When looking for a healthy, sustainable way to lose weight, you’re bound to stumble across terms like diet plan or nutritional program. Diet plans and nutritional programs can help you lose or maintain your weight, but what are the differences between them?
CardioMender, MD Weight Loss Specialists, will guide you on how to gain control over your weight by embracing new eating habits with a responsible nutritional program. Our cardiologist-supervised weight loss programs have helped thousands of people achieve a healthy weight and maintain a fulfilling life.
Diet Plan vs. Nutritional Program
What Is a Diet Plan?
By definition, a diet is a temporary restriction from certain foods to reduce one’s weight, like a strategy or blueprint for achieving weight reduction. Diet plans can be tailored to your specific health status and weight loss goals but not specifically to sustaining it.
What Is a Nutritional Program?
A nutritional program is a more detailed, comprehensive plan and record of what you consume every day, composed of the items in your breakfast, lunch, snacks, and dinner. Nutrition programs teach you how to embrace nutritionally balanced eating habits which result in weight loss that is sustainable.
The Difference Between Nutritional Plans and Diets
Unlike a traditional weight loss diet plan, nutrition plans outline the various foods and respective portions to consume at certain times of the day. A nutrition plan (also called a “meal plan”) is a weight-loss tool emphasizing variety and choice in your meals and how to schedule those choices throughout your day, whereas diet plans most commonly focus on caloric intake.
Nutritional plans are preferred for long-term weight loss because they support focusing on habitually choosing nutrient-rich foods and addressing supplemental health factors, all designed to achieve sustained results. Breaking your daily intake into blocks, such as water consumption, breakfast, snacks, lunch, and dinner, helps individuals understand and formulate the best strategies for their weight loss journey, with support and guidance from their nutritional specialist.
What is a Healthy Diet Plan?
Every person has a slightly different physiology, and there is no one-size-fits-all healthy diet plan that works for everyone. A healthy diet plan considers an individual’s lifestyle and general physiology, but following a healthy diet plan may mean depriving yourself of the foods you love.
What is a Healthy Nutritional Plan?
A healthy nutrition plan can help you manage your health and weight. But what does a healthy nutrition plan entail? A healthy nutrition plan does not revolve around the number of calories you need daily. It goes beyond your usual eating habits and focuses on better nourishment. It is far more important to balance the protein, fat, and glycemic load (carbs) so that you do not have to constantly measure or weigh your food. This balance is an important part of the CardioMender, MD program until you become more metabolically, physiologically, and behaviorally balanced. Ultimately, a nutritional plan, once fully incorporated, leads to a fundamental shift in a person’s nutritional preferences and hence behavioral shifts lead to a stable healthy weight breaking the weight loss/weight gain rollercoaster ride.
A healthy nutritional plan can help you plan your daily meals and ensure that everything on your plate is naturally rich in nutrients while low in unhealthy fat and calories. You can attain a balanced diet and ensure that the meals you serve on your plate have all the nutrients your body requires while staying within your daily intake targets for weight loss. A healthy meal plan incorporates whole foods, fruits, and veggies, which leads to a stable ideal weight and optimal health specific to the individual.
At CardioMender, MD, each of our patient-specific nutritional plans is transformative. As each patient passes various weight loss milestones (benchmarks), a variety of adjustments or plan step-ups are made that ultimately lead to a Maintenance Nutritional Plan. This Maintenance Nutritional Plan is designed to remain within a five-pound radius of the individual’s target weight and optimal health.
Each step of the way, our patients lose weight and achieve progressive wellness, as evidenced by the improvement in various biometric indices, all of which lead to sustainable weight loss, improved health and wellness, and improvement in how our patients look and feel.
Why Most Diets Don’t Work
There are many reasons why a diet might not work for an individual. However, that may not be a failure on their part:
- The purpose of most diets is to help people lose weight quickly rather than to assist them in developing a healthy lifestyle. After a short time, the desired benefits are mostly gone.
- Most diets don’t work for the vast majority of people. Instead of encouraging a reasonable and sustainable lifestyle change, they focus on the types or amounts of food you can consume for a set period, after which you are free to eat what you please.
- Dieting rarely works in the long run. Sure, diets assist people in losing weight quickly but fail to provide the knowledge so that individuals can build sustainable healthy patterns and habits; thus, the weight usually creeps back on again.
In addition to the reasons for failure listed above, diet plans may also produce feelings of deprivation, are difficult to sustain, and can leave you feeling full of guilt, shame, and failure after a cheat, which in turn, leads to giving up before desired results are achieved.
On a positive note, nutritional programs help you embrace and transition to nutritionally balanced eating and provide feelings of satiety and satisfaction. There can also be planned deviations for special occasions, vacations, and other significant events, after which resuming these newly embraced eating habits immediately upon returning to a typical daily routine. Cut yourself some slack, and keep the faith.
CardioMender, MD, focuses on weight loss programs that will succeed and result in sustainable weight management. CardioMender’s maintenance program provides support and guidance after weight loss goals have been achieved to address any future challenges that may arise. We believe that healthy eating and living should be a priority and that a sustainable lifestyle is attainable for all our patients.
Weight Loss Programs in South Florida
At CardioMender, MD, we offer custom weight loss programs that offer an evidenced-based comprehensive approach to weight loss to help you live a healthy life in the body you want. Don’t let your weight continue to hold you back; we have many personalized weight loss programs right here in South Florida.
Get Started with CardioMender, MD Today!
CardioMender, MD, Weight Loss Specialists will work with you to learn about your health, medical history, food preferences, and past weight loss attempts to create a customized and effective weight loss strategy for you.
Contact CardioMender, MD, Weight Loss Specialists today to learn more about our weight loss programs.
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