As a nutritionist the thing I get asked most about is diets and what do I think of them. ‘What do you think about going vegan?’. ‘What do you think about the Paleo diet?’ And honestly my answer is the same no matter what diet it is. If you follow almost any of these diets properly and for the long term, you’re likely to maintain a pretty high standard of health.
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When I say follow these diets properly I mean, if you base it around whole, minimally processed foods i.e. you can be vegan and eat chips, Oreos, frozen fake meats and processed vegan desserts and be very unhealthy. Or you could be a plant-based vegan and eat a huge variety of whole foods including plant-based proteins and thrive on this type of diet.
The real question is ‘have you tried this diet or any others before?’ Invariably the answer is yes and often the list of diets that have been attempted is long. For some people diets work and that’s great. In my experience, for most people they don’t.
What if, instead of the first diet you started and stopped, you’d just quit drinking soft drink and continued with that until now. Then instead of starting and stopping the next diet, you’d doubled your vegetable intake each day and that continued and became a habit. Then instead of attempting the next diet you just started drinking 2L of water every day. You get the picture, but imagine how much better you might be feeling today and how many diets you would’ve avoided!
There are no miracle diets. You need to eat fresh, whole foods most of the time and continue doing that throughout your life.