Tag Archives: free diet meal plans for weight loss

Choosing Meal Plans for Weight Loss

Posted on by
Reply

After surveying the biggest diet plans, tallying up membership fees and food costs, analyzing medical studies, and interviewing leading nutritionists, CBS determined that Weight Watchers is one of the best meal plans to lose weight. Here are all the details on this meal plan and how you can use it with other meal planning services to lose weight fast.

What is the Weight Watchers philosophy?

The Weight Watchers meal plan aims to give its followers long-term weight management that comes from a healthy lifestyle, mind, body, and soul. The trick to staying fit and happy at the same time? Eat what you want from time to time. Weight Watchers encourages dieters to make their own eating decisions and do more physical activity. Additionally, this diet meal plan gives you a community that can help when times get tough. This community includes support like Weight Watchers meetings and online forums. Weight Watchers also recommends splitting your weight loss up into body weight reductions of 5% or 10%. For those who need to lose a lot of weight, breaking up their weight loss into 10% “goals” may help them stay more motivated.

What can I eat?

No foods are strictly prohibited on the Weight Watchers. Instead, each food item is assigned points. The points are based on not only calories, but total fat and dietary fiber. For example, 1 cup of broccoli is 0 points, 1 6 ounce steak is 8 points, and 1 ounce of chocolate is 4 points. You can earn negative points with exercise, which is the program’s way of motivating dieters to get to the gym.

Does Weight Watchers work?

Yes! A 2005 study in the Annals of Internal Medicine showed that participants in the program lost an average of about 5 % of their body weight (around 10 pounds) in six months. Two years later, they had kept about half the weight off. After dieters have achieved their goal weight, the Weight Watchers diet meal plan encourages its users to attend meetings until they’ve stayed within 2 pounds of their goal weight for 6 weeks.

Using Weight Watchers in conjunction with an online meal planning service or app that helps you plan out your grocery store visits and make your grocery lists may comprise the overall best meal plan to lose weight.

Free Diet Meal Plans and You: Diet Myths

Posted on by
Reply

About 66% of Americans feel like they need to lose weight. Because practically everyone wants to lose weight, rumors abound when it comes to weight loss and these myths and diet fads spread like a forest fire. You may have heard tons of advice on how to lose weight, but these are some diet myths you should seriously reconsider:

  • “Eating small, frequent meals boosts your metabolism.”: False. While it makes sense that you will keep your “metabolism” working if you eat frequent meals, food intake has little to no effect on metabolism. Some foods, like coffee, may increase metabolism, but the boost is not nearly enough to help you lose weight. So how do you really increase your basal metabolic rate? Pick up the weights and start liftin’. Muscles burn calories at about five times the rate that fat does.
  • “Give up beer and you’ll get rid of your belly.”: According to Live Science, in a 13 year study of 19,220 U.S. women, nondrinkers were more likely to become overweight than women who regularly sipped on beer, wine, or liquor. Beer doesn’t necessarily give you a gut, but this doesn’t mean you should go around chugging 40-ouncers. Everything in moderation!
  • “Just drink more water and you’ll lose weight.”:  While foods containing water, like soups and melons, can fill you up and help you eat less, drinking water alone doesn’t have the same effect. Though guzzling down water isn’t going to give you a strikingly slimmer figure in weeks, drinking a glass of water before a meal can help you better moderate your eating, according to studies done at Virginia Tech (although, oddly, this effect was only prominent in subjects over 35).
  • “Don’t eat after 8 p.m.”: Guess what? Calories don’t have a watch and they can’t tell time. Your body digests calories the same way whether its 2:00 in the morning or 2:00 in the afternoon. The tendency, however, is to binge at night when the body is tired after the long day. Instead of snacking on ice cream and cookies, have a light snack that’s around 100 calories, like a piece of fruit.
  • “Just cut your calories and you’ll lose weight.”: True, but not for long. A report published in American Psychologist found that within four to five years, the majority of dieters put on a 1,200 calories a day diet, regained the weight they had lost in the study. Don’t starve yourself, you’ll just end up gaining the weight back. Instead, change dietary habits in a sustainable way. Swap snacks for fruit and chocolate bars for a piece of dark chocolate. This will help you keep the weight off long term. Slow and steady wins the race.

All in all, stay inquisitive when you’re reading or listening to what people have to say about weight loss. It could turn out that it’s a whole lotta bologna.