Wednesday, March 12, 2008

How to Customize a Diet Plan

How to Customize a Diet Plan

Fad diets come and go because no one diet fits every need. There are many factors that must be considered before you choose a personal diet.

Physical attributes such as age, height and body build affect how a diet works. How active you are or how much exercise you schedule into your day also affects a diet plan. Use the advice below when customizing your own personal diet plan.

Before You Begin The Diet Plan

Step 1:
Buy a notebook, weight scale and menu planning book or binder before planning your diet. Use the notebook for recording weight loss and keeping a food diary and use the menu planner for planning healthy meals in advance.

Step 2:
Begin writing down how many calories you take in on a daily basis in your food diary. For a dependable reference on your eating habits, and for how many calories you take in on average, record your food intake for a few days before you start dieting.

Step 3:
Pay attention to how much junk food and high calorie drinks you eat every day. Before you begin a new diet plan, rid your cabinets of junk food and food with no nutritional value.

Step 4:
Write down all the healthy foods you enjoy. Sticking to a new diet plan means you must include many foods you enjoy eating that are healthy for you. Having a list of these foods available when you grocery shop helps you avoid purchasing fatty, sugary foods.

Customize Your Diet Plan

Step 1:
Start a new diet plan by learning how many calories are in a pound and how to lessen the amount of calories you take in. A pound has 3500 calories, so burning 500 calories a day helps you lose approximately one pound a week.

Step 2:
Cut your calorie intake by 250 calories and perform an aerobic activity that burns 250 calories to help cut 500 calories a day. If exercise is too much right now, look at your food diary and see where you can cut calories. Replacing soda with water, low calorie fruit juice for sweet tea, plain popcorn for chips, ground turkey for beef and sugar free jello for sweet, sugary desserts are all effective ways of cutting calories.

Step 3:
Pick one day a week when you plan your menu. Choose meals that incorporate lots of herbs, which help flavor foods without adding lots of calories. Make sure you plan healthy snacks so you're not starving throughout the day.

Step 4:
Keep an exercise journal and write down a list of exercises you enjoy doing. These can include walking, jogging, bike riding, skating, swimming, dancing, workout videos and even house cleaning. Choose a different exercise each week and plan to do thirty minutes a few times a week.

Step 5:
Incorporate the different aspects of your custom diet plan as time goes on. Increase the amount you exercise or mix two of your favorite exercises throughout the week. Try new light recipes so your menu doesn't get stale and play around with different ways of flavoring food.

Step 6:
Stick with the menu and exercise plan you write for yourself. Follow your own food journal, exercise journal and menu as if you were following a popular diet fad book.

Step 7:
Set realistic goals for yourself that don't always revolve around weight. Set a goal to jog a half mile, swim two extra laps, drink more water, phase out your chocolate addiction or try a new vegetable or fruit. Creating your own diet plan means you have control of what you eat and the activities you partake in without feeling the need to meet unrealistic goals created by the latest fad diet

Monday, March 3, 2008

Satisfying Diet

Satisfying Diet by Hyder Khan


The Calorie Shifting Diet is an extremely satisfying diet. You never feel deprived of any types of foods. You are never left starving or feeling the least bit hungry. And this is not because your stomach is shrinking or your appetite is being diminished, as is the case with many other popular diet plans.

On the contrary, the Calorie Shifting Diet allows you to eat as much food as you desire at each meal until you are completely satisfied, although not until you are too full. Additionally, you are required to eat four full meals per day, with each meal being spaced out by at least 2.5 to 3 hours worth of gap in between. While on this diet, you are required to eat a variety of foods from all four of the major food groups.

If this all sounds too good to be true, or if this does not even sound like a diet plan to you, then you are in for a surprise: While on this diet you can expect to lose 9 pounds for every 11 days you are on this diet, which amounts to upwards of 20 pounds per month.

How can such a satisfying diet yield so much weight loss? If you are practically able to eat as much food as you want from all four of the major food groups, and that too, at four meals every day, then how is weight loss even possible?

The principle behind the Calorie Shifting Diet is that you can manipulate your body's metabolism at will, simply by shifting the types of calories you consume from meal to meal, from day to day, on a rotational basis. In doing so, your body's metabolism would react to the dietary shifting by tapping into your body's fat stores for energy, in order to compensate for this "simulated nutritional deficit" that you are inducing.


A true nutritional deficit of course comes from extended periods of time without consuming a healthy amount of all of the essential nutrients your body needs. By shifting calories around from meal to meal, you are simulating a nutritional deficit, except you are doing it on a much smaller scale, in short bursts of time.

By the time your body detects a nutritional deficit and begins to compensate by burning your body's fat stores, you reintroduce that nutrient back into your body. But then you immediately shift another type of calorie out of your diet, thus creating a nutritional deficit of this second type of calorie. So your body never truly "recovers" from the nutritional deficit, and thus your weight loss is sustained, even though, all the while, you are actually getting all of the nutrients that you need!

What makes Calorie Shifting such a satisfying diet is this simple fact that you can achieve rapid weight loss results without experiencing any type of starvation, leaving your cravings unfulfilled, or feeling deprived of any type or quantity of foods