Beginning your diet journey 🍔

The long-term goal here is to change what you eat daily.

This is usually a hard transition, because we have to face years or decades of unhealthy eating, for most of us this simply can't be done overnight, we have to go step by step, so we don't have a big resistance against the required changes at once, only small, continuous improvements. In the meantime we need to learn about nutrition and ourselves.

1️⃣ Tracking is absolutely mandatory, if you have never did it, you won't be able to eyeball it; you might be able to omit tracking after years of experience and a new diet.
Choose your weapon: pen and paper, sheets application, mobile application.
As I have shown you earlier I was using Google Sheets first, then I tried some mobile apps and nowadays go with Yazio; if you opt for a mobile app, then get one that has an existing database of food, so you can easily scan QR codes, type your raw food, so you can input everything comfortably.

2️⃣ Don't change anything, start tracking your consumption to see how much food you eat a day in weight, calories and macros. While you are doing this for a few weeks read about the 3 macronutrients: carbohydrate, protein, fat. Play with calculators, calculate your BMR and based on your activity use a multiplier to see a ballpark number of your weight maintenance calorie requirement. Check the food nutrition tables on each product you are consuming, get a sense of what bread, meat and vegetables contain.

3️⃣ Probably your goal is to lose weight, so grab a calculator that you liked and calculate for weight loss, calories should be around -500 kcal compared with the maintenance.
Start changing your consumption to match the calories only (later watch macros too); in other words: eat less from what you did already.

When you feel that you are still hungry after a meal, then either you have to fight that feeling or change what you eat to lower calorie, higher volume food.

Examples (changes):
* banana and apple to red fruit
* red meat with white meat or fat reduced variants
* more vegetables - don't force yourself on salad if you hate it - cucumber, tomatoes, paprika or whatever you are already used to
* dairy products to light versions - fat reduced, protein added
* replace sugar with preferably nothing or zero calorie replacements - bodybuilder product merchants usually have zero calorie sirups, flavors in concentrated drops, need to try multiple, but you will find some that you might actually like
* soft drinks to water or tea, or zero calorie variants

Do these changes step by step from week to week, but not all at once. It is also acceptable to first limit yourself to consuming that unhealthy food only once a week, if you really crave it, it's better to consume it once a week than let the craving drive you crazy and cheat with a huge amount, then regret it.

Eventually as you learn and do the changes, you should end up with a sustainable healthy diet.