If you’re thinking of changing to a vegetarian diet, how do you start? Do you just start shopping in the produce aisle of the grocery store? You might have some anxiety attached to this change as well, and this is understandable.

Try to think of this as adding to your dietary habits, rather than a drastic change. If your diet has consistently included red meat, perhaps you can start substituting other foods for the red meat. Or eliminate the most processed and high-fat meats first, such as bacon and hamburgers. Certainly try to eliminate fast food burgers, which have such a high fat and sodium content. If you think you’ll miss the taste of bacon in the morning, try substituting a turkey or vegetable-based bacon substitute. It won’t be the same, but you won’t be giving up the foods you’re used to all at once.

If you’ve had a health scare and feel the need to change everything at once, make sure you include a lot of variety in the foods you buy as you begin to discover new flavors and textures that you’ll like to replace the ones you’re used to eating. If you don’t need to make a dramatic change all at once, you’ll have a much greater chance of long-term success if you take it slow.

Reduce the amount of red meat that you eat on a weekly basis, even if it means substituting pasta with marinara sauce for meat just one night a week. Increase the amounts of fruits and vegetables you eat. Start with raw vegetables at night before dinner so you’re not so hungry when you get to the main meal. Start reversing the proportions of meat and vegetables and make meat a side dish, with vegetables and grains your main course.

We’re creatures of habit and resistant to change. This is why so many diets fail, because we make drastic changes to facilitate dramatic results, quickly. This is a decision and a change you want to make for a lifetime. Make it a natural and gradual change and you can look forward to many more years of healthy living.

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More and more people are into losing weight because of the physical and emotional hazards too much weight brings. Through the years, dieting has become one of the most popular means of losing weight to almost all overweight people in the world. Although there are seemingly countless testimonies of its effects, many experts agree that there are also side effects when this means of losing weight is not administered properly.

OF DIET AND DIETING

By definition, dieting refers to the practice of eating or drinking in a regulated manner in order to achieve a specific short-term objective of gaining and or losing size or weight. Diet, on the other hand refers to the habit of nutritional consumption and focuses more on a long-term goal.

Studies show that the most common objective of dieting is for a person to lose excess body fat. But, there are also kinds of diet that are prescribed in order to achieve a particular medical objective while some dieting are actually designed and prescribed to increase body fat or add up to muscle weight gain.

Diet is actually categorized into two: the weight-loss diets, which restrict the intake of specific foods or food group in order to reduce body weight and the weight-gain diets, which are usually self-imposed in order to achieve a higher weight class.

Aside from that, special cases also require diets especially when it is related to certain medical conditions. Special diets usually include, exclude, or regulate a set of certain chemicals especially from the foods that contain them.

These special diets are usually given to diabetics to manage the persons blood sugar levels; epileptics who adhere to Ketogenic Diet; celiac disease patients are advised to take gluten-free diet; people who suffer from being lactose-intolerant are advised to veer away from milk products, kidney disease patients are restricted to eat foods that have high-sodium content while people who suffer from mild hypertension are advised to follow a diet low in fat and sodium and rich in fruits and vegetables.

Other specific types of diet to control weight include low-fat diets, low-carbohydrate diet or Atkins Diet, natural diets that include Paleolithic Diet and Evolution Diet, vegetarian diet, and very low calorie diet. Experts say that different diets are designed to on weight loss and weight gain depending on the persons need.

They also agree that if the person would want to use dieting in order to control weight, they must be very careful because different types of food affect the bodys total well being.

They should also seek professional help in losing or controlling their weight because fietingespecially extreme food-intake reduction and rapid weight lossmay lead to prolonged hunger, depression, reduced sex drive, fatigue, irritability, fainting, sinus problems, muscle loss, rashes, bloodshot eyes, gallbladder diseases, and loose folds of skin among others.

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