Thought diet plans are most commonly designed with the primary goal of resulting in weight loss, a diet cannot be a healthy one without also taking into account the nutritional value of the foods which it includes. A complete and healthy diet plan will include a variety of nutritionally rich foods in order to provide adequate amounts of all the necessary vitamins and minerals and other beneficial nutrients such as antioxidants.
Designing Your Diet
Step 1
Look up foodstuffs in your nutritional database that provide high levels of essential nutrients and fit inside your dietary goals, and make a list of each food, along with its nutritional value and its caloric content in your notebook. You will need at least a dozen different foodstuffs to design an adequate diet.
Step 2
Combine your foods into a variety combinations which provide high levels of essential nutrients and also meet the caloric requirements of your diet. These will serve as templates for your meals. The caloric and nutritional value in each meal will need to take into account the number of times you plan on eating each day.
Step 3
Once you have a number of potential meals created from your list of appropriate foods, use your cookbook to look up several recipes you can use to prepare the foods you have selected into a meal. In general, the larger the number of recipes you can choose from the better.
Step 4
Many recipes require additional ingredients to those foods you have already selected, such as butter or oil. Include these additional ingredients in a final calculation of each meal's nutritional data.
Step 5
Plan out a number of days on your dietary plan, combining the meals you have designed in such a way that your daily goals are achieved and your nutritional needs are met.
Tips and Warnings
- Two keys to maintaining a diet in the face of temptation are finding a way to make your meals tasty and designing variety into the plan itself. Foods may have nutritional benefits besides their levels of essential vitamins and minerals. Many fruits and vegetables contain unique compounds with health benefits. Researching the foods you choose extensively may help you design an even more healthy diet.
- Remember that your ability to stick to a given diet plan is just as important as that diet plan's nutritional and dietary integrity. If the foods you choose to combine in your diet plan are repulsive to you then you are much more likely to fail in your goals.
Things You'll Need
- Notebook
- Pen
- Nutritional database
- Cookbook
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