There are 2 different ways to use the term diet: as a noun, and as a verb.
As a noun: the kinds of food that a person, animal, or community habitually eats.
As a verb: restrict oneself to small amounts or special kinds of food in order to lose weight.
Why is it important to differentiate? Because people are often glued to the idea of going on a diet (temporary, has an end date) rather than focusing on what their overall (what the bulk of their year) diet looks like.
We’re here to remind you that no matter how successful you are on a short term diet, you will always end up back at square one if you don’t fix what’s going on overall.
Nutrition is much like exercise: it’s not as if you can workout enough one day and then be set for life. If you want the positive effect of exercise, it’s something you need to keep up with doing for as long as you’re looking for results. This is why people often try to make exercise a part of their regular routine.
Nutrition is the same and yet people often treat as as a temporary effort. They don’t look at what they can do to make their diet healthier for the rest of their life, they are trying to see how fast they can’t possibly see the results they want to see.
This leads to crash diets, unsustainable meal plans, and/or restricting entire food groups. These type of diets are like going from a desk job with no other exercise to suddenly working out for 2+ hours a day, 7 days a week. It’s unnecessary, impossible to keep up for an entire year, and will probably lead you down the path of saying “whatever, I’m ordering cheese fries”
We must STOP looking at nutrition through a temporary lens and start figuring out what changes we need to make to have a healthy diet be something that is our baseline. This does NOT mean your diet needs to look perfect… but until you have consistently incorporated protein, vegetables and adequate water in to your ever day life, there is really no need to look in to restrictive eating.