise plan.

A healthy diet is simple to follow. Eat fewer calories, exercise, and make dietary adjustments as needed. No pills, supplements, acupuncture, magnets, or magic minerals are needed. Just a calculator.

Removing External Barriers to Healthy Diets

Two difficult external barriers are peer pressure and time. Our friends and family influence our lives more than we like to admit. They affect our decisions, choices, moods, behavior, and weight.

During medical school, I worked in a weight loss clinic to make some money. I will never forget the level of influence a spouse or friend could have on a patient. Several times, I saw first hand someone, other than the patient, make the dieting decisions.

At this level of influence, our peer groups can make a big impact on eating a healthy diet. Just keep this influence thing in mind. OR, should I say, “Keep it in mind only if you have TIME.”

Time is another rarely acknowledged external barrier to healthy diets. We live in world that seems to lose time. The normal 24 hour day feels more like 15 hours. All we do is rush from one event or appointment to the next. Eating a healthy diet is next to impossible.

Please, slow down. Who knows, by slowing down we might actually pay attention to the important things in our lives. I find that the more I rush the less I get done. And what I do finish, really isn’t all that important.

Be serious about eating a healthy diet and slow down.

Removing Dieting Barriers to Healthy Diets

About two to three decades ago, while watching repeats on TV, Americans changed their diets and started eating lots of fat and processed foods. We have suffered ever since.

Eating lots of fat created a macronutrient imbalance and has clogged our arteries. Then we fell in love with processed foods. This love affair drained all of the vitamins and minerals from our bodies and resulted in a micronutrient deficiency.

Until we restore things to the pre-TV Dinner diet, we will continue to suffer heart attacks and weight gain.

It’s really crazy…we stuff ourselves with heavy fat and then starve for vitamins and minerals.

Removing Physical Barriers to Healthy Diets

Physically, our lack of exercise is the greatest barrier to healthy diets. Start exercising! Walk. Jog. Swim. Lift weights. Sweat. Move. Breath. Live.

Removing Psychological Barriers to Healthy Diets

The mind can be tough to control, especially when it comes to hunger. But what can help is changing your food perspective. Where do you place food in your life? To help you through this important change in perspective, check out…Weight Loss Psychology

Conclusion

Watch the influences in your life, slow down, reduce fat, eat raw vegetables and fruit, exercise, and change your food perspective.

Once you’ve done all that, then you can focus on eating a healthy diet. I think we need to get back the 24 hour day, what do you think?

To Healthy Living!

Michael A. Smith, MD
Chief Medical Consultant
Diet Basics Website

Dr. Smith is the Chief Medical Consultant for the Diet Basics Website, a content rich weight loss website dedicated to all dieters. Visit his site and check out his Diet Basics News Blog and RSS Feed. Hundreds of E-Zines and Websites have already tapped into this incredible free source of weight loss information. Don’t miss out!

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Any doctor worth their salt will tell you diets don’t work. Plain and simple. Surprised?

Well you might be. You can’t get away from all the talk about South Beach, Atkins, Low Carb, Zone … you name it, they’re talking about it. It’s on TV, in magazines… everywhere you look.

And of course there are the pills, drugs and other expensive methods to lose weight. While they may be appropriate in certain cases, by and large they aren’t necessary. Some can actually be dangerous to your health.

What does work, what’s been proven to work time and time again is something very simple… a lifestyle change. You may not want to hear it, but it’s true.

You can’t eat thousands of calories, rich desserts, sugary snacks, excess fat and tons of carbs, get little or no activity and expect to lose weight with a pill!

You’ll be surprised to know that you don’t need to stop eating or have to exercise for hours every day to lose weight. Just a few simple lifestyle changes added daily can turn your life around quickly. You will start to lose weight within days and feel better as well.

Here are 4 tips you can use to get started today:

Drink water.

Drinking lots of water is probably the single most important thing you can do for your health. Water delivers nutrients throughout your body, flushes toxins out of your system and aids in digestion. When you get up in the morning, start with a full glass of water before you start your day (add a little lemon if you like). Then get at least 10-12 additional glasses of water in throughout the day.

Eat slowly.

Chew your food 10-12 times before swallowing. Your saliva starts the digestion process, and if you don’t chew enough, your stomach has to work twice as hard and many times you don’t get much out of the foods you eat — except maybe some indigestion .

Split your entree.

When eating out, split your entree with your dining companion. Most restaurants now serve portions that are up to 8 times the recommended serving size. Supplement with a salad, soup or vegetable to complete your meal.

Avoid sodas.

Did you know that an average soda has 14 teaspoons of sugar? Not only are these empty calories and carbs that take you on a blood sugar roller coaster and adds pounds, the sugar also can also cripple your immune system for up to 5 hours leaving your body working overtime and open to infections, viruses and the effects of stress. Drinking one soda a day alone can pack on 16 lbs of unwanted weight! Skip that soda and watch the weight go away. Additionally, recent studies have linked increased soda consumption with certain cancers and a loss of essential minerals like calcium from our bodies.

You CAN do it!

