Defining “diet”
The word diet is primarily defined as The usual food and drink of a person or animal. There is a second definition of this word as well: A regulated selection of foods for cosmetic weight loss and unfortunately when someone mentions “diet” today, people almost always associate it with the second definition.
Diet originates from the Middle English diete, from Old French and from the Latin diaeta, and means “way of living”, making it clear that the foods they ate were indeed the way of life of our ancestors (remember: the motto of this site is that fitness itself should be a way of life). In reality, a diet is the staple selection of foods that is associated with a particular region or peoples. For example rice is the staple diet of the Chinese and fish, that of the North-East Indians.
When used in the second definition, diets lose their original meaning and efficacy. It is no longer natural for the human body and hence it’s no wonder it does not work. Artifically restricting entire food groups (Atkins Diet, Sugar Busters Diet) or restricting oneself to only one type of food (Grapefruit Diet, Bread Diet) might work for sometime but only because the total calorie intake is reduced - more on that later. After a while, though, the natural body cravings for a variety of foods will take over and the person is forced to give up on these restrictions causing him to bounce back, rather painfully, to his old lifestyle and gaining back with a vengeance any artifical weight loss he may have achieved.
The bottomline is that artifically restricitive diets(second definition) might work for a short time by reducing total calories, but only a true diet (first meaning!), with a variety, will help people achieve their fitness goals in the long run. Of course one has to practice control over the quantity and quality of the foods one eats but this blog will never say never to a food group.
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Great article…
Its funny how ‘diet’ has become a four-letter word… we can so easily say (tongue-in-cheek) ‘nearly every American woman between the age of 13-50 is on a diet of some sort’. Well, I HOPE they’re on a diet… or else they’d fade away! Good post - this little piece of information needs to be more and more widely ciruclated.