Dietary problems

Many people have the concept that dieting is restricting the amount or type of food they eat during the day. In reality a diet is nothing more than a planned meal. To diet is to stop eating whatever we want, to create a plan of how we will carry out our diet and control the amount of calories and nutrients that we provide to our body.

Diets are a very popular phenomenon, especially those focused on weight loss. Almost every day a new diet emerges and another one comes into disuse. Each person sells it from their experience and some promise to make us lose many kilos in a few months, of course they do not include a study on nutrition or sustainability, they only focus on counting calories.

We will be talking about these and other general problems in the following guide.

The diet fad

Diet fads are becoming more and more prevalent. If we search a little on the internet how to lose weight, we will find a great variety of articles telling us things like "the infallible trick to lose 20 kilo in a month", or "Do this for 15 days and lose 10 kilos". The truth is that most of these infallible tricks do not work nor do they have studies on nutrition and dietetics that can support their postulates. Very few people manage to lose weight doing this type of fleeting diets that are talked about for a while and then nobody remembers them anymore.

Another fad lies in those nutrition "gurus" who only know how to count calories, so they sell us food plans focused on ingesting an absurdly low number of calories, all this without presenting us with an adequate balance of nutrients, assessing our personal physical characteristics or indicating any physical activity.

Generalization of diets

Diets are not like recipes, the steps to follow will not give the same results for everyone. A weight loss diet is too personal to copy it to someone else. When a nutritionist performs a diet on behalf of a client, he/she will study the client's characteristics, level of physical activity, diseases (tolerance to certain foods, diabetic, obese, parasites, stomach problems, etc.), personal tastes (vegetarian, carnivore, etc.).

Although the idea is the same, to ingest fewer calories than we burn during the day, the ways to achieve this result differ greatly when planned by a professional than when you copy it from anyone else. For example, the same diet will not be applied to a person who does not perform any type of physical activity during the day and another one who dedicates two hours a day to perform strength exercises to increase his muscle mass.

A diabetic would probably be treated with a restrictive carbohydrate diet, but an athlete who runs and trains daily wi