#1: Ask for support from the people you live with
When you want your diet to be successful, you should be making long term changes. You will be buying healthier foods and leave junk on the shelves at the store. When the people you live with don't support you and keep buying all the junk food, you'll have a hard time sticking to your healthy ways.
There will be times you won't be as motivated to stick to your healthy food. Then, when junk food is close within reach, things could get ugly. Try to work things out with the people you live with, convince them to buy less junk and inform them about healthier foods.
#2: Make time for your diet
In a successful diet plan it is recommended to eat 1 small meal every 3 hours. If your way of living doesn't allow you to prepare healthy meals and eat them at regular intervals, you should try to change your lifestyle somehow.
You can't expect to be eating healthy when you don't make time to buy, cook and eat healthy food. A stressful way of living doesn't attribute to a healthy lifestyle in the first place.
A blog focusing on a healthy eating for the busy people is Dietriffic, personally one of my favorite nutrition / health blogs out there. The latest post at dietriffic, Help: I Don�t Like Fruit and Veggies!, happens to discuss the things mentioned in the first two tips. Definitely go check it out.
#3: Inform yourself about nutrition
Now this is the essential part. When deciding what to eat you should know what is healthy and what is not. Sure, you could let a weight watchers program decide that for you and you would be counting points. Or you could just find out what types of food are healthy and what food is unhealthy.
For this I recommend the book Eat, Drink and be Healthy by Walter Willett. This book explains all the important nutrition basics you should know when you want your diet plan to be successful. In this book Walter Willett talks about:
* what a healthy weight is
* dietary fat
* carbohydrates
* protein
* fruits and vegetables
* what to drink
* calcium
* vitamins
* what to believe about food
Walter Willett is an epidemiologist and nutrition researcher for the Harvard School of Public Health and is highly respected by his peers, as he's the second most cited scientist in Clinical Medicine. (Epidemiology is the study of factors affecting the health and illness of populations).
An alternative would be to read trustworthy articles and blogs on the internet, while remaining critical about what you read. Don't just believe everything that's being written. Health and dieting is big business. People will say all kinds of things just to sell their bogus products.
Just remember, A successful diet plan is a diet plan you can follow for the rest of your life.
#4: Exercise!
This is obvious, but worth repeating because it's so important. It doesn't matter how you exercise, just make sure you elevate your heart rate a few times per week. By exercising you strengthen your muscles, elevate your metabolism, increase your cardiac health and burn the additional calories which will ultimately lead to weight loss. Exercising will also increase your appetite, making it easier to eat your healthy foods, if you haven't yet learned to fully appreciate them.
#5: Know that the diet plan will become easier
At the very beginning of your diet you may find it very hard to stick with the healthy food. You might think it doesn't taste as good and you might crave the junkier food. This will change after a while when your body had time to detox and lose the junk food addiction. Indeed, junk food is filled with additives, high-glycemic carbs and other products that make you addicted to them. The more you crave junk food, the more food companies will profit.
This post has been edited by Jessica Alba: Mar 12 2008, 01:01 AM