Smart Diets

A smart diet is a diet that's right for you. This means that it achieves your spiritual, physical and mental needs. There are many different kinds of diets, and choosing the diet that's smart for you can be difficult. Fortunately, diets can be broken them down into a few major categories. Most of us are familiar with diets that are supposed to help weight loss; however, people diet for other reasons, most frequently for medical or religious reasons.

Defining a Diet

• According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, the definition of diet is given literally as "food and drink regularly provided or consumed." Most people see dieting as eating less for weight loss purposes. This is simply not the case. You diet all the time, regardless of whether or not your food intake is planned. Adding some structure and planning to your meals can go a long way to making you much healthier.

Weight Loss Diets

• Weight loss diets are all based on the premise that if you eat less than you burn in energy, your body must burn stores of fat for energy. Weight loss diets can be smart if you're overweight or even if you're a little self conscious. Being overweight is associated with increased risk of diabetes, heart disease and myriad other medical problems. Certain foods can make dieting for weight loss much easier, and many diets are based on this principle. However, in the end, you simply need to burn more calories than you consume.

Dieting for Medical Purposes

• Many people need to diet for medical purposes. People who suffer from Celiac's disease need to eat gluten-free diets. This means they need to avoid wheat products. Cancer patients will also often try macrobiotic diets since they are low in saturated fat and high in fiber. Macrobiotic dieting is also a popular healthy lifestyle diet. Dieting for medical reasons is definitely smart since not doing so can result in adverse side effects. For example, people who have Celiac disease and fail to diet properly will experience persistent nausea and other symptoms.

Religious Dieting

• Many religions also have dietary prohibitions. Probably most famous is Jewish Kosher law followed by the corresponding Muslim Halal. Both religions are forbidden from eating pork and Kosher dietary regulations also forbid eating shellfish. Some Buddhists also refrain from eating meat. If you are seriously religious, dieting for spiritual reasons is often an essential part of your religion. If dietary constraints can help you attain your spiritual needs, it's a smart decision. Most mainstream religious diets are fairly healthy.