How To Differentiate Dieting and Eating Healthy?

Two of the commonly misunderstood and wrongly interchanged concepts are dieting and eating healthy. For most people, the reason they diet is that they want to lose weight and eat healthily. However, this does not automatically translate to every form of dieting being a form of healthy eating neither is every healthy eating achieved as a result of dieting. Living a healthy lifestyle will require dieting so that you can be sure that you are consuming the right meals for you and not leaving your meals and other activities that influence your health to chance. This article will conceptualize both concepts and differentiate between dieting and eating healthy.

What is dieting

Dieting can be defined as the restriction of the food a person eats to special types of food because they want to achieve a particular body size or shape goal. In most cases, people diet because they want to lose weight and thus, restrict themselves to eating a smaller quantity of food. However, this does not imply that every form of dieting is aimed at losing weight. There are those that diet because they want to build their muscle. Hence, they consume a large quantity of a particular nutrient, mostly protein, because of its benefits in building muscles while reducing the number of other nutrients they reduce. There are also those that diet because they want to add weight due to their professions or because they feel they are too skinny. Hence, people diet for different reasons, and the reasons directly influence the type of diet they opt for as well as what constitutes the types of food they eat.

What is eating healthy?

Eating healthy can be simply defined as consuming the right food with the right quantity of nutrients that the body needs for its daily activities. This implies that we not only consume the right quantity of calories for our body size and weight but that the calories contain the right quantity of every type of nutrient that the body needs. Every type of nutrient is important for the body, but they also have to be taken in the right quantity. Hence, eating healthy aids the body in functioning properly as it would have enough of every nutrient required to function properly.

What is the difference between dieting and eating healthy?

The major difference between dieting and eating is that it is possible to diet without eating healthy and it is possible to eat healthy without dieting. This implies that when you follow a type of diet or you create a diet for yourself where you cut out some particular nutrients or consume less than enough of a particular type of nutrient, your dieting will not translate to healthy living. This also applies to when your diet includes excessive consumption of a particular nutrient.

On the other hand, eating healthy implies that you are taking all the necessary nutrients that you need in the right quantity. This can be achieved without dieting. By eating healthy and nutritious food in the right quantity, you can be eating healthy without even planning for it or thinking about it. However, when you want to be sure that you are eating healthy, you can review what you are eating currently and if you notice that it does not translate to healthy eating, then you can consider coming up with a diet that would translate to healthy eating. There is also a lot of dieting that has been crafted out for certain reasons, especially for those who want to lose weight. Not all of these diets are healthy as most completely or almost cuts out fat from your meals. If you want to go for a diet, be sure that it meets your minimum daily requirement for every nutrient.