How to Design a Diet Plan
Many people want to lose weight, but not everyone can afford to go to Weight Watchers or Jenny Craig. A lot of us know the basics of healthy eating, such as including more fruits and vegetables, but the problem with most diets is that you must restrict what you eat, so you can't have your favorite foods, and that's what makes you fail at that diet.
Designing your own diet plan is not easy. You have to be very self-aware and very open to changing things about yourself that have nothing to do with your diet. The steps provided are a roadmap to designing your own diet plan, but in the end it is up to you to make that plan work for you.
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Instructions
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Designing Your Diet Plan
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Decide exactly what you want from the diet plan for the short term. The basic idea of this step is to make small goals of things you want to change about yourself and your current food intake. Take out your notebook and write those goals down. It can be as simple as lowering your blood pressure and weight, or setting a goal for something you've always wanted, like to be a certain dress size. After you reach these short-term goals, re-evaluate and set new short-term goals---it's a lot easier to take a series of small steps than it is to take one giant one. Plus, meeting each of these-short term goals will empower you and give you the confidence that you can make the changes you need.
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Keep a food journal. Start out by writing everything you eat and drink for a week in a food journal and make sure you eat the way you normally do; don't start eating healthier than normal because that will make your totals inaccurate. After that week is up look at the food journal and figure out exactly what your caloric intake is for each day that week. In order to maintain the weight you're at you should be eating 10 times your weight in calories (ex. 230lbs = 2,300 calories per day).
Keep writing in the food journal. This makes you accountable for what you eat and also makes it easier to go back and look at what you've eaten. Also, by determining how many calories you've eaten you can look at your food journal and slowly substitute things for lower-calorie versions. Now you have two options: Determine how many calories, based on your first week's findings, you are going to eat per day---but remember never go below 1,200 calories per day---or decide what things you can cut out of your intake that are high in calories and that you won't miss. For example, you might consider substituting a black coffee, which has no calories, for a 400-calorie latte. -
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Start paying attention to food labels, which inform you about serving sizes and ingredients. The healthiest foods don't usually come with labels because they are in the fresh produce section of the market, so it's healthy to load up on those things. When you are buying things with food labels you want to look for calories per serving, how big that serving is, fat content, and fiber content. Remember, non-fat is not always best because your body does need some fat to function; just keep an eye on the trans fats and saturated fats. The higher the fiber content of a food, the better it is for your health. The average American should get between 20 and 25 grams of fiber per day. Be aware that, if health is your goal, there is a debate about food additives and how they can influence health. Buy products with an ingredient list that looks like things you'd have in your own kitchen to cook with. If you can't pronounce the name of an ingredient easily, it's probably something that you don't want in your food.
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Dust off the measuring cups and the scale to familiarize yourself with proper portion sizes. You can use smaller bowls and plates so the portions look bigger. One of the easiest ways to lose weight is just to start eating regular-size portions of the foods you normally eat. For example, a serving of meat, chicken, or fish should be the size of a deck of cards.
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Eat a serving of fruits and vegetables with every meal. The rule of thumb is half your plate should be either fruit or vegetables. Eating them without the added fat (butter/margarine and salad dressings) helps your body digest the rest of your food.
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Get active. You don't have to join a gym unless you want to. Your body is used to the activities you do every day and therefore only burns a certain number of calories each day based on that activity. Wear a pedometer everywhere and track your daily steps in your journal. You should be trying to get 10,000 steps in per day. If that doesn't seem possible try wearing the pedometer for a day while doing your normal routine. At the end of that day check and see what you did, and dedicate yourself to adding a certain number of steps to that for that week. Once you're used to doing that many, add more until you're regularly at the minimum of 10,000 steps. By that point, you should be ready to do more activity. Going to the gym isn't a bad thing because you do need to do cardio and weight training when you're ready, but that is best left to a professional fitness trainer to help you with.
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Stop worrying about what you're eating. If you're counting calories it's not exactly easy to do that, but in order to be successful you can't always be thinking about food. Find things to do that have no involvement with food, like reading, working in the garden, or playing with your kids or grandkids. By constantly thinking about your food, you can actually put yourself into a plateau.
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Forget the scale. Look at your food journal to see all the healthy foods listed in there and look at your diet plan journal at how many steps you are taking each day---that is a much more accurate validation of your hard work than being overly concerned with the number on the scale. When you know you are eating healthy and are more active the number on the scale doesn't mean as much. If you absolutely have to weigh yourself, pick one day per month and weigh yourself on the same day each month.
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Tips & Warnings
Get a physical before starting so that you have all of the results from your blood work and such to base improvement on. Be sure to drink at least eight glasses of liquid each day, it doesn't necessarily have to be water. Write in your diet plan journal as often as you need to because it really can help to write things out, even if it's just a note on how you did that day. Don't get discouraged if you mess up. That's life and this is about living with a plan that you control. Depending on your activity level, you might want to talk to a nutritionist or fitness trainer about how many calories you should be eating each day to balance that out. This is your plan; if something isn't quite working right, it's your right to make it work and change your plan to suit.
Always talk to your doctor before starting a diet and fitness regimen. Don't push yourself beyond your limitations Don't expect the weight to miraculously disappear, it took longer than overnight to put it on and it will to take it off.
