Diets with point systems, calorie counting, meal plans or packaged foods promote weight loss through reducing your calorie intake. Meeting your weekly calorie quota may mean you cut about 7,000 calories from your total consumption, resulting in your losing about 2 lbs. per week. However, not every weekly diet plan suits every person. Consider the positive and negative aspects of a particular reduced-calorie diet to make sure it suits your nutritional needs, preferences and weight-loss goals.
Poor Nutritional Balance
Weekly diet plans should reduce your caloric intake without jeopardizing your health. For example, no-carb and low-carb diets restrict your consumption of carbohydrates, a primary source of energy for your body. Diets with extremely low caloric intake may promote faster weight loss, but do not meet your basic nutritional requirements. Diets that limit your intake of fresh fruit and vegetables do not provide you with sufficient fiber or disease-fighting antioxidants.
Don't Allow Flexibility
A program of packaged foods or day-by-day menus does not give you flexibility within your diet. You will experience greater challenges losing weight and maintaining your weight loss if your weekly menus demand expensive packaged foods, strange ingredients or dishes you cannot make quickly. A rigid weekly diet plan does not accommodate dining out, vacations or holidays and other special events. Build your own weekly diet plan that features interchangeable meals and options within basic ingredients. For example, you may eat three or four 1-oz. servings of whole grain every day, but switch between oatmeal, brown rice, polenta, couscous, tabouleh, wheat berries, wheat germ and quinoa. The same guidelines hold true for proteins. Consume four 1-oz. servings per day of lentils, black beans, garbanzo beans, tofu, edamame or whole pinto beans.
Don't Address Behavioral Issues
A weekly diet may focus on what you eat and how much you eat, but does not address why you overeat. If you eat when you feel overwhelmed, angry or unhappy, or punish yourself for eating, you may require more guidance than a list of healthful dishes or ingredients. A weekly diet plan that ignores issues around emotional eating can set you up for failure and lead to binge eating or starving yourself as punishment.
Lack of Exercise
Simply cutting calories may result in weight loss, but does not necessarily improve your cardiovascular health. You can attain a healthy weight on a weekly diet plan but still lack physical stamina, muscle strength and flexibility. More sedentary people who lose weight also lose muscle mass and bone density as they age. The American Heart Association recommends that healthy adults engage in at least 150 minutes of brisk walking or another moderate aerobic activity every week. If you prefer vigorous workouts like running or boot camp, do at least 75 minutes of exercise weekly. Add resistance exercises like pushups, lunges, pullups, triceps dips, burpees and squats to build muscle and raise your basal metabolic rate.
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