Diets and the Common Denominator

Outcomes of a Healthy Diet

We must first start by establishing the outcomes we’re hoping to achieve with a healthy diet. Ask most people this question and you’d get answers centered around weight, body composition, and looking a certain way. Dietary patterns certainly influence weight and body composition, but that is not the sole reason to focus on a healthy diet. In fact, research suggests that when people overemphasize eating for weight control and appearance, it can push them toward unhealthy diet patterns and disordered eating.

To understand the key outcomes of a healthy diet, we have to zoom out and divorce ourselves from a diet culture that favors thinness and aesthetic ideals. From that wider view, a healthy diet allows for six critical outcomes.

We’ll explore each of these components in greater detail below. For now, notice that the outcomes of a healthy diet aren’t just physical. They’re also emotional, psychological, and social. Therein lies the complexity of our relationship with our dietary patterns. Eating is more than a biological act, and because of that, what constitutes a healthy diet differs for each and every one of us. There are still good, evidence-based principles to build on, though, and we’ll cover them in the rest of this article.

Making Dietary Changes

Before we get to the principles that produce the outcomes above, we have to talk about making dietary changes. We all know this can be a very complex process to undertake. Here, too, it’s less about the biology and more about the psychology. Our dietary patterns are deeply ingrained into our habitual daily routines, and strong emotional and social factors sit behind every food choice. Changing how you eat is not as simple as flipping a switch.

Making dietary changes requires knowledge of which foods to eat more and less of, and it requires some time-tested principles of behavior change. Ideally, you’d have a professional guiding you through the process. A registered dietitian is built for exactly this, and the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics can help you find a registered dietitian near you. If you don’t have a professional in your corner yet, two tools can carry you a long way.

Tool 1: The Dietary Recall

The first is a dietary recall, a behavior-modification technique referred to as self-monitoring. Self-monitoring raises awareness of behaviors that might otherwise go unnoticed. Although we eat most of the time, most of us are unaware of exactly what and how much we eat. A dietary recall raises awareness of both. Here are the steps.

Tool 2: Shrink the Change

After looking at your dietary recall, you can use the principles in the rest of this article to determine where to make changes. Before the where, though, comes the how, and the how is the step most people get wrong. Dietary changes are difficult precisely because they’re so habitually ingrained.

There can be so many things you’d like to change that you feel overwhelmed about where to start. You might even convince yourself to change multiple things at once. For most people, that dooms the effort. Making one dietary change is tough enough, and it affects other aspects of your diet as it happens. Making several at once can be dizzying, unpredictable, and mentally exhausting. This is where “shrinking the change” helps. Here’s the method:

• Pick one dietary habit to change. Ideally, the change affects only one food item. The best target sits at the intersection of what you need to change and what you want to change.
• Set a goal to make that single change, and only that change, for the week ahead.
• Check in daily and weekly with the two questions below.
• Progress to your next change only after the weekly answer stays below 3 for two straight weeks.

Appropriate Energy Intake

If we think of a healthy diet as a house, the foundation of the house is proper calorie (or energy) intake. If you’re currently maintaining your weight, you’re in calorie balance. The calories coming in from food equal the calories going out through activity, and that state fulfills two outcomes at once: adequate energy and weight management.

If you’re currently gaining weight, you’re eating more calories than you’re burning, and the reverse is true if you’re losing. Depending on your weight management goal, you’ll need to determine the calorie intake that matches it. Equations exist to estimate this, but they’re approximations at best. The easiest way to determine where you stand relative to calorie balance is to weigh yourself at the beginning and end of your dietary recall week.

I’m not a proponent of long-term food logging, because it tends not to be sustainable. But the information from your recall pairs perfectly with tool number two. If your goal is to lose weight, and your weigh-ins during the recall week suggest you’re maintaining or gaining, you know you need to eat less. Your one goal for the week could be taking a single item out of your diet and replacing it with a lower-calorie option, or not replacing it at all.

Focus on Lean Proteins, Fruits, and Vegetables

These three foods serve two outcomes directly: nutrition to maintain or improve health, and recovery from activity and exercise. Lean proteins, whether plant or animal based, provide the amino acids that are the building blocks of our tissue. An active person has a protein requirement of somewhere between 0.8 and 1.0 grams of protein per pound of body weight per day.

Fruits and vegetables provide many of the critical vitamins and minerals that allow our metabolic processes to work properly. That drives energy and supports health. Having 5 to 6 servings of fruit and 5 to 6 servings of vegetables every day is a great goal to shoot for. And if you’re well short of that, take heart: each serving that moves you toward the number makes a difference.

Limit Ultra-Processed Foods

Highly processed foods, what researchers now call ultra-processed foods, undergo a significant amount of refinement in manufacturing. Processing strips away much of their nutritional value, turning them into more “empty calories” than anything else. And those empty calories can carry some addictive properties. Harvard’s Nutrition Source has a useful breakdown of how foods range from unprocessed to ultra-processed, and what heavy consumption is associated with.

These kinds of foods work against four of our six outcomes: adequate energy, nutrition for health, recovery, and weight management.

This doesn’t mean we should demonize these foods and never eat them (see the next section, below). It just means we should eat less of them.

Everything in Moderation

To the point made above about not demonizing any foods: it is very reasonable to consume foods you enjoy in moderation. Deprivation rarely works well over the long term, and it normally leads to overconsumption at some point. It also tends to make social eating situations stressful and unpleasant, because those foods are usually in abundance in those settings.

Eating in moderation is what makes the last two of our six outcomes possible: eating experiences that are enjoyable, desirable, and shame-free, and healthy social interaction and cultural rituals. Food connects us to each other, and a diet that can’t survive a birthday party was never going to survive a lifetime.

If you’re focused on eating mostly lean proteins, fruits, and vegetables, having other food items in moderation shouldn’t be much of a problem. You likely won’t be as hungry for them anyway, because you’ll be full of foods that serve you. A best practice here: limit yourself to one serving wherever possible.

Putting It All Together: Steps to a Healthy Diet

This article lays out a basic and flexible framework. One that starts with understanding the outcomes of a healthy diet and zooms out from weight management alone. From there, four high-level principles carry the whole structure:

1. Start with how much. Calorie balance is the foundation of the house.
2. Focus on lean proteins, fruits, and vegetables. They feed health and recovery at the same time.
3. Limit ultra-processed foods. Eat less of them, without banning them.
4. Enjoy all foods in moderation. Shame-free eating and social connection are outcomes too.

Finally, we covered the dietary recall to determine the current state of your diet, and paired it with a tool, and a series of questions, for making one dietary change at a time so the change actually sticks. Before you pick your first change, take stock of where your foundation stands today.

Your ability to take ownership of your diet, and by way of it, your health, is in your hands. A nationally certified AFS Fitness Coach is here to help if you’re looking for someone to walk with you on your journey to greater health.

About the Author

Kemper Sosa, BS, ACSM-CPT, ACSM-EP, NSCA-CSCS

Business Development & Marketing, Applied Fitness Solutions

Kemper Sosa has been part of Applied Fitness Solutions since 2014 and has led business development and marketing since 2020. He holds a B.S. in Exercise Science with a minor in Human Nutrition from Eastern Michigan University, and is an ACSM Certified Personal Trainer, ACSM Exercise Physiologist, and NSCA Certified Strength and Conditioning Specialist.

Supremely passionate about people, Kemper brings his love for AFS members, his appreciation for the team, and his passion for life to every interaction, from touring new members to representing AFS in the community. His proudest accomplishment to date: becoming a father to his daughter Gracie in late 2022.