When we talk about diet, we can find various definitions and classifications of diet, but what actually it is? In simple definition, diet is the amount of food ingested by an organism or a human that defines the level of calorie intake. In simple definition, food that we eat defines our health. In fact, this concept is very true because what we eat greatly affects the rate of weight gain and the quality of life.

Many people believe that dieting is all about avoiding calories and counting calories. This is very wrong. Yes, calories and counting calories are important elements in any diet program, but they are not at all the main components of dieting. The truth about dieting is that, in addition to calories, there are a lot of other factors that influence the rate of weight loss or gain, which will determine whether diet programs will work or not. Some examples are: what type of food you like to eat, your activity level, and your daily activity level.

Let’s take a brief look into both nouns (dieting program), starting with dieting. In the noun sense, we can define dieting as the process of removing calories from the diet. At first sight, it seems like a pretty straightforward idea. However, it requires some thought to be able to really understand why dieting is important. For one thing, calories are part of our everyday diet, so eliminating them means we have no calorie supply.

When you look closely at the idea behind dieting, it is a bit more complex than that. In the dieting noun, we can see a clear correlation between dieting and fruit consumption. Fruits contain very few calories and hence, the body uses these calories as source of energy. If you do not include fruits in your diet, you will reduce the number of calories that your body can use for energy and you will gain weight. Some examples of this are shown in the entries below:

So we can see from the above, dieting involves a balancing act between the reduction of the intake of calories and the replacement of that with energy from other sources. The verb for dieting therefore has a double aspect – the first aspect refers to the action of dieting and the second aspect refers to the fact that dieting is a balancing act. The diet verb in the second sense is used as an act which is achieved by watching what we eat and reducing intake of calories.

Lastly, let us look at the verb to diet. The context of the word diet has been pretty clear so far. The verb to diet, on the other hand, suggests the act of watching what we eat and keeping track of those foods. The point being made here is that the goal of dieting is to keep scrolling down the list of calories intake and eventually reaching the top – consuming the most number of calories as possible, so as to keep the weight off.