Losing weight is a simple equation: expend more calories than you take in. One of the best ways to do that is reduce and restrict your daily caloric intake. While some fad diets limit your meals to a single food or food group, the ADA Diet emphasizes fruits, vegetables, whole grains and low-fat dairy products to ensure you're getting enough vitamins and minerals.
ADA Diet
The original ADA diet was created as a partnership between the American Dietetic Association and the "Ladies' Home Journal." Based on the recommendations in the USDA Food Guide Pyramid, the ADA diet offers a balanced meal plan with a small number of discretionary calories to spend as you wish. The original diet allowed 1,550 calories per day for 12 weeks, administered to 20 women who wanted to lose weight. According to the "Ladies' Home Journal" website, all 20 women on this diet lost weight.
Meals
Breakfasts on the ADA diet consist of items such as 1 cup of cereal with skim milk, whole-grain toast, fruit, scrambled egg whites or bagels with non-fat cream cheese. Lunches consist of vegetable soup, steamed vegetables with pasta, lean ham and cheese sandwiches or cucumber slices in balsamic vinegar. Dinners might consist of rice and beans, grilled steak, grilled skinless chicken breasts, salmon, extra-lean burgers on English muffins or pasta with marinara sauce. Allowable snacks and desserts include 1/2 cup frozen yogurt or sorbet, a slice of angel food cake, two mini candy bars or 1 oz. fat-free chips.
Calorie Counting
Keeping the diet's meals at 1,000 total daily calories presents a challenge. As you're inspecting food labels to get an accurate daily calorie count, make sure you're taking the product's serving size into account. Products like bags of chips or bottles of diet sodas usually contain multiple servings, even if most people consume them in one sitting. Count the correct number of servings when estimating your daily caloric intake.
Calories per Day
The U.S. government's Dietary Guidelines for Americans offers an estimate of the number of calories you need per day based on your age, sex and activity level. According to a chart provided by the Institute of Medicine, only sedentary toddlers aged 3 and under should ingest 1,000 calories per day. Women aged 31 to 50 need between 1,800 and 2,200 calories based on their activity level; men of the same age need between 2,200 and 3,000.
Considerations
Although you can reduce serving sizes or eliminate one meal a day to reach the goal of 1,000 calories, that doesn't necessarily mean you should. In "The 3-Season Diet," John Douillard notes that when your body doesn't get enough calories, it goes into starvation mode. Your body releases cortisol, causing your blood sugar to rise. However, the insulin surge that accompanies your body's sugar release keeps your body from burning fat --- instead, your body holds onto it and stores it for future use. As a result, you should check with your doctor to be sure 1,000 daily calories is a safe number for you.
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