Why not dieting is the best New Year’s resolution

It may sound strange, but the best resolution you can make for yourself for 2024 is not to diet. We explain it to you. It’s not that you shouldn’t take care of yourself, it’s that we have to stop understanding diet as something restrictive that we do occasionally and that causes us suffering. “We forget that taking care of ourselves has to be something continuous and constant,” warns Ana Márquez Guerrero, dietitian-nutritionist at Nutrisana Educación. The purpose should be to learn to eat. “When they tell me I want to lose weight and I tell them: ‘What if we don’t diet?’ They look at me strangely. The idea is to organize it in a different and respectful way for the patient. You must first locate if the feeling of hunger is because you are bored, scared…, what happens to make you eat what you are eating or stop eating other things. Food has to be conscious,” concludes the expert. Another of the small big decisions that can mark our success in the search for a more conscious diet is to remove the sugar bowl from the pantry. It can be done all at once or little by little. When sugar is reduced or removed, the palate is able to appreciate other flavors that are also pleasant. «It is not about changing white sugar for brown sugar or for honey, panela or syrup. All of those options are also sugars and quite sweet. Nor for sweeteners,” says Márquez Guerrero. The dietitian-nutritionist explains to us how we can integrate the recommendation of eating five vegetables a day into our eating pattern. It’s simple: add vegetables, greens and fruits to any of the dishes we prepare. «It is not about separating but about including. By adding them, you reduce the size of the portion of protein or carbohydrate that you don’t need to be so large,” she points out. Plus, there are no time or money excuses. They can be purchased frozen or packaged. And you don’t have to be square either: fruit doesn’t always have to be for dessert, it can be included in any salad dish, sautéed vegetables or take advantage of the one that is already very ripe to prepare it with milk and yogurt: “It serves us well for a super-satisfying dinner or snack.” MORE INFORMATION news No The orthopedic surgeon to whom celebrities entrusted their knees: “Collagen does not regenerate cartilage” Avoiding snacking is essential in a healthy eating pattern and for that we must pay attention to the feeling of hunger and satiety and organize schedules . “If we have to eat dinner later than 10 p.m., it is preferable to have something more nutritious in the middle of the afternoon so we can have a light dinner,” she advises. Less red meat and soft drinks Red meat should be occasional. Instead, to obtain the necessary proteins we can opt for fish, eggs and legumes. “It takes less time to prepare a salad with a jar of legumes than it does to fry a steak,” he recalls. And to give flavor to these dishes we have extra virgin olive oil and spices and aromatic herbs. The sausage should also be very occasional and opting for those with a higher percentage of meat. This year, a good resolution would be to get rid of soft drinks and energy drinks, which do not provide anything nutritionally and do increase the risk of being overweight due to their fast sugars that the body converts into a reserve of fat mass. And those that contain sweeteners are not recommended either, according to recent studies. It should never be consumed daily but very occasionally. «What hydrates the body is water. If the problem is that we don’t like it, a trick is to season it to give it flavor, without adding calories, with a slice of lemon or tangerine or some mint leaves,” concludes the dietitian-nutritionist.