Diets are usually too extreme to be healthy for the whole year-round, year after year. It is not healthy to have an ongoing and extremely limited diet. Not only is your body running on not enough fuel, you might be compromising your immune response by not getting enough vitamins. Common signs of a poor diet might also include feeling overtired, cranky and stressed.

All of these things are quite normal in the company of extreme dieters because eating too few calories will result in getting overtired and keeping your body under stress. What happens next when the diet is over and normal eating resumes, is an onslaught of calories that puts further stress on the body system.

The only way to achieve a healthy lifestyle is to break the cycle of dieting and start eating healthily and exercising regularly. A healthy lifestyle should include 30 minutes of light to moderate physical activity. A healthy diet is made up of a variety of foods, rich in vegetables and high in fruits. No more than 60 grams of fat should be eaten a day, none of which should be trans fats. Sugars should be limited and a fair amount of your grains should be whole grains.

There is one more piece to the healthy eating puzzle and that is portion size. Controlling the amount you eat is the only way to have a healthy diet that is neither deficient nor overly heavy in a certain food group. Following these recommendations will mean never having to diet again.