Making the decision to eat healthier is just the first step to improving your nutrition, losing weight or making a better attempt to maintain your current weight. A diet menu plan will help you stick to your nutrition and weight-loss goals and help you plan for when cravings strike or when you don't know what to cook for dinner.
Significance
Creating or using a diet menu can have lasting effects on your weight as well as your overall health and nutrition. Making food decisions at the last minute can lead to indecision and unhealthful food choices. By creating a diet menu for the day, week or month, you can accurately predict the number of calories you'll eat on a daily basis, making it possible to set realistic weight loss goals.
Considerations
Your eating habits go beyond just breakfast, lunch and dinner. According to MayoClinic.com, snacks are a part of a reasonable diet plan because they help curb hunger and prevent you from overeating at your next meal. As you create your diet menu and consider your options, leave room for snacks throughout the day. If you don't end up using them, you're no worse for it. But when you do feel hunger strike, you'll have them accounted for in your diet plan. Several resources are available to help you create a custom menu. The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, for example, has a customizable menu creator that allows you to choose the foods you eat from a list of options, then gives you the nutritional information that accompanies those foods. This allows you to keep an accurate count of the number of calories, grams of fat, carbohydrates and other nutrients you're consuming every day.
Types
It takes no more than a piece of paper, a pencil and a nutrition information guide to create your own diet menu. But other options are available if you don't feel like you have the time or energy to come up with your own plan. Companies such as NutriSystem offer customized and pre-packaged diet menu options you can stick in the microwave or oven at your convenience. All you have to do is write down the nutrition information on the box and incorporate the numbers into your weight loss goals.
Effects
Blindly eating can leave you wondering where you went wrong with your weight loss goals. Between the snacking, the liquid calories and the extra portions, you may end up gaining weight rather than losing it if you don't create a diet menu plan. Losing weight really is about math. Because it takes a calorie deficit of 3,500 calories to lose 1 lb., you can use your diet menu plan to help create a deficit of between 500 to 1,000 calories per day in order to lose between 1 to 2 lb. every week.
Sample Menu
Using a diet menu doesn't mean you have to go hungry. Consider the following sample diet menu for one day from Good Housekeeping magazine. For breakfast, try a bowl of bran flakes, with half a slice of banana and 1 cup of skim milk. At lunch, treat yourself to a spinach salad with bacon, mushrooms, feta cheese and onions. For dinner, try a savory Asian patty made with ground turkey breast mixed with garlic, green onions and water chestnuts, fried in a skillet with non-stick spray. Served with a side of broccoli and a cup of berries with dessert, and you've had a day full of food for only 1,300 calories, according to Good Housekeeping.
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