Graeme Tomlinson - The Fitness Chef: Eat What You Like & Lose Weight For Life: The Infographic Guide to the only Diet that Works

What is the most effective way to lose weight and keep it off? There are so many diets available, each claiming that their method is best. How do you choose? Some say you should reduce carbs or restrict specific foods, others say you should fast for long periods of time or eat more frequently. Maybe a meal plan from a fitness celebrity is the answer? Or how about banning sugar from your diet?

The truth is: the only way to lose fat is to burn more calories than you consume.

For any fat-loss diet to work, it has to be based on the simple principle of what is known as a caloric deficit.

No prescriptive diet has been proven to make you lose weight unless it involves a state of overall caloric deficit, and all the weight-loss diets and clubs out there ultimately offer alternative ways of achieving this.

Maybe this doesnt seem like such a bad idea. Following a prescribed diet makes life easier theres no need for you to personally evaluate your food intake, you simply follow their rules, right?

No!

In my work as a personal trainer and nutrition coach, I see these complex and restrictive diets causing people to lose sight of the simple principles necessary for weight loss to occur. As anyone who has tried to stick to a prescribed diet knows, eliminating foods you enjoy or missing meals isnt easier than watching your portion sizes and in any case, you still need to watch your portion size on any diet for it to work.

Diet Guilt

Your journey to lose weight should never begin because somebody else made you feel inadequate as you are. You should never feel external pressure to lose weight. Losing weight will only have a positive impact on your life if you recognize that doing so will improve the quality of your life. You have to have this self-motivation yourself.

Whats more, many diets involve regimented recipe preparation, adding pressure to our increasingly busy days. Then youre asked out for a meal. Youre offered a glass of wine or a slice of pizza, and sharing a good time with friends feels as important for your happiness as reaching your desired weight. You deviate. The next day, you feel like a failure. Now whats the point of continuing? You might as well abort this new eating regime because you cant stick to it.

Rigid diet schedules are as likely to lead to anxiety, guilt and discouragement as they are to weight loss, and with the volume of eat this, not that rhetoric echoing across the media, deciding what to eat has become prohibitively complicated.

Most of us know that salad is nutritious. But what most of us dont know is that we can still eat things we love chocolate, crisps, etc. without feeling that weve failed, and still lose weight. This book will teach you how and why.

Exercise Fails

Too many of us are stuck in the rigid mentality that extreme, pulverizing exercise is essential if we want to burn fat. But, much like the restrictive and unnecessary diets that exist, this type of exercise is usually unsustainable. I will help you understand the basics and free you from the dreaded bootcamp mentality, because there are more enjoyable, sometimes surprising, but just as effective ways to exercise for fat loss. Much like eating food, if you dont enjoy what youre doing, you wont stick to it. So pick something you enjoy.

You Dont Need a New Diet

You already have a diet what you eat every day. However, if your body composition isnt currently what you want it to be, you need to understand your daily diet a little better and make some adjustments.

The original definition of the word diet is: The food and drink usually eaten or drunk by a person or group. Now, diet or dieting most commonly refers to the attempt to alter body composition usually for fat loss by prescribed means. And as the world becomes more extreme, so do the diets. This simple deceptive noun, diet, has been transformed into an extreme, restrictive and unsustainable array of eating patterns and a guilt-invoking verb, dieting. Its time to stop that.

Losing Weight and Enjoying Life

The aim of this book is to explain why you dont need to follow the likes of low carb, intermittent fasting, clean eating, slimming clubs, juicing and all the other restrictive dieting methods in order to achieve fat loss. It will show you a way to lose weight thats proven to be effective and doesnt ban any food types.

The only fat loss diet that works is the one that you can stick to consistently while enjoying your life. You just need to make a few small changes to ultimately get big results.

Using the simple principles in this book, you can take control of how you eat and manage your weight for the rest of your life, without cutting out any food groups.

There will be no temptation to return to unsustainable fad dieting trends after reading this book. All the information you need is presented in a series of powerful visuals to make sure that you understand exactly how to manage the food you eat, incorporate everything you enjoy and achieve your nutrition goals for the rest of your life. No agenda. No gimmicks. Just facts.

I started my Instagram feed in 2016 to post recipes for my followers, but by March 2018, having grown disillusioned with the unregulated nature of the fitness and diet industry, I started posting about the ironies, myths and pitfalls of dieting. My posts got people talking and distinguishing diet truths from diet fiction. The conversation continued, and by August 2019 more than half a million followers had joined in, including influencers and professionals, the national press and blogs worldwide. The more people who are able to arm themselves with information that can help them to better understand the basics of nutrition and improve their relationships with food, the happier I am.

My mission is to guide you through the maze of diet culture and food advertising, to provide you with an evidence-based resource and a practical perspective on food that you can use for the rest of your life to benefit your health. With each page of this book, you will silence the ingrained voice of the diet culture and replace it with a healthier, factual perspective on the food you eat.

Dont forget that food should be enjoyed, regardless of your fitness goal, so dont punish yourself with a dieting method you hate. The best way to lose weight is finding a diet that you can stick to consistently and enjoy. It is possible to get sustainable results and still eat chocolate, pizza or any other food you adore.

Many books tell us that their own rigid method is the only way to lose weight, but this book is different because I provide the information you need, back it up with science and deliver it with empathy and humour. The magic occurs by, crucially, allowing you to learn and become free to choose what you eat for yourself. This is how to bring about change.