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Using Low Calorie Meal Plans

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Researchers at Louisiana State University have concluded that a low calorie diet can lower your insulin levels, reduce your core body temperature, and reverse signs of aging. However, those same researchers urge people to avoid going overboard when it comes to restricting calories. Consuming less food and using low calorie meal plans can undoubtedly be beneficial to your health. However, you should set realistic and healthy expectations for yourself.

If you regularly eat around 2000 calories a day, switching to a 500 calorie a day meal plan won’t be healthy or realistic. On the other hand, switching to a 1500 calorie meal plan wouldn’t be detrimental to your health or particularly difficult for you to do, especially if you were armed with the right strategies.

Strategies to Help You Switch to Low Calorie Meal Plans

  • Pay Attention to Portions: If you’ve made the decision to change your diet and adopt healthy low calorie meal plans, you’re going to have to change the way you eat and what you eat. First and foremost, you should adjust your food portions. The plates we eat off of are simply too large, and their large size often tricks us into eating more than we should. After all, we’ve been trained from childhood to clean our plates. Try eating off salad plates instead of dinner plates. Many dieters find this to be a successful strategy.
  • Customize: Your low calorie meal plans don’t have to be the same as everyone else’s, particularly if you aren’t trying to adhere to any particular diet like the Paleo Diet or HCG diet. If your primary goal is to reduce your caloric intake, you should plan your meals based on what you like. You may want to make a list of all the low calorie foods you normally enjoy eating and include those in your healthy meal plans. Some low calorie foods you could include in your meal plans, for instance, are apples, grapefruits, legumes, black beans, turkey, spinach, low-fast yogurt, oranges, brown rice, and fish.
  • Use Online Tools: Online tools can help you plan out your meals and count the calories you consume. Your goal should be to calculate all the calories you plan to consume each day as a part of your overall meal planning efforts. You should also keep track of how many calories you actually take in versus how many you plan to take in. This can give you an idea of whether or not you need to adjust your eating habits or meal plans to take in fewer actual calories.

  • Drink Plenty of Water: Drinking water throughout the day will help curb your appetite.  And drinking one or two glasses before each meal has been proven to reduce food intake. When you reduce your caloric intake, hunger is going to be your biggest hurdle. Drinking more water will help you overcome that hurdle. Additionally, choosing to drink water as opposed to sodas and juice will help reduce how many empty calories you take in. If you drink diet soda, it’s still a good idea to switch over to water, if possible. Certain additives in diet soda are actually thought to increase your appetite.
  • Don’t Forget to Snack: Plan to eat two or three snacks a day, and bring those snacks with you to work or wherever you go throughout the day. Some ideal snacks are baby carrots, apple slices, grapes, and whole-wheat pita bread with hummus. If you start to feel hungry before a meal, eat one of the 100 or 150-calorie snacks you’ve prepared. Eating snacks throughout the day will help prevent overeating at meals and keep your blood sugar levels stable. One of the most difficult parts of conforming to a low calorie diet is practicing portion control. Since snacking throughout the day helps prevent overeating at meals, you should consider snacking a part of your overall portion control efforts.

So, practice portion control, plan out your customized meals, drink enough water, and snack to avoid overeating. Remember that you are in control of your nutrition, and you have the power to succeed at eating a low calorie diet!

Low Calorie Meal Plans: The Volumetric Diet

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Bottom line: the only way to lose weight is to establish a calorie deficit. This means that if you’re trying to lose weight, you must establish a low calorie meal plan, or at least a meal plan that contains less calories than your current caloric intake. Establishing this calorie deficit may, however, trigger some not-so-comfortable feelings, like hunger. So what if we want to lose weight, but avoid those debilitating hunger pains? Tactics like “volumetrics,” or eating higher-density foods, can help you eat more but weigh less. Keep these low calorie meal plans and density tips in mind if you’re trying to lose a few.

Volumetric Low Calorie Meal Plans

Volumetric dieting is based on the idea that people like to eat, a universal truth as we all can attest to. People tend to eat the same amount of food per day, whether the foods they choose are calorie-rich or not. Volumetrics is all about getting more mileage out of what you eat. Therefore, according to this philosophy, the best way to lose weight is to eat healthy foods that provide low energy but high volume. With these low-calorie foods, you feel full without filling yourself with high amounts of calories. For example, fruits and veggies have a small amount of calories, but they are very high in density, making them great choices for any diet. Raisins, however, pack a high amount of calories into a tiny package–about 1/4 raisins has about 100 calories. Grapes, unlike raisins, have the same number of calories for an entire cup, making them a better choice if following the volumetric diet.

Other foods that fill you up may include fruits, vegetables, soups, popcorn, puffed rice, egg whites, shrimp, and chicken. Plan your meals around volumetric philosophy by filling half a plate of veggies, one quarter with whole grains, then a small serving of lean protein. A great volumetric meal is anything with fibrous veggies, like a lentil bean soup, which will leave you feeling full and satisfied, or a grilled chicken salad with lots of greens. These meals will not only make you feel fuller because of their high volume, but they’ll also make you chew more, which will send signals to your brain to stop eating sooner. This chewing fact has been confirmed by researchers at Reuters, who found that chewing food 40 times instead of a typical 15 times caused study participants to eat nearly 12 percent fewer calories. Another mind trick? Use smaller plates and spoons! Brian Wansink, a food psychology professor at Cornell University said, “We eat with our eyes, not with our stomach” after performing a study that showed that people tend to eat 25% more when using a bigger plate.

In short, volumetrics and the volumetric ideology can greatly aid anyone’s weight loss goals. Next time you’re trying to create a low calorie meal plan, make sure to plan meals that are high volume and low calorie for great results.