Finally Creating an Effective Diet and Exercise Plan

With a multitude of diet and exercise plans being advertised, it’s often difficult to choose the best one for you. It’s even trickier to avoid falling into the easy trap of believing one of the many fads that exist claiming to have secrets you need to achieve your goals.  A proper diet and exercise plan is vital to a healthy and balanced lifestyle, but it’s important to focus on creating a balance between effective results and maintaining – or improving – your overall health.  

Completely cutting out carbs or eating just raw food or drastically reducing calories may help you lose some weight in the short term – but is it healthy, with realistic and long-lasting results? An effective diet and exercise plan must incorporate several different things in order to be effective AND healthy.  Merely focusing on what you eat with no consideration of exercise means that your body is only receiving partial attention to what it needs to be fully healthy. Furthermore, many fad diets require you to cut out many of the essential nutrients that help your body energize, fight disease, build muscle, etc.  An effective diet and exercise plan will help ensure that your body is receiving all of the necessary foods AND getting the exercise it needs to be healthy.

Working with a registered dietician is an excellent way to create a customized diet and exercise plan that meets your current needs and future goals. By assessing what you currently eat, how much and how you exercise and what you want to achieve, a registered dietician can customize an effective diet and exercise plan which will:

-          Develop detailed, yet easy to follow, recipes and menu-plans that not only meet your weight loss goals but are also personalized to account for your own food preferences so you can enjoy eating during weight-loss.

-          Help you better understand how to make smart food choices, as well as educating you regarding the impact making good or bad choices will have.

-          Create a realistic exercise plan that not only suits your needs, but also your lifestyle.

-          Incorporate activities that suit your preferences, encouraging you to exercise solo in your home or in a public setting, such as the gym or running clinics.

Meetings with a registered dietician provide both motivation and support, which can make or break the success of reaching healthy lifestyle goals. These individual and/or group meetings offer opportunities to address any ongoing issues, ask questions, or change things about your diet and exercise plan that don’t seem to be working.

All of these components work in harmony to ensure success and satisfaction with a diet and exercise plan that is individualized with consistent support and encouragement.

Instead of setting unrealistic goals --the pursuit of which may put your health at risk -- a diet and exercise plan established by a trained dietician lays the groundwork for meeting rewarding health and fitness goals.

If you have found setting and reaching your own goals to be frustrating and unsuccessful, it may have more to do with not knowing how to design and stick with a plan that truly meets your needs and abilities, and less to do with your ability to lose weight. Working with a registered dietician to establish a diet and exercise plan offers motivation and success for achieving a truly healthy lifestyle has offered a breakthrough for many who have struggled alone.

Why deny yourself the success you long for? To find out more about the results that could change your life when creating an effective diet and exercise plan or to meet with a registered dietician, contact Athletic Edge Sports Medicine by calling 416 800 0800, or visit www.aesm.ca