It's estimated that as many as 90% of women have been on a diet at some point in their lives - some of us spending decades trying to lose weight through controlling our food. While aiming to lose body fat or improve your health isn't a bad thing, the problem is that many diets promoted by the media, celebrities, social influencers and even the health, nutrition and fitness industries are just too difficult to maintain in the long term.

This means that initially you might get great results within the first six or so months, but a year or more down the track the weight will likely come back accompanied by some extra kilos.

Calories In/Calories Out

There's been more emphasis lately on how health and wellbeing factors such as hormonal imbalances, metabolic issues, gut health, sleep and stress levels can impact weight loss. Yes, these can affect how easy/difficult it is to lose weight, but the calorie equation still rings true:

If you consume more calories through food and drink than your body burns/uses up through physical activity and your metabolism, it will lead to weight gain. If you burn more calories than you consume, you will lose weight. Somewhere in between the two is weight maintenance.

There are many different ways to reduce food intake and any diet that restricts or reduces calories can help with weight loss, but if the way of eating is too difficult or too restrictive it probably won't stick. For this reason, the Ministry of Health doesn't recommend detox diets, the Paleo diet, or very low-carb diets such as Keto.

These ways of eating often get rapid, impressive results because of how restrictive they are - for some people strict diets can be useful for varied reasons - but for the majority these diets are difficult to continue when you step out of your everyday life on holidays, events, times of stress, illness, social occasions... you get the idea. This means a constant juggle of jumping on and falling off the bandwagon, leading to yo-yo dieting.

Additionally, restrictive ways of eating can lead to a dysfunctional relationship with food where we may feel guilty, ashamed or naughty for eating certain things, feel like we have to earn our food through exercise, think of foods as being good or bad, or experience feelings of failure for not sticking to the diet.

How to lose weight in a healthier, sustainable way

We always recommend an everything in moderation approach - remember that you can lose weight by reducing food intake in any way. Whether you're cutting one meal out a day (as in intermittent fasting), drastically cutting a food group (such as carbs with keto), removing processed foods (clean eating), or in the case of what we suggest, following standard portion sizes for each meal (which may end up taking a little from each meal throughout your day and/or filling up on nutrient-dense foods while reducing processed foods).

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