The Best Ways to Diet

The absolute best diet plan is the one that involves a permanent eating change. Fad diets and quick weight-loss programs can be effective over the short term, but they only provide a temporary solution. For permanent results and a much healthier lifestyle, certain facets of eating need to be understood. The importance of water, food selection and quantity of consumption during a meal are the foundations for beginning the best lifestyle diet.

Water Consumption

• From time to time, your body will trick you into thinking you are hungry. So instead of simply drinking water, you will snack on something or have a meal, which results in an unnecessary amount of extra calories and fat intake. Water helps alleviate your hunger pangs and fills you up in a healthy way. Experts suggest that drinking a full glass of water 30 minutes before a meal will help prevent overeating.

  Water is also a great source for increasing your metabolism. Dehydration causes metabolism to slow and even shut down if water consumption is too low.

  "If people want to keep their nutrients in balance, they need to drink plenty of plain, unflavored water every day," says Judy Dodd, R.D. and past president of the American Dietetic Association. Water not only acts as a solvent for many vitamins and minerals, but is also responsible for carrying nutrients into cells and wastes out of cells so the body functions properly.

  As a rule of thumb, you should drink a half-ounce of water for every pound of body weight daily. If you are very active, you should increase your water intake to two-thirds of an ounce per pound of body weight daily. So if you weigh 100 pounds, you should drink a minimum of 50 ounces of water a day.

Food Selection

• Any diet selected should have the same principle format that involves low fat and trans fat, low sugar, high fiber and protein. The book "Eat This Not That" by David Zinczenko supplies real world information about the normal foods people consume every day, and gives better and more realistic alternatives.

  The idea with food selection is too understand which foods are the most unhealthy, but don't seem like it, and replace them with much healthier choices. Some slices of pizza contain 650 calories per slice, while some burgers have almost 2,000 calories for one meal. Having a good grasp of what you are actually putting into your body is essential to allow you the opportunity to make better decisions.

Quantity of Consumption

• Portions can be very misleading at restaurants, which has led to a false understanding of what a meal should actually contain. Your stomach is about the size of a fist, so keep that in mind the next time you are dining at a restaurant and the food quantity can barely fit on the plate. A healthy portion of meat is about the size of a deck of cards. For rice or pasta, use the size of your fist as a gauge of a healthy portion.

  With restaurants doling out such large portions that are three to four times more than a healthy serving size, people have become trained to follow the same portion size for home meals. You need to retrain your mind to understand what a healthy meal portion is and eat accordingly. At first it will be difficult because you will still feel hungry. This is okay, because once your body gets used to this new habit, you will no longer feel hungry with smaller portions and your waist size will shrink accordingly.