There’s a lot of information about weight loss floating around and a lot of the discussion revolves around people talking about the advantages of a being on a diet vs. lifestyle change. Even though it seems straightforward, it’s still a bit confusing. How do the two compare against each other? Is one better than the other?
The Life Change Journey
When comparing a diet vs. lifestyle change, it’s best to look at what to expect with each. If you go on a diet, you will change your eating habits, but your goal for diet change is to lose weight. This change is temporary and often means that you’ll go back to your normal habits once you reach your goal weight.
A lifestyle change makes you focus on more than food intake. Instead of just counting calories, you will exercise to get healthier and look at the mental and emotional reasons you overeat.
This is the most important point when examining a diet vs. lifestyle change. A diet is temporary. A lifestyle change is meant to last forever.
Maintaining the Weight Loss
When you examine a diet vs. lifestyle change, you also need to look at weight maintenance. People who diet often gain weight back as soon as the diet ends. That leads to yo-yo dieting, which can affect your metabolism.
Lifestyle changes aren’t just about weight loss, it’s about changing your relationship with yourself and with food. you’ll start to notice that changing your lifestyle makes it easier to lose the weight and keep it off.
Diet vs. Lifestyle Change – Focusing on Health
When you compare a diet vs. lifestyle change, you’ll notice that lifestyle changes are the best when it comes to making health-related decisions. Since diets are short-term, people have been known to do crazy things to lose weight. Imagine only eating 500 calories a day or cutting out an entire food group. Since lifestyle changes are meant to last your whole life, the focus is on health. Your goal should be to learn how to live a healthy life by making good choices with a lifestyle change.