When you think of a diet do you picture eating a few celery stalks and drinking water? We’ve been conditioned to believe that a diet needs to have as few calories as possible to lose weight fast. In reality, nothing could be further from the truth. If you want to build a new, lean and fit body, you need real eating plans to lose weight fast. Any proper eating plan will put you on the path to success for shedding fat, so much so that it should be able to be adapted as a nutrition lifestyle rather than a short term diet. Let’s see what the characteristics of eating plans that will help you shed the fat, improve your health and have you feeling great, look like.
Build A New You: Eat More
Any eating plan that has you eating tiny meals, or worse, shakes and bars will only leave you hungry. Who wants to be hungry on a diet? First, your body is very smart and it needs a certain amount of calories and nutrition to survive and run optimally. If you don’t satisfy your body’s nutrition needs, it begins to alter your hormones as well as your metabolism in such a way that is a nightmare for anyone wanting to lose weight. Your body goes into “survival mode” if you fail to eat enough and get enough nutritious food in your diet and it will fight to hold onto every calorie (and pound) that it can. So in order to keep your body from fighting you in your weight-loss goals, you need to eat more calories but less than you burn off each day. Losing weight, at the simplest level, comes down to calories in (what you eat) versus calories out (what you burn off). To properly gage how many calories you need each day (calories in = calories out), I like to use online calculators. A good one is at caloriesperhour.com
It will tell you how many calories to consume based on different situations such as:
- maintaining weight
- losing 1 pound per week
- losing 1.5 pounds per week
- losing 2 pounds per week
My suggestion is to start off with the online calorie needs calculator above. Figure out your daily calorie needs based on your goal. You’ll find that you’ll can actually eat more, feel satiated and still lose weight. No more diet or eating plans where you have to survive on a measly 500 calories per day.
Build A New You: Eat This
Now you understand that you can eat more, the question becomes:
Eat more of what?
Well, any eating plan where you want to lose weight fast will have you eating foods that are high quality. Sure, you could probably eat some fast food and junk foods and still drop weight as long as you consume less calories than you burn off. On the downside, your weight loss will NOT be optimal and you are short changing your body of valuable nutrients. Give your body the nutrients it needs and your metabolism will be efficient at burning calories and your hormones will be stable and more readily keep your body in a mode to burn fat. So to do this, you should be eating ample amounts of
- Protein
- Good carbohydrates
- Good dietary fats
Okay, you’ve probably heard of the words above but maybe you aren’t sure what foods have them. You might not have known that fats and carbohydrates could be good and aid in weight-loss, especially if you’ve been on diets that are low/no carb or low/no fat. Our body needs a combination of all three to achieve optimal weight-loss, so let’s take a look at all three.
Carbohydrates (4 calories/gram)
Carbohydrates are what gives your body energy. Foods with carbohydrates get broken down in to sugar. Foods with good carbohydrates will have a few main traits:
* A good amount of fiber
* Close to their natural state
* Slow digesting (they don’t cause crazy spikes to your blood sugar)
My favorite good carbohydrate foods to choose from are:
Vegetables (especially green leafy ones)
Fruits
Beans
Peas
Lentils
Whole grain pasta, cereal and bread
Sweet potatoes/yams
Oatmeal
Protein (4 calories/gram)
Protein is made up of amino acids which are the building blocks of our muscle and tissues. We need protein to help our body repair itself as well as maintain and build new muscle. My favorite protein sources are:
Boneless-skinless chicken
Steak
Fish
Turkey
Beans (a good carbohydrate, too!)
Low-fat Dairy (yogurt, cheese, and milk)
Other protein sources are any animal meats like duck, lamb, veal, etc. I also like to have anything with soy in it. Keep protein to about 1 gram per pound of body weight.
Fat (9 calories/gram)
Fats are crucial to our body and they are used in many systems throughout our body from absorbing fat-soluble vitamins to keeping our hormones stable to helping protect the brain and central nervous system. Not all fats are bad. Any fat that has poly-unsaturated and mono-unsaturated fats are considered good. Of course a fat is a fat and still higher in calories versus carbohydrates and protein. So fats should be kept to about 0.5 to 0.75 grams per pound of body weight. Good fats to include in your diet for optimal weight loss are:
Nuts
Seeds
Cold-water fish
Natural peanut butter
Flaxseed, Olive, Sesame, Sunflower, Soybean or Canola oil
Avocados
Tofu
Build A New You: Eat Smart
Now you need to put it all together. Any eating plan that does the following will put you on the path to losing weight fast while reaching optimum health. The other great thing is that you get to choose much of the food you’ll eat.
In the above, the recommendation was to eat at least 1 gram per pound of body weight of protein and about 0.5 grams per pounds of body weight of good fats. We didn’t give a recommendation for carbohydrates. What you should do is figure out your protein and fat needs and then the rest will be your carbohydrates. So let’s go through an example:
Example
Body weight = 180
Weight loss goal = 1 pound per week
Using caloriesperhour.com and my statistics, it stated that I should eat about 2,340 calories a day.
Daily calorie needs to lose 1 pound per week = 2,340 calories
So if I weight 180 pounds, the protein needs would be 180 grams. There are 4 calories in each gram of protein which equals (4×180) 720 calories.
Protein calories each day = 720 calories
Now using 0.5 grams of fat per pound of body weight, that equals (0.5×180) 90 grams. There are 9 calories in each gram of fat, so that equals (9×90) = 810 calories.
Fat calories each day = 810 calories
The rest will go to carbohydrates = 2340 – 720 – 810 = 810 calories
Carbohydrate calories each day = 810 calories (or 202.5 grams)
Now, assuming you don’t eat one large meal each day, I recommend eating at least four to five meals, spread throughout the day. Assuming 5 meals, that means each meal should have:
36 grams of protein (180/5)
18 grams of fat (90/5)
40 grams of carbohydrates (202.5/5)
A great tool I like to use on the Internet for tracking foods and the calories they contain is at fitday.com
It has just about every food you can imagine and it will allow you to create meals while tracking calories, protein, carbohydrates and fat. Also, the Internet is a great source of information. Just do a search for good protein sources, good fats and good carbohydrates.
Building a new you that is leaner, more fit and healthier does take a little work but you shouldn’t have to guess how or try crazy diets to have success when it comes to eating plans to lose weight fast. It is a methodical process where you can eat more, eat well and eat smart. If you can manage to do that, you will lose weight quickly and you’ll love the changes that you’ll see in the mirror.