Diet vs. Meal Plan

I’ve tried a lot of diets.  Low fat, low carb, count­ing calo­ries, you name and I’ve prob­a­bly tried it.  The prob­lem with those is that they don’t work for the long term.  I did the low carb diet just before it became the craze and carbs became evil to every­one.  It worked and I lost a good deal of weight.  I started at 300 pounds and got down to about 225. Great!  

The only prob­lem was it wasn’t sus­tain­able.  Just as I was start­ing to feel real good, my knees stopped hurt­ing, and I had to buy a whole new wardrobe, I started to slip up and my weight slowly started to inch up.  

There are two prob­lems with Diets that I see: 1) They are not sus­tain­able, and 2) Peo­ple think they just have to do them for a short period of time and then can go back to eat­ing the way they were before they started. That is why diets fail.  

A few years back I became acquainted with one of the per­sonal train­ers at my local gym.  Through con­ver­sa­tions with him I came to the under­stand­ing of what I like to call a Meal Plan.  It’s a way of eat­ing and struc­tur­ing meals so that you lose or main­tain body weight, but also feel sati­ated.  By feel­ing sat­is­fied you don’t have any crav­ings and don’t feel deprived so the thoughts of “when I get off this thing…” don’t creep into your head.  For me, eat­ing 5 — 6 small meals a day works best.  Now, I know you are going to say that seems like a lot, but remem­ber I said small.  Por­tion con­trol is key.  No more than 300 — 400 calo­ries per meal.

Related Posts:

• Diet vs. Meal Plan response.
• Diet vs. Meal Plan, continued…
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• Cre­at­ing a Diet Rou­tine to Gain Muscle
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• Is That Diet Soda You’re Drink­ing Actu­ally Mak­ing You Gain Weight