Your Thanksgiving feast is over and soon the New Year will be here with thoughts about dieting, but which fads work?
2015 was a big year for diet fads, but not all prove to shrink your waistline.
Steven Kinder, a Dallas entrepreneur, tried several of the popular fads shortly before his 40th birthday.
"I had said going into 40, I wanted to be able to renew my life. Now, I am 201-202 pounds and before I was 239-240 pounds," said Kinder.
How did he do it?
Seamus Dooley, Tier 4 Trainer at Equinox Club in Dallas, has some suggestions.
"You kind of want to be thinking of long-term solutions to nutrition and health," said Dooley, who debunked several diet myths for us.
The "Beyonce diet" was big in 2015, also known as the "vegan 22" diet.
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The superstar reportedly lost 60 pounds on a plant-based diet and challenged her fans to eat a vegan diet for 22 days.
"It is packed with a lot of nutritious foods – I can support that," said Dooley. "It's really had to do that from a long-term perspective. It's really not sustainable for the average person. It's great if you're a celebrity and you can have a celebrity chef who can make you cheese made from cashew nuts, but it's really hard for us to go home and have the time to do all that and to prepare all those foods. So from a fad perspective, it may have some benefits where you can achieve some quick weight loss, but can you do that and employ that in your daily life long term?"
What about "souping?" It's said to be the healthier alternative to juicing.
"Souping is a great way to have low-calorie meals. It is a tough thing to ask someone to each soup every single day for the rest of their life. Souping is great in the winter for a couple of days and then eventually you're going to get to a point where you're going to say, 'I want to something other than soup,'" said Dooley.
The best tried-and-true method, said Dooley, involves a shift in how you shop for groceries.
"Thinking about macro-nutrient dense foods. These are locally sourced, organic, pesticide-free produce. Think high-quality proteins – like grass fed meats, chicken, fish raised without antibiotics or pesticides. We do need fat in our lives. We just want the right kind of fat. We want avocados, coconut, oil olive oil, things like that," said Dooley.
Avoid processed food, refined sugars and carbs, he said. Those are foods that cause inflammation on the body.
"Hydration is big. If you're body is not hydrated, it will not function properly and won't rid yourself of the things you need to get rid of," said Dooley.
He suggests taking your body weight, dividing it in half, and the remaining number is how many ounces of water you should drink on a daily basis.
"You can see results almost instantaneously. If your body is not fighting inflammation and it's got a lot of nutrients in it, you're going to sleep better, you're going to have more mental clarity, your movement quality is going to be better," said Dooley. "Almost within a week, you're going to feel changes in your body. It's going to be long-term, as opposed to when the 22 days is up, and you ask yourself, 'where do I go from here?'"
After making those changes, Kinder lost 15 pounds in three months.
"My energy is different. My body feels different. I used to have aches and pains in my body. A lot of that is gone now," said Kinder.
For more information on diet trends, you can visit http://crucialfour.com.
