Although it has been only a few days since I purchased the The Diet Solution Program, my friends and even my wife are asking me why I thought this is the “right” fat loss diet plan, and if it is just a series of fat loss tips that wouldn’t produce any real weight loss success.
Let me tell you my thinking on the right approach to using diet for fat and weight loss, and why this resulted in me purchasing and documenting my weight loss journey with the diet solution program.
Everyone knows that most diet programs “don’t work”, and I won’t even go into the shared perspectives on why almost every formal exercise program results in more failures than successes in people trying to get those six pack abs.
Let’s start with my thinking [as a normal, pretty unqualified nutrition and body fat expert] and how I got to the program I am trying now.
Fat Burning Diets – Cutting the Body Fat with Food
Wow – how counter-intuitive does this sound – I can reduce my body fat and lose weight with food? Really?
Let’s look at what you may find when you first start searching for that ideal weight loss plan that will cut your body fat:
- Extreme diets that starve calories and include numerous pills
- Diets that eliminate 90% of what you love to eat
- Fat loss programs that only allow you to eat pre-packaged meals
This list could have had 10 more diet approaches on them – but honestly, where I ended up was thinking about the best foods for weight loss – I wanted to burn body fat and look all trim and healthy, but I also had done enough research to know it couldn’t be something horrendous that either would make me quit within a week, or worse [for my wife and friends] turn me into a grumpy, unhappy soul on an ongoing basis. How many people do you know that are on a diet or fat burning exercise program that, to be honest, are grumpy, irritable, complaining all the time, and generally unhappy to be around?
The best foods for weight loss aren’t something I could determine myself – I look to certified nutritionists to have the education and training to understand what a body needs, what it doesn’t need, and how to align my mind with my body in a uniform approach.
Losing body fat requires something that keeps my mind aligned with my body – any time your thinking, mood, emotions, and general well being conflicts with your bodies needs – that is when you create stress in the system that never results in anything good [physically, emotionally, and psychologically].
How to lose fat
So how do you approach figuring out what the heck to do in your want to lose body fat? I didn’t go to my friends, or join Weight Watchers, or Jenny Craig, the Atkins diet, the California diet, or any other trendy thing. What I did was consciously make the decision to start adjusting my diet with a real program, and defer on starting any serious exercise program until I felt I was providing the right kind of “fuel” my body had evolved to process and be optimal on.
Losing fat for me was the goal – I’m sure soon I will have the goal to look like the ideal “man”, but for now I wanted to reduce body fat and start feeling healthier.
Here are what I consider the key elements of ANY program you look at if you want to ensure a successful approach to losing body fat via diet [which IMO is the precursor to saying you are reducing fat through exercise to reach your weight loss goals]:
- The diet must be designed by a certified nutritionist
- Don’t be the first customer – there should be thousands of testimonials and a real track record of people hitting their weight loss goals on this plan
- It should be realistic, and lay out a gradual shift in your diet versus some drastic life change in 1 day
- It should have example meal plans so you can ease into the program with prescriptive guidance, but also not be so rigid that you can’t adjust your meals after you understand the underlying nutritional concepts related to healthy weight loss
- It should have supporting materials – theory, comprehensive “manual” on the approach, Quickstart Guides to help you get up and running fast ahead of reading or listening to the entire plan, recipe suggestions or guides, etc.
- It should account for variances based on people’s metabolism. This to me would be an immediate reason to reject a program – everyone’s metabolism is different, and if the diet you are looking at doesn’t measure and account for that it isn’t a real approach to losing body fat in my opinion.
- It should have real foods. I’m not eating Kale or Dandelion Greens 5 days a week [or even 1 day a week]. It should have a good mix of tasty foods, not be too restrictive on “2 ounces of this, and 3.5 ounces of this]. This includes having a wide variety of good food choices for weight loss.
- It should have a support network. Weight Watchers and Jenny Craig are good at this, and it helps immensely, but wow is it expensive. What I like about the Diet Solution Program is that after you purchase their program they send you check in emails to see how you are doing, offer recipes and tips around difficult times like holidays, and even have a community bulletin board of people just like you – to share fat loss tips, diet tricks, cooking and food choices – all there for you to engage in with questions and readouts on how you are doing.
Choose wisely – I spent less than $50 on the Diet Solution Program, but based on what I read before I bought it, and what I am working my way through, this program meets all of my criteria above and then some. The proof of course will be in the pudding as they like to say.
Russell