Should I Be Following a Meal Plan?

Whew, this is a big question so let’s try to unpack this question to get to whether meal plans will work for you.

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The Pros and Cons of Meal Plans And the Best Meal Plans According to a Registered Dietitian

Establish the Reason You Want to Follow a Meal Plan

Before deciding on whether a meal plan is right for you, you will want to decide what is your goal. Are you wanting to improve your mood or anxiety level, reduce inflammation, or decrease your risk of diseases like cancer or Alzheimer’s? Do you want more energy to play with your children, or are you are an athlete who wants to improve your endurance and performance? Are you a college student that want to make sure you are getting adequate nutrition for optimal brain focus and memory, or are you just wanting to implement a meal plan for weight loss? You can often find a meal plan that fits your specific medical condition or goals.

Should Weight Loss Be your Goal in the First Place?

Before moving on, let’s talk a little about weight loss. We have learned so much about the negative impact of weight obsessing and diet culture. In fact, I think we are sometimes so scared about falling back into that weight obsessed trap that we have made others feel guilty, (like they are somehow wrong) for still expressing a desire to lose weight. Yet people have experienced many health benefits after losing weight, such as less joint pain or improved energy. Many who have lost weight have found relief and have seen significant improvements in their medical conditions. So I think it’s okay if you have a desire to lose weight when your desire comes from wanting to improve your health.

With that being said, I would like to encourage you to focus on what foods can do for you more than on your weight. Healthy comes in many different sizes. If everyone ate exactly the same, we still would all be different sizes. We have different builds and genetics. In fact, you may be surprised to find that you feel fantastic even if you don’t look like what the magazines tell you to look like.

What is a Meal Plan and What are the Benefits?

So maybe you are still saying, “Yes, Lacy, weight loss is one of my goals because I think I will feel better.” Or maybe you want to see if following a meal plan will improve a medical condition, your stress levels, or overall health. Now, the next step is to look at the pros and cons of a meal plan.

With meal plans, you choose to follow a specific menu. The length and variety of meal plans can vary. Meal plans can range from weekly meal plans, two-week cycle meal plans, and monthly meals plans. Some menus are on a monthly cycle, which means you have a different meal given to you for every day of the month, and then you start over the next month. Some websites offer even more variety by helping you develop your own meal plans using thousands of foods and recipes. Usually meal plan diets allow you to switch meals around or omit the meals you dislike. Some meal plans are very specific and tell you what to eat at every meal and provides recipes. Other menu or meal plans can be more general. These general meal plans may tell you what types of food to eat at every meal or provide you a list of foods to incorporate instead of giving you a specific menu and recipes.

Pros and Cons of Meal Plans

One benefit of meal plans is that you don’t have to figure out what you are going to eat. This diet takes out the guesswork. For many, the more variety the meal plan allows the better. Meal plans are helpful for people who don’t want to put too much thought into their diet.

weight loss photo — Photo by Sole Treadmill

Meal Plans can be considered rigid, and some meal plans are very strict and structured. Some meal plan don’t “travel well” and don’t work well if your day veers even a little bit away from your normal routine. Meal plans may go out the window the minute you are too busy to cook or when you are eating out. Most meal plans are lower in calories, which would help you lose weight; however, many are incomplete of all the nutrition a body needs. These stricter meal plans could become boring due to lack of variety. Moreover, many will end up feeling hungry if the meal plan does not provide enough calories.

Another thing to consider when trying a meal plan is that most people will not do a meal plan forever, especially the strict, rigid ones, and when they stops the plan they may notice the benefits they once had go away.

The Take Home Message

Meal Plan diets, especially strict ones, may not be a good long term plan, but it can sometimes be a great jump start for someone who is overwhelmed with how to start their healthy eating journey. A meal plan might also work well for you if you are the main cook in your household. (If you are not the cook and are not in control of what you cook, then perhaps Portion Control Tips might work best for you.) The more specific, monotonous, restricted, or rigid the menu plan is the less likely you will meet all of your nutritional needs and the less likely you will be able to stick with the diet. weight loss photo

Best Meal Plans

I have found that the best menu plans, however, are the plans that offer variety and flexibility. You don’t follow a specific menu, just general guidelines when you make food choices.

