Body Toning Diets

Whether you're starting from the ground up, or are already close to your ultimate weight-loss goals, getting your body completely tight and toned can seem like a cumbersome task. As long as you you incorporate certain principles of a truly body toning diet, and combine those diet principles with a thorough and efficient exercise routine, getting that slim, beach body should be just a matter of time.

Real, Natural Food

• By eating real foods in their most natural form or at least purchasing real foods in their most natural form, you will avoid many of the foods and chemicals that prevent you from having a toned body. Real foods are foods that your great, great grandparents would have recognized as food. These types of food include animal food such as full-fat dairy, eggs, meat, fruits and vegetables, whole grains and brown breads, and coconut and olive oils. Vegetable oils, hydrogenated oils, processed sugars and processed foods -- many of which contain MSG -- would have been unrecognizable to our ancestors and are associated with overweight and obesity.

Raw Foods

• Raw food is a cornerstone to any body-toning diet. The sight of an overweight or obese raw vegan is rare. You can eat as much ripe raw fruits and vegetables as you desire as long as you are eating enough vegetables and are getting at least moderate amounts of exercise, according to veteran raw vegan and endurance athlete Harley Johnstone. In addition, raw animal food diet veterans such as bodybuilding expert Randy Roach and nutritional scientist Dr. Aajonus Vonderplanitz have proven through decades of combined experience that raw animals foods, especially raw meats, support healthy, lean muscle mass even with minimal to no amounts of physical activity.

Fat

• One common point that many people going on diets miss is that not all body fat is easy to remove and completely usable. The reason some body fat, especially forms of cellulite, can behave this way is due to our consumption of hydrogenated oils in general or vegetable oils such as canola and soybean oil, which the human body is not designed to process or use. There are several ways to rid the body of these difficult fat stores as well as fat stores in general. These include eating plenty of animals fats, such as butter; eating plenty of raw fats, such as avocados and coconut meat; eating pineapple that contains enzyme bromelain, which breaks down fats; eating banana with coconut, which dissolves hardened fats like cellulite; and exercising.

Overfeeding

• Many dieters make the mistake of eating less and eating less often to cut calories and lose weight. But this type of dieting only slows down their metabolisms, makes them feel horrible, and makes them lose little, if any, weight at all. Dieting in that manner triggers "starvation mode" in your body, slowing down your metabolism to conserve energy, according to Matt Stone, an independent health and nutrition researcher who runs 180 Degree Health. The proper way to diet is to eat until satiated and to eat as often as your feel hungry -- even if that is six times a day. The reason why overfeeding will not make you fat, but instead will make you thinner, is that it actually speeds up your metabolism. Of course, you should only overfeed on real, natural foods.