Mark Idzik reports on natural and alternative health and is an author and health coach helping his clients lose weight and make better health choices. Receive his 37 free weight loss tips by visiting: http://www.Everyday-Weight-Loss.com

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As we all know, weight loss diets are big business. And looking at the statistics, it’s easy to see why. Currently, an estimated 58 million American adults are overweight (BMI 25+), of whom an estimated 40 million are obese (BMI 30+), 9.6 million are seriously obese and 6 million suffer from super-obesity (BMI 40+). Worldwide statistics on overweight are equally alarming, as reflected in the new word “globesity”. In China, the number of overweight people has risen from less than 10 percent to 15 percent in just three years. In Brazil and Colombia, the figure of overweight is about 40 percent - comparable with several European countries. Even sub-Saharan Africa is seeing an increase in obesity, especially among urban women. In all regions, obesity appears to escalate as income increases. And the higher the incidence of obesity, the higher the incidence of weight-related disease, including: type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, metabolic disorders like insulin resistance, and cancers of the breast and colon.

CONVENTIONAL DIET METHODS

Both the US Surgeon General and the Dietary Guidelines For Americans (2005) issued by the US Dept of Agriculture emphasise the need for calorie control and increased physical exercise to reduce the overweight epidemic, but evidence suggests that conventional diet methods do not provide significant weight reduction, due to poor compliance. Surveys show that annual weight loss resulting from convention diet and exercise programs averages less than 8 pounds per annum, while in a 4-year follow-up study of programs incorporating the use of obesity drugs, behavior modification, diet and exercise, the final average weight loss was 3 pounds. This apparent failure of conventional weight loss methods is often contrasted with the 30-40 percent average weight loss following bariatric surgery.

FOOD COMPOSITION OF DIETS

Fashion sells products, and weight loss diets are no exception. First we had low-fat diets, which were promoted as heart-friendly ways of reducing weight. Unfortunately, this message was interpreted by consumers as “all fats are bad, all carbs are good”, and led to an unhealthy overconsumption of refined carbs. With the relaunch of Dr Atkins “New Diet Revolution”, the fashion penduluum swung the other way. Now carbs were the enemy, not fat.
After Atkins came the South Beach Diet, which offered us a more moderate low-carb approach. Now, it is GI diets - based on foods with a lower glycemic response - that are high fashion and, being scientifically more beneficial, are likely to remain so for some time. However, while the food composition of diets may change, the basic law of weight loss remains unaltered: calorie expenditure must exceed calorie intake. To this extent, provided a diet is calorie-controlled and includes foods from all food groups, the exact composition of foods remains no more than a matter of personal taste.

GENERAL EATING AND EXERCISE HABITS

When assessing the effectiveness of conventional dieting methods, due regard must be paid to general eating habits. In America at least, these do not appear to be helpful. Despite the mounting evidence of weight-related ill-health, social eating habits continue to develop in unhealthy directions. Value-for-money “supersizing” continues to attract customers, while fast-food sales continue to rise. And the continuing demand for “instant” food only inspires the food industry to produce more and more refined food options bulging with nutritional deficiency and calorie-overload. Is it any wonder that levels of diet-compliance among average dieters is so low? Meantime, an estimated 78 percent of Americans do not meet basic activity level recommendations, while 25 percent are completely sedentary.

IS SUPPORT THE ANSWER?

If conventional diet programs remain less than perfect ways of tackling overweight in the face of engrained eating habits, it would be misleading to write them off completely. Not only does research data from the US National Weight Control Registry demonstrate that long term weight reduction is perfectly achievable, a number of diet programs, especially medically-supervised clinic-based programs, are consistently effective. What distinguishes these diets is the level of counseling support which subjects receive. Nowadays, this support can be provided in various ways, including: mandatory group meetings, one-on-one sessions, online forums or chat-rooms. And it seems to work. For example, according to recent studies, the average weight reduction for a 10-12 week clinic-based obesity program involving meal-replacement diets, exercise and counseling support is 5.5 pounds.

FINDING MORE SUPPORT

If getting proper support is one way of improving conventional diets, dieters need to rethink their approach. Instead of focusing attention on finding the optimal eating-plan, they need to look for programs offering optimal support. Weight Watchers is an obvious choice but diets organised around the workplace or other social groupings may also provide natural help. Online programs with forum support might also be considered. In any event, there is no substitute for a reliable dieting partner.

ADOPTING HEALTHY HABITS

Given the fact that losing as little as 7-10 percent of body weight can improve many of the problems linked to being overweight, such as high blood pressure and diabetes, some obesity experts advocate a less formal approach to calorie control. They recommend adopting certain healthy habits rather than following a specific diet. An example might be a 200-calorie-a-day reduction achievable by taking a moderate 30 minute walk, and switching from (say) whole milk to skimmed milk. This saves 73,000 calories a year - the equivalent of 20 pounds of body fat. The commercial response to this approach is already visible in programs such as the “Three Hour Diet”, which recommends regular eating to maintain a regular rate of calorie burning. Expect to see more weight loss programs like this, which emphasise specific habits.

CONCLUSION

Current levels of overweight and obesity require urgent attention. To be effective, conventional diet programs need to provide optimal support rather than optimal food composition, in order to facilitate diet compliance. For people who are unable or unwilling to follow a specific weight loss plan, making small but specific changes may be sufficient to achieve significant improvements in health.

Linda Smyth B.Sc., RD, aged 51, is a qualified dietitian and nutritional consultant. She is part of the editorial team at http://www.diet-i.com which provides a range of information about diet, nutrition and weight management to more than 5 million visitors per year.

Diet Information
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