Choosing foods

One thing that is important to understand about dieting is the impact and importance of personal preference. The best diet for long-term adherence is a diet that contains food that you enjoy, making it easier to follow. However, the foods that you enjoy are usually not the best ones for dieting itself, as they’re usually too low in protein, high in fat, high in sugar, and high in sodium. They’re tasty, but they usually don’t fill you up very much, and they’re very prone to be overly consumed.

So while having foods that you enjoy in your diet is important for adherence, the exact opposite is true as well. Having foods with higher satiety (even if they’re not exactly your favorites) will allow you to have more energy, less hunger, and be less likely to overeat, which are incredibly important while dieting. The key here is finding the balance.

If your diet is based on ice cream and Oreos, even though you’d lose weight if you’re in a caloric deficit (assuming you don’t overeat, which is difficult if you’re eating delicious ice cream), it would fail in the long term. Not only is this obviously not the healthiest, but you will also be hungry and low on energy. On the other hand, if your diet is only unseasoned chicken salad for every meal, while you may feel full and with energy, it will likely fail as well. You will feel restricted, likely have a lot of cravings and hate your diet.

Try to have a diet of mostly whole foods that you enjoy. Some junk food here and there isn’t going to kill you, but it needs to be in moderation, and you have to resist the temptation to binge (we all know how hard it is to eat a single potato chip).

My basic recommendation is to have 10% of your weekly intake on less diet-friendly food sources. For a 2000-calorie diet, if you decide to spend it every day, that would be 200 calories, which is roughly a large scoop of ice cream. If you choose to have it twice a week, then you can have around 35% of your daily intake for each day, which would be 700 calories, roughly a burger from McDonald’s. You don't have to be precise with this, this is just to provide you with a rough guideline.

This doesn’t mean you have to “spend” those calories on junk food, but simply they are available to you if you want to. If you chose to stick with diet-friendly foods all the time, more power to you, as long as this is sustainable for you.