The Nourishing Meal Builder provides the benefits of meal planning without the rigidity. In fact, you can use The Nourishing Meal Builder for the rest of your life! The Nourishing Meal Builder provides a general list of foods to include in your life as well as their benefits. Then, The Nourishing Meal Builder shows you how to either build a nourishing meal on the fly or how to quickly chose your foods in a restaurant so unlike some other meal plans, The Nourishing Meal Builder “travels well.”

Evidence-based list of foods that boost mood, reduce anxietym support the immune system; promote cognitive function,; and reduce the risk of chronic disease. Plus meal builder cards are provided to help you build healthy meals with foods from the list.

Another form of a meal plan would be using a healthy cookbook to plan your menu. My favorite type of cookbooks are the cookbooks where you can mix and match your breakfast lunches and dinners like the Cooking Light Mix & Match Low-Calorie Cookbook: 1500 Calories a Day.

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There are thousands of wonderful Meal Plan Books & cookbooks. Below I have named a few:

The Nourishing Meal Builder

The Nourishing Meal Builder: Gluten-Free, Dairy-Free Edition

Anti-Inflammatory Diet Meal Prep: 6 Weekly Plans and 80+ Recipes to Simplify Your Healing

The 28 Day Pescatarian Meal Plan & Cookbook: Your Guide to Jump-Starting a Healthier Lifestyle

If you would like to evaluate your own diet and determine which tips work best for you, please take the free Christian Wellness Diet Self Assessment and Evaluation developed by a registered dietitian.

You are free to retain any and all content here for personal use, but need permission to use it anywhere else on the internet.

Should I Try a Meal Replacement Diets?

First, Establish the Reason You Want to Follow a Meal Plan

Should Weight Loss Be your Goal in the First Place?

What is a Meal Replacement Diet and What are the Benefits?

So maybe you are still saying, “Yes, Lacy, weight loss is one of my goals because I think I will feel better.” Or maybe you want to see if following a meal replacement diet will improve a medical condition, your stress levels, or overall health. You can often find meal replacements for your specific medical condition or diet lifestyle (i.e.. vegan/vegetarian). Now, the next step is to look at the pros and cons of a Meal Replacement Diet including pre-packed, pre-planned meals.

What is a Meal Replacement Diet>

Most meal replacements recommend that you replace two meals in your day with their meal, drink, bar, etc. For the third meal you eat one serving of a regular meal of your choice. Some meal replacements also recommend eating fruit two times a day for a small snack.

Pros and Cons of Meal Replacements

One benefit of meal replacement plans is that you don’t have to figure out what you are going to eat. This diet takes out the guesswork. For many, the more variety of foods available as a meal replacement the better they are able to adhere to the plan. Meal Replacements are helpful for people who don’t want to put too much thought into their diet. Some of these plans are healthier than others. The meal replacement plans that have more variety and include nutrient-dense foods are the best among the meal replacement diets.

Some find the meal replacement diet hard to follow especially when they cook for others, when they go out to eat, and when they eat at parties. People often become bored on these rigid diets. Meal replacements are also hard to maintain long term. Most people will not stick with pre-packaged foods forever; therefore, when the dieter goes back to making and portioning their own foods, the benefits the dieter received will most likely go away.

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Example of Meal Replacement Diets

The Meal Replacement diet may be one of the most popular kinds of diets. Many meal replacement diets are available. Examples of meal replacement or pre-packaged meals include:

The ” Subway Diet”: On this diet you choose the one of the low fat sandwiches and do not add mayo or oil and vinegar.
“Slimfast” bars and shakes: For this diet the dieter often eats bars or shakes for breakfast or lunch and then eats a healthy dinner.
“Cereal Diet”: For this diet, a dieter eats a bowl of whole wheat cereal with skim milk for breakfast or lunch
Frozen Dinners diet: “Lean Cuisines”, “Healthy Choice”, “Smart Ones” or other lean frozen dinners are eaten for at least two of the three meals.
“Kellogg’s Special K Challenge” also has a meal replacement plan. You can find details on the Kellogg’s website, specialk.com. They also have meal plans that you can follow.
“Cookie Diet”: The cookie diet replaces all meals except dinner with a high fiber, high protein cookie.
Jenny Craig and Nutrisystem: For these diets, the pre-portioned foods are sent to your house.

