How important is food variety to you when dieting?

This is a discussion I've had a few times with friends and colleagues and I'm interested to see what the broader sentiment is.

My personal method for achieving healthy weight loss boils down to "create an appropriate calorie deficit, maintain a healthy macronutrient ratio, and ensure you get all the micronutrients you need". I'm pretty meticulous about tracking macros/micros so I get this right (more than I really need to be, but being detailed and strict about it is what works and motivates me). The problem is that I'm a) extraordinarily lazy and b) a terrible cook. So on a lot of days, rather than eating a variety of foods and picking and choosing meals based on what fits my macro requirements, I just make Huel shakes, which do exactly what I want and take pretty much no time to make.

This week, primarily just for the fun of it, I did that for every meal, and got literally all of my calories from Huel. (It's gone fine, and it's been a pleasing novelty to "precisely" hit my calorie/macro targets every day). I was chatting with my colleagues about it and one of them kind of couldn't believe that I was OK doing that, expressing that they'd get super depressed if they were only able to eat one thing, especially if that thing was Light-Brown Nutrient Sludge™. Now, I totally understand that position and accept that I'm an outlier in terms of food opinions, but I've always found that food variety doesn't really matter to me at all - even when not dieting, I'm a same-sandwich-every-lunchtime sort of guy. I'm just wondering about everyone else, and interested in what r/loseit's opinions are on the topic.

Are you the kind of person who can eat the same thing every day and be fine, or do you have to mix it up? If you need a lot of variety, do you find that that makes dieting more difficult to manage, or that you end up short of certain macros/micros, or that it's tougher to get your fiber in? Or if you're a same-sandwich-every-day kind of person, does that cause you any issues with diet/nutrition, or do you find that people comment on it a lot?

I don't have a hyper-specific question I'm looking to answer here, I'm just interested in hearing different approaches and philosophies on this and seeing what interesting stuff comes up in discussion. I'm definitely not trying to divide the sub into two bitterly warring factions, perhaps called Team Gruel and Team Cornucopia ^{but if that does happen I will lay down my life defending the gates of Castle Nutri-Goop}

submitted by /u/columbologist
[link] [comments]

from loseit - Lose the Fat https://ift.tt/MPYqZxy