Wednesday 6 May 2009

Today is International No Diet Day!



The International No Diet Day, started by British feminist Mary Evans Young in 1992, is a celebration of body acceptance and body shape diversity and a day dedicated to raising awareness of the dangers of dieting.


The Body Image Coalition recommends:

  • Celebrate your natural size, eat well and be physically active every day
  • Pay others a compliment based on something other than weight-related qualities
  • Don't compare your body to others
  • Avoid fad diets and eat healthily
  • Help young people understand that the image of beauty portrayed in the media are not normal.
Sounds good to me!

Disappointment with diets shouldn't come as a surprise. I've blogged about the lemonade diet recently. There's the cabbage soup diet, the grapefruit diet, the Subway diet, the Scarsdale diet (promising 1 lbs weight loss a day!), the cookie diet. The list goes on. The fact is, you'll lose weight if you follow these diets... at least for a little while. However, the more restrictive the diet, the more hungry you'll be and the more you'll crave once-favourite foods you've given up. You'll inevitably "cheat", leading to feelings of failure and hopelessness and, in turn, you'll most likely give up on all weight loss strategies, including the good ones like exercise.

A healthy sustainable diet with lots of choices, few (if any) restrictions and no 'special foods' that's not only good for your waistline but for your heart, bones, brain, colon and psyche is what will help you meet your goals and keep you happy and healthy for a lifetime.

2 comments:

Gina; The Candid RD said...

YES! Thanks for the info, I'm going to have an extra scoop of my homemade peanut butter ice cream tonight, for sure!

Jo said...

Certainly there are a lot of diet tips out there. But I believe in maintaining a balanced healthy food in your intake is the best way there is. Why deprive yourself of something that is really good, just eat whatever you want but in moderation of course don't overdo it.