Your Health: Forgetting concept of bikini diets

While this might seem like a huge step away and less scientific, it is just as scientific a subject as fish, and in some ways even more important.

Summer is supposedly here and school holidays are too along with an influx of wedding invites which can leave people feeling they need to diet, either to look great on holiday or for that special event.

The problem comes in how most people choose to lose weight. There are two really important factors here: firstly, you don’t need to diet to have a bikini body.

Get a bikini and wear it. Now whether you feel comfortable doing that is your choice, and there is so much pressure to have the perfect body.... but no one is perfect, so accept it.

If you don’t like your body then change it...but not just because you want to wear a little dress or a bikini. Change it for the reason of health. Secondly, if you do feel the need to lose weight for an occasion, do it sensibly and properly. Weight loss shakes, magic pills and low calorie diets don’t do your body any favours.

You can ruin your metabolism by constantly dieting, so making it much harder when you are older to lose weight without existing on a lettuce leaf a day.

Fad diets are often promoted as quick fixes, and yes, maybe you will lose weight, but what these diets don’t address is:

Overall health and wellbeing

Your relationship with food

Food addiction and comfort eating

Gut health

Understanding what a healthy balanced diet actually is, and nutrition personalised to your needs.

We are all individuals and so while we need to address the general nutrition guidelines, we also need to look at our individual health history and create personalised plans for people who may have chronic illness.

If you do want to lose weight this summer, here are some important tips to help you along:

Ditch anything that encourages you to count points, syns or calories.

Yes, calories are important, but knowing where these calories comes from and eating for health not just to meet your calorie allowance is far more important for health over all.

Fill up on vegetables at mealtimes so that at least half the plate is full of vegetable content (potatoes not included). All fats and other saturated fats such as coconut oil have been shown to be beneficial to health.

Cut back on the alcohol as it’s full of empty calories and the research is inconclusive as to how much and how often a glass of wine may be beneficial to health.

If you’ve already tried every diet in the book, it isn’t the diet that doesn’t work, it’s your mindset telling you it won’t work.

If you constantly think you’re fat, you can’t become slim because your brain thinks you’re fat so behaves in that way i.e. overeating, eating junk food etc.

That might seem harsh but ultimately, every diet works if you stick to it (whether it’s healthy is a different matter).

You need to get out of the mindset of being on a diet, hence not counting calories..

Make sure you have a clear goal of where you want to be and by when. It doesn’t have to be a number on the scales as the scales don’t show whether you are actually losing fat or just muscle and water.

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