Confidence, health, and beauty come in a wide range of shapes and sizes. However, if you feel like you would prefer to see a smaller number appear on the scales – whether for health reasons or to achieve a personal goal – then you are probably keen to find a diet plan that will match your taste and lifestyle.
Fortunately, there are a variety of healthy and effective regimens available to help you lose those pounds the right way. These diets focus just as much on maintaining your overall health as they do on calorie burning, so you can slim down while still getting all of the vitamins, carbs, and fats you need for a strong and healthy body.
Read on to discover all about these health-boosting weight loss diets and discover which one could work best for you.
The Keto Diet
The Keto diet is a regimen named for the physical effect it aims to produce – ketosis, also known as the body’s fat-burning mechanism. The Keto diet achieves this by restricting the quantity of carbs (and, to some extent, protein) that you consume while boosting the fat content of your meals.
The diet works because it restricts the foods that many of us overindulge in, such as bread, crisps, pasta, rice, and cakes. Carbs are our go-to comfort food, but unfortunately, they are often the main culprit when it comes to weight gain. By restricting the carbs in our diet to just 50g a day, the Keto plan forces our body to burn off stored carbohydrates for energy, which in turn triggers fast weight loss.
The downside of this diet? If you want to maintain your weight loss long-term, you will need to stick to the Keto plan, or at least, keep to a low-carb regimen. In other words, if you can’t live without regular helpings of rice, bread, or spaghetti, this is probably not the diet for you.
Become A Flexitarian
If you are keen to embrace a more plant-based diet plan – but without giving up meat and fish altogether – then you may want to consider becoming Flexitarian.
This regimen has a number of advantages. For one thing, you don’t need to constantly count calories, as you will be eating a lot more low-calorie foods such as fruit and vegetables. For another thing, you shouldn’t feel constantly hungry, and you will be nourishing your body with plenty of vitamins and minerals, as well as the extra water stored in many fruits and veggies.
The Shake Diet
Embarking on a shake diet for weight loss can help you to shed pounds quickly while still providing your body with the essential vitamins and minerals it needs to stay healthy.
While weight loss shakes may have once been considered bland and monotonous, these days you can find a tempting range of delicious, thick, and creamy shakes in a variety of flavours. You can even find gluten-free shakes from Shake That Weight, if you need to be on a gluten-free plan.
Of course, if you don’t want to stick to an all-shake diet, you can incorporate weight loss shakes into another diet plan instead, whether as an occasional meal replacement or a healthy and satiating boost in between meals.
Decide To DASH
If you have never heard of the DASH diet plan, the acronym stands for Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension.
As you may expect, this eating regimen was designed to help people who suffer from high blood pressure; as such, it focuses on low-sodium and low-fat foods, and an abundance of fruit and vegetables, in order to lower your intake of bad cholesterol and saturated fats. However, it also has the welcome side effect of helping you lose weight. It achieves this by filling your body with satiating low-calorie foods – all of those fruits and vegetables – so you no longer feel the need to eat more fattening options such as cheese or steak.
As well as helping with weight loss, the DASH diet was also found to boost muscle strength in this study carried out on obese adults.
The South Beach Diet
Like the notorious Atkins diet, the South Beach plan has been around for a number of years now. The focus of this diet is low glycaemic foods – in other words, foods that will not cause your blood sugar to spike, and then crash. This generally means a low carb intake, and a firm focus on lots of veggies, nuts, eggs, fish, and meats such as turkey and chicken.
Unlike the Keto diet, which also restricts carbs, the South Beach diet is big on protein and promotes the intake of healthy fats, including full-fat milk or yogurt. This diet helps to achieve weight loss by lowering carbs and keeping blood sugar levels stable, which means you are less likely to indulge in calorific snacks.
Choosing The Right Plan For You
As you can see, each of these healthy weight loss plans has its own unique qualities and advantages. At the end of the day, the regimen you choose will depend on which plan dovetails with your own personal dietary preferences and your lifestyle.
Just remember – the most important thing is that, if you do decide to lose weight, you do so in a healthy and sustainable way by choosing a diet that nourishes, rather than deprives.