What Do You Think?

What do you think about Meal Replacement Diets? Yay or Nay?

Want to Learn More?

If you would like to see if this strategy or other strategies will work for you, fill out the Christian Wellness Diet Self-assessment Form.

You are free to retain any and all content here for personal use, but need permission to use it anywhere else on the internet.

How to Lose weight with Calorie Counting

Does Calorie Counting Work? The short answer is ‘yes.’ If you do calorie counting correctly, it can work well for weight loss.

If you choose this weight loss strategy, you will first determine how many calories you need to eat to lose weight. For this diet, you will be counting calories, reading labels, and measuring out all the food you eat. For this plan to work you will need measuring cups, scales, and Calorie Counting Apps, (myFitness Pal and FitBIT are great options) or calorie counting books. You can also look up calories on restaurant or on your favorite brands websites. Another option is following a low calorie cookbook or find a low calorie recipes online that have the calories already listed. You could decide you will meal plan using these recipes. The key is portion sizes.

Pros of Calorie Counting:

This diet gives you more flexibility than many other diets. For example you can eat pizza if you want, but you have to eat less food later to compensate for a higher calorie meal. On this diet, you can eat what you want as long as it is within your calorie range. However, the lower the calories the food has, the more food you can eat; thus, you will feel fuller and feel like you have eaten more if you stick to low calorie, nutrient dense foods. I find calorie counting works very well with mindful eating. Once you determine your calorie intake range, mindfully eat so that you can feel satisfied eating fewer calories than you are use to eating.

calorie count photo — Photo by byzantiumbooks

Remember, to lose one pound a week, you must take out 3500 calories a week. That means you need to eat 500 fewer calories a day to lose one pound a week and 1000 fewer calories a day to lose 2 pounds a week.

Note: You can also burn calories by exercising as well. In other words, you could take 500 calories out of your diet a day and also do enough exercise to burn 500 calories a day, which would equal a 1000-calorie deficit a day or 2-pound weight loss per week.

How Calorie Counting works:

First determine the amount of calories you need to eat in a day. Do not go under you calorie needs. For the most accurate calorie recommendations please see a dietitian. To determine a more accurate calorie recommendations a dietitian will use your height, weight, activity level, age, and more. You can also type in your height and weight on the Team Beachbody calorie calculator

For an estimate of the calories you need in a day, find your height in the chart below. If you are very active, you can go up one block (example: if you are at 1600 calories but are very active you can go up to 1800 calories). Below the calorie chart you will ﬁnd the servings you should be eating at each meal to reach your calorie range.

Find your height below to see the amount of servings you should be eating per day if you are lightly active (If you are moderatley active add 100 to 200 calories to get an estimate of your calorie intake. If you are highly active add 200 to 300 calories to get an estimate of your caloire range):

Lightly Active Female between the heights of 5’1″-5’2″:

Calories per day: 1200

Lightly Active Female between the heights of 5’3″-5’5″:

Calories per day: 1300-1400

Lightly Active Female between the heights of 5’6″-5’9″:

Calories per day: 1500-1700

Lightly Active Female between the heights of 6′:

Calories per day: 1800

Lightly Active Males between the heights of 5’3″-5’4″:

Calories per day: 1400-1500

Lightly Active Males between the heights of 5’5″-5’7″:

Calories per day: 1600-1700

Lightly Active Males between the heights of 5’8″-6′:

