Being a foodie can be a blessing when you are dieting. However, many people cannot imagine this being an advantage. You instantly think about all the delicious, extremely energy dense, highly palatable foods that will be most likely be a no-go for a long time to come. Sure, your diet will have to change if you want to change your body, but this process doesn’t have to suck. How is that even possible? I’m glad you asked! Read on, embrace your foodie-ism and delve in.
I’m a foodie too, just like you. I like cooking and tweaking recipies. Most books I buy are cookbooks and I read them like the most captivating thrillers. One of my favourite pastime is shopping for ingredients. And the supermarket around the corner won’t be good enough to please my needs. It has to be at least a local farmers market! Eating out turns out to be difficult: most restaurants simply aren’t worth it, as I have the feeling of “I could do this better”.
But you can be fit, lean and healthy despite being a foodie, even if this sounds like a discrepancy. Yes, we like the tastiest foods imaginable, yes, we tend to be obsessed about food and it’s deliciousness, but being a foodie has a variety of benefits too!
We Love Learning About Food
If you love food, you like learning more about it. Why not learn about the macros and micros of your food? For a fitness foodie, this will be much easier than for someone who doesn’t want to think about his next meal.
Better yet, truly understanding what you’re eating—general food awareness—is perhaps the single most important thing you can do to improve your nutrition. It’s a learning curve that pays dividends for the rest of your life. That’s true for anyone and everyone, but foodies are passionate about food and love learning about it. This is a huge advantage.
We Love Cooking
By cooking yourself, you have complete control over the amount of energy you consume. There are no “hidden” calories like you would encounter by eating out. This allows you to accurately manage your macros and squeeze as much flavour into your daily calorie budget as possible.
And adding flavour to your diet will make it much easier to stick to it! Nobody wants to eat bland food, and we foodies know all the tricks of making food delicious. Most of us just have to learn some new, calorie saving techniques like charring your broccoli with garlic and a splash of mirin, transforming an often hated vegetable into a delicacy.
The more you cook, the better you look.
Most people don’t know how to cook at all, as a foodie, you are in an advantage: you already know the trade! Chopping onions isn’t difficult anymore, you don’t need a cookbook to know how to season your chicken that it tastes delicious and you are already an expert at barbecuing your steak to perfection. This makes everything so much easier!
We Appreciate Flavour
Do you know one of the most important factors in dieting? It’s adherence! The best and well thought out diet won’t help you if you simply cannot stick to it. Dieting takes time and if you hate every day of your diet because your food tastes bad, you won’t make it through.
But as foodies we can easily circumvent this problem! We are already obsessed with improving flavour, a new diet is just another reason to get creative again. Adherence gets much easier if you manage to transform bland pork loin into something you’re looking forward to eat. Everything gets easier if you manage to rework a calorie heavy cheesecake that would never fit your macros, into a protein rich version you can have every day.
This makes meal prep so much more convenient, as you can prepare your food in larger quantities, leaving leftovers for the next days to come. I never get it when people say they don’t want to eat the same thing for a few days. Are they cooking so bad that they can’t enjoy it the next day?
We Like Trying Out New Things
I always get excited when I find something new or unusual at the market or my butcher. There is so much to try, so many possibilities, so much variation! As a foodie you know the value of hidden gems like chicken liver or the hated-by-many cauliflower.
Many people don’t eat certain foods because of reasons I never will be able to grasp. They make their diet unnecessary boring by excluding delicacies like seafood or mushrooms. But foodies know better! Switching from high carb veggies like potatoes to low carb veggies like zucchini will feel like an opportunity to try something different, not like an opressive constriction.
You Will Have To Diet …
… but by now you know it won’t feel as bad as many of us imagine. Being a foodie allows you to diet differently than most: still enjoying your food every meal while still making progress and being happy about your decision to diet.
Are you ready to diet differently? To love food? To be fit?
Beary Strong 
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