Finding the Best Diet

By Dietitian, Juliette Kellow BSc RD

How to find the best slimming diet for you

Once you’ve done the groundwork, it’s time to devise a diet plan that will work for you. While ‘miracle’ slimming diets that claim they’ll help you lose weight fast might sound tempting, many will...

• Severely restrict your food intake
• Have you scouring the supermarket shelves for weird and wonderful ingredients
• Require you to make time-consuming meals
• Ban certain groups of foods such as carbs or dairy products as well as all your favourites.

The result: meals will be boring and leave you feeling miserable or take too long to prepare so that you quickly give up. These diets may also leave you short on many nutrients if groups of foods are off limits, putting you at risk of a whole host of health problems ranging from anaemia and osteoporosis to constipation and lowered immunity.

Instead, it’s best to avoid faddy diets and devise your own reduced-calorie slimming diet based on what you currently eat, including some of your favourite foods.

WLR will set an appropriate calorie intake for you, based on whether you want to lose weight at a rate of ½lb, 1lb, 1½lb or 2lb a week – and then it’s simply a case of sticking to this daily calorie intake.

The good thing about this is that it allows you to adapt your diet to your lifestyle – rather than trying to change your lifestyle to fit around mealtimes. This means you can still create incredible meals if you love cooking or can simply heat up a ready meal if you don’t like, or have time, to spend hours in the kitchen.

Better still, cutting your calorie intake for slimming purposes isn’t usually as hard as it sounds. Often it is as simple as reducing your portion sizes slightly and/or making simple calorie swaps every day. For example, swapping a daily Danish pastry for a wholemeal scone will save a staggering 275 calories, while having a small 150ml glass of wine instead of a large 230ml glass will save almost 70 calories. Slimming really is that easy.