Millions of Americans are actively dieting at any given time.
After all, it’s important to eat right and it’s not always easy for most of us to do so. Sure, we’ve all said it. “I’ll start tomorrow.”
With the technology, science and medicine that’s available to us today, there is in fact thousands of options for getting back on track with living a healthy lifestyle. There are special diets, support groups, apps for smart phones and even companies that will mail you your meals. There’s no one right answer for everyone. Not all diet options are good ones for each individual. However, depending on the end-goal and lifestyle, we should be able to find a way to get the weight down and, most importantly, start feeling better.
Dieting
Some seem to come and go, some even seem to be a bit comical at times, but there are those that have were considered “fad diets” that seem to have stuck around and really proved to be successful for people. Although we are not dietary experts here at North Orlando Chiropractic, we know that getting in shape can help prevent some of the more common problems that we treat on a regular basis.
Here’s a breakdown of a few popular diets to help you battle the bulge!
South Beach Diet was designed by a cardiologist in Florida. The diet is designed to protect patients from serious medical conditions like heart disease and diabetes. This diet stresses the importance of controlling hunger by eating before it strikes. This diet also aims at cutting out bad carbs and focusses on lean protein, low-fat dairy, and good carbs and vegetables.
Weight Watchers remains one of the more popular commercial diets out there. It uses a points system to keep track of your intake which has evolved over the years. They focus on eating a balanced diet, moderation and most importantly eating what you want (which makes this a popular one).
Paleo Diet allows only those foods that man ate when he first roamed the planet millions of years ago, like fish, lean meats, fruit, non-starchy veggies and nuts. No processed foods at all are allowed with this diet and there’s a big emphasis on exercise.
Before starting any diet, please talk to your doctor to make sure you get a professional medical opinion.
How can technology help you with your goals?
If you’re one of the billions of people out there with a smart phone, you may have heard about some of the apps that can help you in your mission to get and stay healthy. This technology has become so main stream the folks at Apple introduced a free app that comes with one of their latest updates to the software.
While there are TONS of apps out there to help you with staying on track with some of the diets that we listed above, the one that I want to feature in this article is one that is by far the most popular, the Calorie Counter & Diet Tracker by MyFitnessPal.
This application is the most popular and user friendly one out there. Best of all its completely free and helps sticking to a diet, or just eating healthy something that is actually manageable for someone who has never been in the habit of eating healthy. There is a huge user created database that will automatically give you the nutritional facts of tens of thousands of items that you already buy. You can also save your meals in the app, so if you tend to eat similar meals throughout the month, you don’t have to go and add each individual item in order to keep track of what you are eating.
There’s little pop ups and reminders when you reach certain nutritional goals and when you’re about to hit some of your daily limits like sodium and saturated fats.
If you’re like most Americans, you tend not to pay too much attention to what you are eating because of your busy schedule, this is a great way to retrain the way you think about the food that you eat. If you don’t know what the problem is with what you’re eating, how can you ever fix it?
If you’re reading this on your phone you can simply click here to download the application.
MyFitnessPal app for the iPhone
MyFitnessPal app for the Android