Healthy Recipes
Healthy Recipes are pivotal in a successful diet plan. I write a lot of my original homemade recipes down at the blog Free Online Recipes, and this week was a good example. I made Penne Pasta with Zucchini and Summer Squash last night – and it was one of the best things I’ve made in a long time. When you make a great meal, write it down for future use – you’ll want to use that recipe again and again – especially when it’s healthy!
Diet Plan
Starting a new “diet plan” is never easy. It’s planning, and work, and shopping, and reading, and research, and diligence. Starting a new diet, the plan is probably the most important thing, because without one – you’ll just keep eating the way that you were. I’m not that good at creating things from scratch, and I work best when I have an example to go from. Before this diet I was easily eating around 4,000 calories per day. I don’t think it’s very smart to go from eating like a horse, down to a 1,200 calorie diet, so I decided to do some research and look for examples of that a 2,000 diet plan would look like. Surprisingly enough, if you just go to google and type in 2,000 calorie diet plan you get over 150,000 results – and they’re nearly all free. In just minutes I settled on this 2,000 calorie meal plan.
Why did I choose this meal plan for a guideline? For the same reasons you should search for a meal plan that meets your needs, but is also practical.
A good meal plan…
- Is easy to implement for people who work
- Has easily obtainable ingredients
- Has practical foods
- Has affordable items
- Has little prep time
My 2,000 diet plan guideline had fruits, vegetables, diet pop (which I’m addicted too), variety of drinks, variety of foods, fruits and veggies, and seemed like everything was little effort to make and very affordable. I was able to make a shopping list from this plan quickly for my first week of dieting. Do a little reading on google and you’ll find thousands of diet plan and meal planning resources that you can draw from free of charge.
How to Begin a Diet
I need to lose weight, which makes me wonder the best how “How to Begin a Diet”?
I haven’t posted to this diet blog much yet because I need to get some kind of plan going to start a diet. I think with anything you try to do in live, starting it is the hardest part – second only to keeping it going. So this post is a bit about how to begin a diet if you don’t know how to get started. It’s not like I’m an expert here or anything, let’s face it – I’m fat, so I haven’t been successful at starting a diet up until this point at all. But I’m pretty good at writing plans – I just have to make sure I implement this one!
How to Start a Diet
- Write down what you eat every day
- Figure out how many calories you normally eat
- Figure out how many you “should” eat (to lose weight)
- Write out a trial one month meal plan
- Consult your doctor with your plans
- Figure out the cost of your new meal plan in groceries
- Create a shopping list based on the new meals
- Create a plan for what to do (and eat) if you go out
- Create an exercise plan to go with the meal plan
- Write down and set aside time to exercise for the month
- Create a weekly log of what you did vs. this plan
Wow, it turns out that my plan is – I have to write out some plans for my diet! Now I see why I’m never ready to start a diet, I don’t have anything to go by yet and I just keep thinking “I’ll get to it…” If I’m going to be serious about starting this diet I have to get a written diet plan, shopping list, etc.!
How many times have you started a diet? What were the easiest ways for you to get it going?
