A Quick Guide To A Good Diet Plan

After the 10 tips for better eating I posted last time, I thought I would follow up with an outline of a diet plan.  Why an outline instead of details?  Because I don’t believe in these “one size fits all” diet plans that seem to be popular.  The following is intended as a starting point for people trying to fix up their eating habits.  It is not intended as a step by step guide.  I don’t know you, I don’t know your situation and pretending that I do and that I know the perfect solution for you would be a lie.  So take this outline and fill in the gaps yourself according to what you think works best for you.

Next week I’ll do the same for exercise, the other vital part of a healthy lifestyle.

Step 1 - Research

Yes, you need to do your research.  I’m sorry, I know you want to jump right into the mix of things and start making the big changes but do you even know what you need to change?  Do you know what your worst eating habit is?  Spend a month keeping a food journal.  Write down everything you eat, what you felt when you ate it and why you were eating in the first place.  This is your map, it’s your database of information that you will mine for a lot of valuable facts.

Step 2 - Identify the Problems

You have a lot of good information from your eating journal, now we start to analyze it.

• How many meals a day are you eating?
• How many calories a day are you eating?
• Are you getting most of your calories from meals or from snacks?
• Are you eating breakfast?
• Are you eating because you’re stressed?
• Are you eating too much at buffets?
• Are you getting a lot of calories (more than 10% of your daily requirements) from drinks?
• What’s the difference between the amount of calories you’re eating now and the amount you should be eating at your target weight?

Step 3 - Identify Your Goal

What are you trying to accomplish?  Yes, I know, you want to lose weight.  That’s great as an overall goal, but you have detailed facts now so let’s make that goal more realistic.  Do you want to lose 10lbs in 3 months?  do you want to be 190lbs by July?  What’s your goal and is it realistic?  Remember, each lb you lose means 3000 less calories.  If you want to lose 2lbs a week, you better find a way to create a 6000 calorie deficit every week from now until you get to your goal weight.  That’s not easy folks so make sure you keep it in mind.

Step 4 - Plan of Action

Now that you know what specific goal you want to accomplish, how are you going to accomplish it? Your plan needs to be realistic and you need to make sure you can hit your goals with this plan.  Otherwise, you’re setting yourself up for failure before you even start.

Let’s take a look at an example.  In step 1 I tracked all my calorie consumption.  In step 2 I identified the fact that I consume 500 calories a day through sodas.  In step 3 I said that I want to lose 10lbs in the next 3 months.  Now in step 4 I’m going to state that I’m going to achieve this goal by cutting out sodas and only drinking water.

Is the plan realistic?  Sure, soda is not a necessary part of life and, with enough will power, you can cut soda out and drink only water.  However, don’t underestimate the caffeine addiction.  It’s going to be a miserable few days when you first start doing this.  Perhaps the first part of your plan should be switching to diet sodas?  Maybe you should cut down gradually instead of going cold turkey.  I’m not sure of the answer, it depends on you, but make sure your plan is realistic.

Also, make sure this plan is something you can maintain for the rest of your life.  Remember, temporary changes produce temporary results.  If you revert back after 3 months, you’ll just gain the weight back.

Finally, does your plan make sense in light of your goal?  Well, let’s see.  You want to lose 10lbs over 3 months.  That’s a 30,000 calorie deficit over 13 weeks or 91 days.  My research from steps 1 and 2 tells me that I consume 500 calories a day from sodas.  So if I cut that 500 calories out for 91 days, I will have a calorie deficit of 45,500.  Sounds like your plan is realistic.  By the way, this assumes that you were not gaining weight before this plan but were instead at a steady weight level.  If you were gaining weight, you had a calorie surplus which we would need to account for.

What if you only consumed 200 calories per day in sodas?  Cutting that out for 90 days would mean a calorie deficit of 18,200 calories.  That’s well short of your 30,000 goal.  Guess what, your plan is unrealistic and is set up for failure before you even start.  This is why it’s important to do the research and set realistic goals.

Step 5 - Implement

This is the easy one.  Put your plan in action.  In this particular case, stop drinking sodas.

Step 6 - Assess and revise

It’s been 3 months, have you lost the weight?  By the way, body weight can fluctuate by 2 or 3 lbs per day.  That’s natural, so keep it in mind when you weight yourself.  If you met your goal, that’s great.  Just remember to maintain your new habit for the rest of your life.  If you want to, go back to step 1 and set up a new goal.

What about if you failed?  What if you didn’t lose the weight?  In that case, try to analyze what happened.  Did you compensate for the missing sodas by eating more chips?  Did you miscalculate your amount of calories required?  I can’t give you a detailed answer because the answer depends on your specific situation, but trust me when I say this, for most people losing weight is simple math.  Somewhere in your plan, you calculated something wrong.  Go back to step 1, keep a food journal and then start over.

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Note, this plan is for people like me who want to know and understand how and why things work.  We LOVE details.  We LOVE tracking numbers.  If that’s not you, no problem.  Just follow the tips for healthier eating that you see in this post.  They work even if you don’t know the exact math behind them.

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