Female Diet Plan

If you're a women who needs to lose weight, construct a diet plan that you can live with. Diets that only allow a narrow selection of food can harm your health and cause rebound weight gain. If you're pregnant, breastfeeding or over 50, poor eating habits can cause serious nutritional problems that beckon child development problems or chronic diseases. A balanced diet of low-fat and low-calorie foods from all the food groups will promote steady, healthy and permanent weight loss.

Calorie Limit

Get your doctor's advice on what your normal caloric intake should be within the female average of 1,600 to 2,400 calories per day. To lose significant weight as rapidly as is safe for your health, the U.S. Department of Agriculture advises cutting normal daily calorie limits by about 500 calories, or less than that for a longer time frame. To meet your dieting needs for caloric restriction, choose low-calorie protein, dairy, grain, fruit and vegetable foods and eat them in the reasonable portions suggested on food labels.

Nutrients to Ensure Health

Women have a strong need for iron, calcium and B vitamins, especially when menstruating, pregnant, lactating or as older adults. Avoid anemia due to iron or vitamin B deficiency and osteoporosis due to low lifetime calcium intake by making sure to get these nutrients while restricting the calories in your diet plan. The American Heart Association suggests consuming 1 percent or fat-free dairy products daily to gain calcium and the vitamin D your body needs to absorb calcium. Whole grains and protein foods provide iron and the full range of B vitamins, helpful in preventing birth defects during pregnancy.

Nutrients to Avoid

Some nutrients in food drive caloric values upward as well as contribute to long-term health problems. To lose weight and maintain normal cardiovascular and function and blood-glucose levels, select diet foods with less saturated fat and sugar. Unsaturated fats also carry relatively high calories, so limit your use of oil and margarine while dieting.

Meal Times and Energy Expenditure

The final components of a female diet plan rest on regular meal intakes and caloric output through exercise. Attempting to cut calories by skipping meals can make you overeat later, so the National Institutes of Health recommend three evenly spaced meals as well as an interim low-calorie snack, if necessary. Trying to work off all your calories at once on the weekend probably won't work either. Replace time spent at the computer and television screen with daily exercise to create the calorie deficit you need to lose weight.