Diet Plan

Create Your Own Effective Diet Plan

Although many people successfully follow the prescribed diet regimen like Jenny Craig, The Zone, and South Beach, these diet plans often do not effectively address the unique eating habits of families, personal preferences, and their physical activities.

Hence, it is important to follow a diet plan, specially designed to your own personal needs in place of just curtailing your cookies intake. You can design your personal diet plan to shed your extra kilos in the following ways:

Your Ideal Diet

The effectiveness of every diet plan lies in its suitability for adopting it for a longer period of time. Hence, choose your dietary regimen that is most ideal for your pallets, as also to your habits. Here, you will find the ways and methods to discover your effective personal diet plan. Fortunately, you need not follow a strict dietary regimen that consists of insipid meals or an aggressive workouts program, in order to shed weights. Minor adjustments in your diet plan to curb some calories and increase in nutrition will do.

Joy Bauer, MS, RD, author of Your Inner Skinny: Four Steps to Thin Forever says, “It is established that any diet plan that lowers the calorie consumption would surely lead to weight loss, irrespective of its carbohydrate, protein or fat content.”

But there is a catch. You can’t maintain the weight loss if you do not adopt an eating and exercise habit that goes with your diet and lifestyle.

Personal diet plan

You should do some self-assessment before embarking on a dietary regimen. Heather K. Jones, RD, co-author of ‘What’s Your Diet Type? Use the Power of Your Personality to Discover Your Best Way to Lose Weight’, says in this regard, “Personal habits play an important part in the success of any dietary plan. This is the reason why some changes in the lifestyles effectively lead to weight loss for some people, while it fails miserably in the case of many others.”

He further elaborates, “People, who have successfully shed weights have invariably done it by finding out the most diet plan that suits to their personal habits. In other words, it is a case-specific approach that gives success.”

Six queries that you should answer

Bauer and Jones have suggested these six queries that one ask in order to make a sensible self-assessment.

• Count the number of meals you take in a day. Then allocate the total permissible amount of calories in a day to each of the meals.
• If you do not have much time or detest preparing meals at home, then you should learn to simplify the preparation of healthy and fresh foods.
• Arrange the kind of support you need to succeed. Maybe you need the support of your buddies, who are also be fighting weight loss, to keep you on the right track This is most important during the phase when the initial zest begins to go away.
• If you love eating out, then take care to take into account the calorie counts of those foods.
• If you pamper yourself with small, yet special treats every day, then always keep 100 calories in your dietary plan for those helpings of cookies, candies, or bars.
• Your exercise regimen should be realistic. Experts believe that half an hour of moderate activities like walking will do. But this varies from person to person. Hence, consult your physician to find the right amount of exercise for you.

Keep tab of the calories

In order to succeed in achieving weight loss, you should burn the number of calories you take. Hence, following a daily calorie budget is the key to success. This depends on your sex, age, the amount of daily physical activities you undertake, and of course the periodic weight loss you intend to achieve.

Once you have decided the amount of calorie you should take – then select the foods that are to be included in your diet plan. Bauer suggests that whole foods like fruits, vegetables, whole grains; low-fat dairy foods are the most ideal foods.

The MyPyramid.gov website of the U.S. Department of Agriculture gives a blueprint of a healthy diet plan. You can easily calculate the number of servings and the food and oil content you should take, can be determined from any of the five food groups, as per your calorie level to achieve the weight loss.

How to determine your daily diet regimen

After determining the number of servings you need from each of the food groups, you have to assimilate them in order to prepare the palatable meals and satiating snacks to avoid any possibility of falling for some other delicious foods. The keys to success are as follows:

• Eating small meals at regular intervals is important, as it would keep the hunger at bay. So, have meals at least thrice a day.
• Having a combination of protein and fiber in your meals and snacks would help you to stay fuller for a longer period. While you can find the protein in milk and meat, whole grains, fruits, legumes, and vegetables contain plenty of fiber. You can enjoy an apple or a boiled egg with whole grain than a soda cracker that has the same amount of calories with low fiber and no protein.
• Save up calories: Go for the ingredients that have the lowest amount of calories amongst each food group. Choose one percent reduced-fat-milk in lieu of full-fat, while selecting 93 percent ground beef in place of 85 percent. Similarly, choose light popcorn and avoid the buttered ones.

Remember, although the food plan is for weight control, it important that you take the right amount of each food. People generally avoid sumptuous helpings of carrot but consume more of the red meat, pasta, and other delicacies.

In case you are unsure regarding the right amount of servings, then fill up your kitchen with measuring cups, small weighing machines, and measuring spoons in order to determine the right portion of your food at home.

If you think it is too much for you, then get to know the correct sizes by comparing them to other articles in your home. It may be the light bulb, basketball or even the playing cards. In this context, it is important to imbibe and develop the skill to gauge the size and amount of food through your eyes, for you wouldn’t be taking all your meals at home.

Hope Warshaw, MS, RD, author of Eat Out, Eat Right says in this regard, “Americans generally have around six meals in a week outside the home. And admit it; the restaurants serve foods that contain high doses of sugar and fat with less of vegetables, whole grains, fruits, and low-fat dairy than what you normally eat at your homes.”

This is not to suggest that people who dine out are in a hopeless position, as far as dieting is concerned. But, it is better to curtail the dinner engagements. It is also sensible to take your home-cooked foods to work or you even have them while on the road instead of approaching the nearest restaurant nearby. And kill those extra calories by maintaining regular physical activities.

Take the help of published materials or websites of where you love to dine, to have an idea about the amount of calories, the foods you take there contain. Only go for dishes that would help you in curtailing the calorie consumption like vegetables, grilled meat, and fish made with little extra oil and low-fat salad.