While it’s obvious that your brain and your gut share the same body, these two unique parts of you share a special bond. Have you ever experienced having a feeling “in the pit of your stomach?” Your brain health and your gut health are connected in ways that may not be immediately apparent, but these connections undeniably exist regardless. Let’s explore some of the ways you can optimize your brain and gut health by choosing the right foods for your diet.

There are so many diet plans out there, it can be difficult to tell which ones are true weight loss plans and which ones are utter nonsense, possibly even harmful (we’re looking at you, cotton ball diet). Of course, one of the biggest keys to taking weight off and keeping it off is following a diet plan full of foods that you enjoy. It’s also important that these foods are high in nutritional value, and that is where BODY Divine comes into play. As much as we might love the idea of a Snickers-and-ice-cream diet, it just isn’t realistic.

Even if you did manage to curb your caloric intake through the consumption of candy and ice cream alone, you would feel pretty lousy, as those foods are basically devoid of nutritional content. Lots of fat and sugar, but virtually no nutrients otherwise. And while you definitely need fats and sugars in your diet, this isn’t exactly what we’re talking about. So let’s dive right into four ways you might consider using as diet plans to help you slim down effectively and deliciously.

Flexitarian Diet

The Flexitarian diet is an easy way to venture into vegetarianism or veganism. The Flexitarian diet emphasizes a plant-based focus, but if you feel like having a burger now and again, that’s okay, too. There aren’t any restrictions on calories per day specifically, but Dawn D. Blatner, nutritionist and author of the book The Flexitarian Diet, provides a 5-week eating plan that clocks in at around 1500 calories per day.

What is better for weight loss, cutting calories, or increasing exercise? Cutting calories seems like a bit of a no-brainer — if you burn more calories than you take in, then you lose weight. It sure seems, at least to us here at BODY Divine, like a pretty simple weight loss routine! But exercise seems like it’s about the same thing, even with the same rationale: if you burn more calories through exercise than you take in, you lose weight. Right?

Unfortunately, like many of the notions around a weight loss routine that rely on exercise, it just isn’t that simple. In this blog, we’ll discuss why diet and exercise affect weight loss differently and how you can make nutrition your secret weapon in weight loss.

Diet versus Exercise

While technically, a person could use exercise and diet interchangeably to achieve their weight loss goals, it tends to be much easier for humans to lose weight through diet or diet and exercise than through exercise alone. It’s just simpler to consume fewer calories and shed pounds that way than it is to try to exercise them off.

It’s also not always possible for us to exercise off the excess calories we have consumed. There are only so many hours, and so much available exercise time, available to us busy, social creatures. While it is one choice to not eat that candy bar or packet of chips, it’s another altogether to spend the 42 minutes of fast-paced walking or 22 minutes of running to eradicate the calories from that Snickers bar, or the quarter slice of pizza that is 449 calories requires a 1-hour 23-minute walk or 43-minute run. Frankly, you’re a lot more likely to run out of time and willpower to keep going after you add up everything you need to burn off and conclude that you basically have to run a half-marathon every day at a 10:00 per mile pace to burn off what you can simply not eat in the first place.