How to get healthy, in five easy steps. Step 3, the eating plan.

Filed Under Eating Healthy, Healthy Habits

Thisentryis part 4 of 6 in the series SERIES - How to get healthy, in five easy steps.

This post is part of a series

How to get healthy, in five easy steps.
How to get healthy, in five easy steps. Step 1, research.
How to get healthy, in five easy steps. Step 2, setting goals.
How to get healthy, in five easy steps. Step 3, the eating plan.
How to get healthy, in five easy steps. Step 4, the activity plan.
How to get healthy, in five easy steps. Step 5, evaluate and retune.

We’re working our way through a simple plan to good health this week, continuing with step 3, the eating plan.

We’ve talked about some research and goal setting the past two days and if you’re going to be following this plan at home, you’re probably doing this part a month after you first started. The first month was all about information. You figured out what you were eating and when you’re active. You also set yourself some goals. Now we’re going to start using this information in order to plan our goals.

Interim Goals

If you read yesterday’s post about goal setting, you hopefully have a good set of goals set up. Each of these goals should have a series of interim goals. For example, your weight loss goal should actually be something like “lose 10lbs each 3 months over the next year” or “lose 20lbs by August 1st and then reevaluate weight.” These are great interim goals and we’re going to use them as part of our planning. Essentially, we’re going to set up our eating plan in order to hit your first interim goal, not your end goal. So even though your end goal might be to lose 100lbs, we’re going to set up our first plan to meet your first interim goal of losing 20lbs by mid next year. That way you have an immediate goal you’re working towards, plus you’ll have an opportunity to readjust your plans when you hit this goal and see the effects.

Calculate Calorie Requirements

The first step is to calculate how many calories you’ll need for your interim target goal weight. We do this by using a BMR calculator such as this one. You’ll note that this calculator gives results based on your activity levels. We’re going to use level 2, “lightly active” for now, because that’s what you’re going to be once we’re done with the physical activity plan.

I just used this calculator and it showed that I need 2729 calories per day if I was in the lightly active category. Great, now we know how many calories I need per day to hit our goal weight.

Splitting up the calories

How are we going to consume these calories over the course of a day? Well, first of all, we’re going to skim 20% right off the top. We’re going to do this to account for unexpected snacks and such, plus to promote weight loss. So my 2729 just went down to 2183 calories per day. Now we’re going to split up these remaining calories into several meals per day. My recommendation is to split it into four meals with the bigger meals coming at lunch and dinner. However, do what feels right to you.

If we’re sticking to my plan, your daily eating plan would be something like this:

Breakfast - 1/6 of your daily calories, which for me is around 364 calories.
Lunch - 1/3 of your daily calories, which for me is 728 calories.
Afternoon snack - 1/6 of your daily calories, which for me is 364 calories.
Dinner - 1/3 of your daily calories, which for me is 728 calories.

Two things to remember. First, these numbers are based on my weight, age, height and activity levels. Your numbers are going to be different. Second, feel free to adjust this breakdown. If you like eating more at breakfast and less at lunch, that’s great. Moving calories around is fine. You can even eliminate one of these meals altogether. The only things I would recommend keeping are breakfast and at least two other meals per day. How you want to split up your calories between these things is up to you.

Counting Calories

This sort of eating plan seems intimidating at first. It looks like you need to count calories at every turn. However, remember that eating journal you kept during your first month? This is where that information comes in handy. After keeping track of your food for a month, you should start getting a feel for how many calories are in various types of food. You should know what’s good for you and what’s bad. That’s going to be very useful as you try to stick to this eating plan. You don’t have to be exact, we took out that 20% of calories to account for little mistakes here and there, but you should have a decent feel for how many calories are in the food you eat. If you don’t then look it up BEFORE you eat it. Remember, you are no longer just noting down your calorie intake, you are actively trying to control it now. So if you don’t know what something contains you need to look it up ahead of time or not eat it.

Eliminate Bad Habits

At the same time that you start reducing calories, you’re also going to start eliminating bad habits. Again, the food journal comes in handy for this part. Go through what you ate the last month and start identifying stuff you don’t really need. Common things are: sodas, coffees, candy, junk food and so on. Now make yourself another interim goal. By whatever date you set for your first interim weightloss goal, you want to eliminate one bad habit out of your diet. So if you set up December 31st, 2007 as the date by which you want to lose your first 10lbs, add another goal to that. By that date, you will eliminate sodas from your diet.

Other possible interim eating goals could be elimination of junk food, cooking more meals at home, eating more vegetables and so on. Just set one goal and work towards achieving it. Remember, you’re not going to revolutionize your diet over night and go from unhealthy to healthy. Just work on one things at a time and make it into a habit. Once it’s ingrained into your lifestyle, you can move on to the next bad habit and so on.

Overall Eating Plan

So the outcome here is a meal plan that lets you plan out your calorie intake per day, plus another goal to add to your goal set which gives you a bad eating habit to eliminate. Remember that this eating plan is only targetted at your first goal weight. We’re going to need to adjust it once you hit the date for that goal weight. At that point we can adjust it to your next goal weight or make any changes necessary in case you didn’t hit your goal. Overall though, the process is always the same.