Diet Diet Diet Diet Diet

EatTrainWin

Yesterday, I received a hate-message through social media. The person said I am doing a disservice to women by talking about dieting. Ummmm, hello, that's how people lose weight.

D-I-E-T is a four letter word to most people because they think of calorie restriction and deprivation. I think we need to take back the power of this word! I like to focus on the uncommon and rarely used definition of the word as defined by Merriam-Webster dictionary:

a : food and drink regularly provided or consumed

If we regularly eat healthy food, we have a healthy diet. If we eat junk food all the time, we have a unhealthy diet. Every living person and animal has a diet.

What do you think about the word?

ebayaddict0127

I agree with seeing the word as it is in the dictionary. It's when people say "I'm on a diet" or "I'm doing a diet" is when it sounds like a fad or something other than a lifestyle change.

bwogilvie

Something I've posted here before: "Diet" is a tricky word, because we use in two senses in the modern US. The first is "a short-term set of foods that I will eat while losing weight, and then give up when I reach my goal." That's like the Grapefruit Diet, or the Atkins Diet. The second sense is "the balanced set of foods that I normally eat," the way people talk about the "Mediterranean diet" (which is more of an abstraction) or the traditional Inuit diet (very high on protein and fat). People who lose weight on the first kind of diet usually put it back on, because they return to an unhealthy diet in the second sense, and go back to overeating a little bit.

TommyJensen1987

Remember only the people who matters get hate messages. You have to do something for people to want to kill you.

For sure we need a more correct word than diet. Life improvement would be my suggestion – you could certainly have gone with lifestyle change as well, but that is too broad and not precise enough.