The Difference Between a Balanced & Unbalanced Diet

While sustainable dieting success is a fairly rare thing, that is often not due to lack of trying or lack of willpower. Dieting information can be confusing to digest for the layperson, resulting in a situation of inadvertent noncompliance--characterized by a scenario where the dieter believed that they were doing everything correctly, when in fact their diet was relatively unbalanced in practice. Illustrating the difference between a balanced and an unbalanced diet can help to avoid this crucial dieting faux pas.

Balanced Dieting

• Understand the various items you will have to "juggle" when attempting to plan and follow a balanced diet--caloric content, food choice, macronutrient breakdown. Caloric content merely refers to the total number of calories being consumed on the plan. More specifically, the issue is whether the total number of calories being consumed is adequate for your specific goal--weight gain, weight maintenance or weight loss. Ideally, you will want to keep a food journal to tally these figures, aiming to consuming a roughly identical number of calories each day so that you can make quick and easy adjustments upwards or downwards to better help you reach your goals. A dieter following a balanced diet will often be able to tell exactly how many calories he has consumed throughout the week, enabling him to better meet his objectives by allowing for a more precise level of adjustment.

  Regarding food choice, a balanced diet will contain plenty of nutrient dense foods that enable a dieter to fulfill her body's needs without subjecting her to an unreasonable level of caloric intake. General nutrient dense foods include fruits, vegetables, whole grains, lean protein and all types of food that are found in nature and served in a reasonably unaltered state.

  Regarding macronutrient breakdown, a balanced diet will strive to keep a balance between the consumption of carbohydrates (usually between 40 to 60 percent of diet), protein (usually between 30 to 40 percent of diet) and fat (usually between 20 and 30 percent of diet). Ensuring that the body has enough of each macronutrient to enable healthy processes without overloading it with any one is the key to balancing a diet.

Unbalanced Diet Mistakes

• Avoid the common mistakes made which could potentially unbalance your diet. Possibly the most common mistake is reliance on "junk" calories and other nutrient poor sources of food. Common nutrient poor sources of food include foods that are high in sugar or fat, fried foods, alcohol, desserts and "white" carbohydrates--white rice or refined flour. Dieters often favor these items because they are more accessible and subjectively consider them to taste better. So the first step to balancing your diet is removing reliance on these food items in favor of the aforementioned "balanced" food types listed above.

  The other major mistake is avoiding adequate consumption of fruits and vegetables. Fruits and vegetables are generally considered to be free foods on many diet plans, as they are fairly low in calories but high in the vitamins and minerals your body needs to function properly. Therefore, the other major step you can take to move your diet from unbalanced to balanced is consuming both a serving of fresh fruits and a serving of fresh vegetables with each and every meal.