Calories per day: 1800-2000

Servings of Starch per day: 7.5

Servings of Dairy per day: 2.5

Servings of Lean Meat per day: 10

Servings of Fruit per day: 4

Servings of Vegetable per day: At least 2 and up to 4 servings

Servings of Fat per day: 4.5

Lightly Active Males between the heights of 6’1″-6’4″:

Calories per day: 2100-2300

* Serving Sizes:

1 starch serving (pasta or rice) = 1/2 cup or the size of a lightbulb

1 starch serving (bread)= 1 slice

– 1 fruit serving= 1 fruit or 1/2 cup or the size of a lightbulb

– 1 milk serving = 1 cup

– 1 meat serving = 3 ounces or the size of a deck of cards

– 1 vegetable = 1/2 cup or the size of a lightbulb

When cooking food: Look up the amount of calories per serving in the food, and then measure out the appropriate amount using measuring cups or scales.

When dining out: Look up the calories on the restaurant’s website or if the restaurant is local, look up the calories for the general food you are eating. You may want to look up the calories in foods before you go to the restaurant to avoid looking at the menu when you are hungry at the restaurant.

One of the easiest ways to do calorie counting may be selecting pre-portioned, pre-packaged meals, and just count calories by reading labels. There is no room for guess work or underestimating when you eat pre-packaged meals. However, learning to count calories by controlling your portions on your own may be better in the long term. Using prepackaged meals will be harder if you are cooking for a whole family.

Another way calorie counting can be made easier is using low calorie cookbooks that have the calories per serving listed for you. You could use the cookbook to plan all or most of your meals again taking out a lot of guess work. But remember you still need to measure out your food to be able to eat the correct serving.

Yet another way to limit calorie counting errors, is to preplan your meals for the week using your recommended calorie range. Then make all your food one day a week. Pre-portion and pre-package them yourself, and put them in the freezer. You can also pre-portion snacks by taking them out of the bag and make pre-portioned zip-lock bags for snacks ready to grab. This way you won’t graze on snacks all day and you have included snacks in your calorie counting.

Cons of Calorie Counting:

A major difficulty with this diet is not knowing exactly how many calories are in a food and thus underestimating meals. In other words, it can be easy to cheat on this diet. We often underestimate what we eat; therefore, measuring out your food is crucial. And even when we measure, we can often still put too much by over filling the measure cups, going back for seconds, or taking bites of food while cooking or cleaning up, or just small snacking. We often don’t realize how quickly those side bites add up. For example, say you only had four small bites to taste your food while cooking. Well, if you did this for lunch and dinner, that now turns into eight bites. Eight bites can easily add up to 150 calories a day. That may not seem like much, but think of it like this. Say you ate 150 calories less a day. You would lose 15 pounds in one year just by taking 150 calories out of your diet a day. Well, the opposite also holds true. How many times have you thought, “I really am not eating that much more, why am I gaining weight?” I know I have thought this, but then I remember it doesn’t take much. If you eat 150 calories more than you are suppose to that day, then you will gain weight. So if you eat 150 calories more a day by taking 8 extra bites, or grabbing one piece of chocolate candy, adding extra dressing, or a hand full of chips (my weakness), then you could gain 15 pounds in one year. So you can see why calorie counting really needs to be accurate. One way to make sure calorie counting is accurate is by sticking to prepackaged pre-portioned foods. This will make calorie counting as easy as reading a label. Make sure you look at serving sizes when you read labels. Once I thought I was eating only one serving of sushi when I got a pre-packaged sushi roll. After eating the whole container of sushi, I felt very full. I relooked at the label and realized I had eating 2 servings and going way over my allotted calorie count for that meal.

