Starting a Weight Loss Nutrition Plan Pt. 1

When it comes to deciding what foods to choose, and how much of these foods to eat, it can become pretty confusing, especially if your new to it. I have people come up to me and ask me for meal plans all the time. The truth is that meal plans are fairly easy to make, they just require some time and thought.

The first thing you need to do when starting out on a weight loss meal plan is to find out roughly how many calories you're taking in per day. In order to do this you need to record everything you eat along with the calorie amount for 5 days, add up all the calories and then divide this figure by 5. This new figure will be your average calories you intake per day.


The next step is to calculate your daily caloric needs. Basically this is how many calories your body needs in order to sustain itself throughout the day. To do this you can visit http://www.healthandfitnessfocus.com/calculators.php and follow the link to the daily caloric needs calculator. Once you have this figure take a minute to compare the two figures. More than likely you'll notice that you actual daily calories outweighs your daily caloric needs. The goal here is to eat less calories than your daily caloric needs. However; it's important to note that you should only drop a few hundred calories per week, as dropping off 500+ calories at a time may send your body into shock, causing fat storage. Usually most people shoot for about a total of 500 calories a day less than your daily caloric needs when all is said and done.


Now that you have these two figures, its time to get started on the main part of making a weight loss meal plan. I would suggest going to a site that has documented nutritional values for everyday foods, like http://www.calorieking.com/ . Now for losing weight purposes I suggest going with a ratio of 50% carbs, 30%protein, and 20%fat.


This ratio now has to be broken down into gram values, so in order to do this we have to know how many calories make up a gram of a certain nutrient. 1gr of fat = 9cal, 1gr of protein/carbs = 4cal. Okay so now we simply take your target calorie amount (actual calories-300) and multiply it by the percentages to get the total number of calories for each item. Then divide the calories by the appropriate number that pertains to the item(either 4 or 9). This will give you gram values for all of the items


Now you should be trying to get about 6 smaller meals a day rather than 3 large ones. This will keep your metabolism up higher. So take all of your gram values and divide them by 6, this will give you a pretty good idea as to how many grams of each item you should be getting per meal. So now we go to calorieking.com and come up with some foods for each meal, trying to stick to the allotted protein, carb and fat amounts.


When you have finished with this go ahead and add up all of the values for each item and check to see if you are roughly around your goal amount, if not then go back and lower the portion amount, or change the food. A sample of creating a weight loss meal plan can be found at http://www.healthandfitnessfocus.com/nutritionimportance.php . When making a weight loss meal plan also remember that it is important that you choose healthy foods, which have very little sugar, or refined ingredients. Stick to foods that have a higher fiber content(3g and above).


This may seem complicated but once you start, it will all start to make sense. Like I said earlier this is going to take some time to do, but making one of these meal plans will help you to keep track of your calories and make sure that your sticking to healthy foods.