There seems to be an assumption in the media and in society at large that if you want to lose weight you need to completely change up everything about your diet. You need to ditch all the stuff you enjoy and live entirely on salads and fruit like some kind of rabbit.

This is just wrong and I am convinced that this is why most people ultimately fail. If you ditch everything that you enjoy losing weight will be a miserable existence and one which you won’t have learnt anything from. As soon as you have ditched the unwanted weight you will straight away go back to your old habits. As your diet is different from your weight loss diet you won’t have any clue what a healthy portion size is and you will just put all of it back on again. You are also more likely to fall off the wagon choosing this approach because you have stripped out everything that you enjoy in food and there are only so many leaves you can force down yourself.

The best thing that you can do to avoid this is rather than changing your whole diet, make small changes. Such as cutting down on the amount of oil you use or being more conscious of portion size. This coupled with increasing the amount of activity you do through the day should be enough to lose weight in most cases.

The main thing you need to make sure is that your amount of calories consumed needs to be lower than the calories you use and you will lose weight. Beyond that you can follow whatever diet pattern makes you feel the most satisfied and least likely to go on a binging spree. An example of this is a bagel with light spread is approximately 300kcal which is the same as a small portion of granola and yogurt but I know for sure that if I pick the granola I will be snacking by 11am!