Remember you can always combine diets from these different categories to come up with a diet plan that will work for you. For example, you might decide that for breakfast and lunch you want to eat the same pre-packaged meal everyday so you eat the same calories everyday for breakfast and lunch. (You would be using what I call the the Pre-packaged meal or Meal Replacement diet category here). You are calorie counting because you know that for breakfast you had 400 calories and for lunch you had 400 calories. That is 800 calories total. If you are on a 1600-calorie diet then you have 800 calories left for dinner. Then for dinner, you use a cookbook that has the calories listed to plan your dinner. You measure out 800 calories worth of food for dinner. Finally, you decide to eat raw vegetables with no sauce or dip for snacks throughout the day. This is one of the tricks listed in Snacking for Weight Loss Blog. (Raw vegetables are often considered free foods. In other words, because they are so low in calories you can eat them without counting them.) For lunch and dinner you are using the substitution diet. For dinner you are using a meal plan diet because you have set amount of meals to choose from in a cookbook. For the snacks you, are using the Snacking for Weight Loss tips. You of course are still counting calories as well.

Personal side note: I was very successful eating like the example above while my husband was deployed out to sea. I made calorie counting simple by using pre-portioned frozen foods. This was easy for me because I didn’t want to cook huge meals for just me, and it was easy for me to grab a frozen meal to take to work. However, when my husband returned this did not work as well. When my husband returned, I was cooking meals for him, and my lifestyle changed, I had to re-assess a plan that worked best for me. So like I had to do, you may have to change your plan when your lifestyle changes like in my case.

Again, most diet plans will fall into one or more of these categories. Many diets use the calorie-counting method. Many people successfully lose weight by finding ways to count calories. I would consider Weight Watchers a calorie counting method, but weight watchers make calorie counting easier by counting points instead of calories. Many have found success using Weight Watchers.

If you would like to see if calorie counting or other weight loss techniques may work for you, fill out the Diet Self-assessment Form.

Have you successfully lost weight by calorie counting? What techniques did you use to make counting calories easier and accurate?

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4 Ways to Lose Weight When You Have a Sweet Tooth

Tips For Losing Weight When You Crave Sweets

Limit your sweets to weekends or one day a week or one meal a week.
Eat fruit every time you crave sweets.
Keep sweets out of the house. If they are not there, then you can’t eat them.
Avoid the sweet aisle in the grocery store.

dessert photo *If you would like to evaluate your own diet and determine which tips work best for you, please take the free DIY Diet self assessment and evaluation developed by a registered dieititian.

You are free to retain any and all content here for personal use, but need permission to use it anywhere else on the internet.

My Thoughts on the Elimination or Limiting Diets

Does Avoidng Certain Food Groups Help with Weight Loss?

For the elimination or limiting diet, one or more foods or food groups are eliminated or greatly reduced from your diet. The Atkins diet would be a type of elimination diet. The Atkins diet restricts foods that the USDA 2015 Dietary Guidelines recommends. The diet is mostly protein and fat and very low in carbohydrates. A high protein diet like the Atkins diet can also help reduce your appetite.

Other examples of the elimination diet are:

South Beach diet: On the South Beach diet, you would eliminate certain foods like all sugars, processed carbohydrates, fruits, and starchy vegetables; then the foods are re-introduced gradually.

Hallelujah diet: This diet prohibits animal, dairy, sugar, and flour as well as Seasonings, alcohol, caffeine, tea, soft drinks, and sports drinks. To help you with the diet, they provide you with menu plans and recipes. The diet consists of mostly raw foods and is very low in calories, possibly too low.

Sugar Busters: Eliminates sugars from your diet.

Most people will lose weight if they can follow these diets because like most diets, on these diets you will eat fewer calories. Eating fewer calories is always the major key. These types of diets often claim certain foods help you lose weight. Diets also sometimes make other claims about why that particular diet works; however, in my professional opinion, usually there is not scientific evidence to back up the claims and again the key is limiting calories. One of the difficulties of the elimination is that they can be hard to stick with long term because people will find it hard to take out some of their favorite foods. These diets can be very restricted. Also, when on the elimination diet, you are often limiting the nutrients your body needs; therefore, the diet would not be healthy for your body long term. In other words, these diets don’t encourage healthy eating, should not be long term, and can sometimes cause the “yo-yo dieting” effect, which is gaining and losing weight over and over again. The elimination diets may be hard to follow if you cook for others or when you go out to eat or at parties. These types of diets can often be boring and inconvenient.

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