Guest Post
Trying to maintain a healthy and regulated diet is difficult at the best of times. It’s so easy to try and eat healthily, but as soon as you lose motivation or encounter a ‘cheat’ food, it can be game over very quickly.
However, by setting yourself up with a personalized diet plan, you’ll have a strict routine to stick to, helping you to make progress and achieve your goals. Here’s a complete guide showing you how to set up this meal plan.
Start by Setting Your Goals
Before you even start thinking about creating your meal plan, you need to determine what you want to achieve. Maybe you want to maintain your current weight? Maybe you want to lose weight? In some cases, you may even want to put on weight; it’s completely up to you.
Work Out How Many Calories You’ll Need
Using online tools, you can easily figure out how many calories your body should be consuming a day. On average, a male will need to consume around 2,500 calories whereas a female will need around 2,000. However, this figure can vary depending on your age, size, height, weight and how much physical activity you engage in a day.
Create Your Targets
With the information above in mind, you can start to create your targets. This will be what you’re aiming for in your meal plan. Let’s say, for example, you want to lose weight, and your body needs around 2,250 calories a day.
To lose weight, you’ll want to drop this calorie intake to around 2,000. This will allow your body to function normally while giving it the chance to burn off extra calories that your body is already holding.
Suhaimah Adila Malouf, a content manager for Top Canadian Writers, continues;
“The part of the process where you set your goals could easily be considered the most important. This is what will motivate and inspire you every day and will give you the feeling of absolute joy when you achieve them.
For a bit of advice, set small achievable goals, to begin with, and work your way up. Every big journey starts with a single step.”
Set Up Your Recording Database
This can be done on a bit of paper or, easier, on a computer spreadsheet. Whatever format you wish to use, you’ll need to create a table with the following columns;
- Food Name – This is the title of the food that you’re eating day by day
- Calories – How many calories the food item has
- Fat – How much fat the food item has
- Protein – How much protein the food item has
- Carbs – How many carbohydrates the food item has
- Totals – Daily or weekly totals for what you have consumed
This is the most basic form of meal plan, but it has everything you need to record your progress that will help motivate you to achieve your goals.
Using the Diet Plan
Now you can begin eating like you normally would. Everything you eat, no matter how big or small needs to be recorded in the meal plan. On the back of your food packaging, you should be able to find all the information you need to fill out the table. If not, you can use online tools to find the macros by simply searching ‘Food item name ‘macros.’’
Changing Your Diet
After a week or so, you should have a very detailed report of what you’ve been eating every day as well as your total calories for the week. Now, line this up with the information you had in the primary points above.
“If you normal eating day equals around 3,000 calories, you’ll now have to cut down 1,000 calories a day to achieve your goals. You can now refer to each day to see what the high-calorie items are, allowing you to cut them out easily,” says Jonathan Bricks, a health writer at Assignment Help.
For example, you may have a bag of crisps for a mid-morning snack. Instead, replace this with an apple to drop the calorie intake.
Continue to Improve
This changing of your meal plan will be an ongoing process. After the first week, write up what you want to eat, day by day, meal by meal, for the next week and stick to it. Then go through it again at the end of the week and change it for the next week how you want it to be. This will enable you to reach your targets and achieve your goals effortlessly.
For more tips on fitness and diet, check out the previous article on How to Enjoy Your Diet & Cardio for a New Gorgeous Look this Summer.
About the Guest Author:
Jennifer Scott works as an editor at UK Top Writers and as a blog writer and proofreader at UK Service Reviews. She is a business development consultant working with clients from different areas such as education, technology, security, etc.
Sifa’s Corner on,
BLOGLOVIN .||. INSTAGRAM .||. YOUTUBE .||. FACEBOOK
1 comment
Calorie counting does not work as not all calories are created equal. A much better idea for a personalized diet is seeing what food types make your blood sugar spike – it is when blood sugar levels spike that fat is generated and stored by the body.