Many people want to lose weight, but very few have a solid diet plan to help them achieve their goal as smoothly as possible. The more restrictive your diet, the more cravings you’ll have and the harder it is to fight off temptation when you’ve deprived yourself of food for so long.
It doesn’t help that advertising is so prevalent in today’s media, you can barely go a few minutes without seeing a fast food commercial. On the drive home from work you’ll probably drive by two dozen fast food joints tempting you to go in and have a cheat meal.
But if you have easy to follow diet plans, you’ll never go hungry and that weight will come off in no time. Luckily for you, I have compiled 10 easy steps for you to follow to make this process even easier on you.
Step 1: Find Out Your Calorie Needs
If you hope to lose weight, your easy diet plans should allow for less calories taken in that are burned off. That means you need to choose low calorie foods that are actually good for you. (None of those 100-calorie candy scams). To find out how many calories you should be taking in, find out what your BMR or basal metabolic rate is. You can find many BMR calculators online, but this will give you a good estimate of what your meals should total up to each day if you hope to lose weight.
Step 2: Eat Plenty of Fruits and Vegetables
If you want your easy diet plans to be healthy, you should work on eating at least five servings of fruits and veggies each and every day. For best results, mix up your fruit and vegetable selection and try to implement them as snacks for when you get hungry. Fresh fruits and vegetables are packed with vitamins, fiber and antioxidants and they will help to fill you up so that you’re not so hungry all the time.
Step 3: Portion Size
If you are going to create easy meal plans for your entire day, you’ll want to prepare just the right portion sizes for each meal. For instance, a serving of pasta is typically ½ cups of cooked pasta. On the other hand, a serving of pasta at your favorite restaurant is usually four times that or more! When you weigh out your portions properly, you only give your body the calories it needs and you will lose weight much more efficiently.
One easy way to limit how much food you eat is to go out and buy smaller plates and bowls. When you literally cannot put as much food into your plate or bowl as you normally do, you will be less likely to overeat. Just make sure you don’t go for seconds or else you are defeating the purpose!
Step 4: Eating All of Your Meals
To lose weight quickly, you need to get your metabolism roaring. That can easily be accomplished with small yet frequent meals. Instead of eating three huge meals throughout the day, break those meals up into five or six smaller meals. That way you are eating every few hours, your blood sugar remains level and you get through the day with plenty of energy and not a bit of hunger.
Step 5: Wholesome and Fresh Foods
To prepare the healthiest meals, purchase only the freshest foods and stay away from any packaged or processed foods. Foods that have been heavily processed are often filled with preservatives and other foreign chemicals that you just want to stay away from. Your body relies on fresh foods to grow and function, and that’s exactly what you should feed it.
Step 6: Don’t Restrict Yourself
If you hold back on your craving for chocolate for too long, you will finish an entire box of chocolates the moment you get your hands on it. Never forbid yourself from eating or drinking anything, as that will only make you want it more. Instead, eat a bite and really savor that bite. If you want another, take another, but truly enjoy it. Once you get it out of your system, you’ll be less likely to have day and night dreams about it.
A caveat is that if you are someone with poor self-control, and you know that taking the first bite will definitely lead to a second, a third, and so on, then perhaps skip this step. The point of is advice is to keep your sanity in check, similar to how a nicotine patch for smokers will provide a little bit of nicotine so that the craving doesn’t get so bad. However, if it ends up pushing you over the edge to a full blown binge-eating session, then that defeats the purpose and all temptation should be avoided.
Step 7: Learn to Read Labels
You can’t know what’s really going into your body until you learn to read food levels. You should understand what the labels tell you and what to look for. One thing you should always keep in mind is that any products that claim to be low in sugar or carbs are not necessarily low in calories or fat. Learn to read labels and you’ll be much more effective at creating health easy diet plans.
Step 8: Watch the Sugary Drinks
You should always drink plenty of water and limit the other drinks you consume. While fruit drinks are good for you, many of them are loaded with sugar you really don’t need. The same goes for soda and energy drinks. Energy drinks, especially, are known for having two or three times the sugar of regular soda drinks. If you can drink water instead of all of these sugary drinks, you’ll be much better off and your fat loss will succeed much faster.
Also, most diet, “lite”, or zero calorie drinks use an artificial sweetener called aspartame instead of sugar. Even though these drinks are technically contain zero sugar and zero calorie (so their marketing is technically correct), too much aspartame can cause side effects such as headache, seizure, insomnia, anxiety, migraines, and even depression. You would do well to just stay away from all soft drinks if you can.
Step 9: Keep a Journal
You should be logging everything that goes into your body. Every morsel and every drink should be written down the moment you swallow it. Not only does this help you look back to see why you did or didn’t succeed on any given day, but it also helps you to realize exactly how much you’re eating, and that can be a real motivator to cut back.
It’s a little more difficult to cheat on your easy diet plans by devouring that chocolate cake when you know you’ll be writing it down in your food journal right after. Nowadays, everybody has a cellphone with a high definition camera on it, so you can take a picture of each meal to log it. Then you can see exactly how much you ate, when you ate it, and how big the portion was.
By holding yourself accountable, you’ll be less likely to break your motivation to lose.
Step 10: Get Off Your Butt!
If you want to lose weight, no matter how healthy you eat, you need to exercise. Just to stay healthy, experts say you should work out at least for thirty minutes and all the way up to sixty minutes every single day. They also say that you should combine muscle building exercises at least two times per week.
The more you exercise, the more calories you burn. The more muscle you build, the more calories you burn, even while at rest. So it just makes sense, when you want to lose weight quickly, to pick up an exercise regimen you enjoy so that you’ll stick with it for as long as you can. Even something as simple as going for a brisk stroll around your neighborhood is better than doing nothing.
The Bottom Line
If you follow these 10 steps when making your easy diet plans, you will lose weight faster than you ever thought you could. These steps are designed to give you easy-to-follow techniques that require no calorie or point counting and no need to measure or weigh anything. As long as you follow these steps, you’ll be able to choose the right foods to get you through this time until you see the completely body transformation you’re after.