About a week ago, I started blogging about ways to get in shape or lose weight for a wedding. My initial interest in this topic is because I’m a wedding photographer, but I do have a health related major, and I’ve always loved this stuff. Today, we’re talking specifically about food and what a wedding diet might look like.
The Wedding Diet or the Forever Diet
The first thing I want to bring up is about the word diet. Unfortunately , diet has been turned into this evil word that everyone hates. No one wants to be on a diet, but truthfully we are all on a diet. Your diet is simply what you eat. Some of us have a healthy diet and others not so much. The real thing to take from this is that a diet should be something that you do your entire life, not something that only lasts for a week. People that do extreme diets will in almost all cases quit after a short period of time, go back to their old ways, and gain the weight back. If you want this change to be permanent, the diet must be permanent as well. So my first diet for a wedding diet is to pick something you can actually live with. Don’t let it be too extreme, make it realistic.
To make a diet realistic, we have to understand that each person is different. We all have difference preferences and tolerances, so I’m not going to necessarily tell you what to eat. I’m going to give you some tips and advice and you can apply it however you want. I’m pretty good at avoiding junk and cooking food, but for most people, my way of eating wouldn’t be something they could maintain. For the rest of this information, think about yourself and what would work for you.
Overall, to make a wedding diet successful, you need to eat real food. If you have no idea what the food consists of, if it is packaged, or if it comes from a restaurant/fast food place, I wouldn’t consider that food. In all the previous situations, the food has been highly processed and all types of junk has been added to it. To eat real food, you have to make real food. If you make all of your meals yourself, I guarantee you will do better. For some of you this might mean you make one of your meals each day. For others, you might be able to make them all. Any change is a positive one. A quick an easy solution for real food would be fruits and vegetables. As long as you don’t add a bunch of sugar or ranch dressing to them, these are quick, healthy, and portable.
There are hundreds of sites out there that can provide recipes for real food. Most of them are free. Some sites focus on healthy recipes, while others are more about the taste. Try to go for the healthier sites, but even if some of them aren’t the healthiest, I’m sure they are better than going out to eat. Here are a few I would suggest for your wedding diet:
http://www.heart.org/HEARTORG/GettingHealthy/NutritionCenter/Recipes/Heart-Healthy-Recipes-Responsive_UCM_465114_RecipeLanding.jsp
http://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/recipes
http://www.eatingwell.com/
My next big tip would be to plan or schedule your meals. If you don’t plan, plan to fail. The worst thing you can do is just walk up to the fridge and try to decide what to eat. Most likely you are going to make a bad decision. If you know in advance what you should eat, you are more likely to eat it. Also, if you plan, you can make the meals in advance and be prepared for the whole week.
My last tip might not work for everyone’s diet, but it’s been pretty helpful for me. Cheat. Yes, I said cheat. Not all the time, but it can be beneficial to set up some scheduled cheating. It could be one day or one meal, but if you have something to look forward to, you won’t cheat throughout the week and you will stick with the diet. One cheat meal a week won’t ruin everything.
Alright, I know that wasn’t super specific, but again, we’re all different. If you apply a few of those tips, your wedding diet could be your forever diet, which means that wedding body might be your forever body. Wouldn’t that be super?
