A 1200 Calorie Meal Plan: Lose Weight Through Counting

Watching carbs, reducing fat intake, increasing exercise. If you wanted to start listing every diet and exercise program that has been introduced to the American public, you would run out of time and space before you ran out of ideas. But while many a "nutritional expert" has come out with a program to help ease the path from overweight to thin and fabulous, the science behind weight loss has not changed. It's a simple formula. Eat less than your body needs to maintain its weight, and you'll get thinner. If you want to see the numbers on your scale go down, you'll have to either reduce your food intake or increase your exercise. This is why a 1200 calorie meal plan works so well for so many people. The Food We've heard it time and time again: these foods are bad, and these foods are good. While there is something to be said for this theory from a number of perspectives (health being chief among them), it really isn't applicable from a weight loss standpoint. The only relevance it has is that a piece of chocolate cake isn't going to make you any less hungry than a banana, but you're going to get much more for your caloric "dollar", so to speak, from the banana. But this notion of good and bad foods is what throws a lot of people off their carefully constructed meal plans. If you're following a 1200 calorie meal plan, it helps to fill that plan with calorically light foods simply because you'll be able to eat more of them. Mistakes Humans aren't meant to be robots, though. It may be because we are evolutionarily encouraged to seek out the richest, most calorically dense foods we can. In the days of our ancestors, we didn't know where our next meal was coming from. You took advantage of any bounty you could. In an age where we can head to McDonald's whenever we want, we have to use willpower to eat foods that make a little more sense for the times. But that doesn't mean mistakes won't happen. When they do, it's important not to compound the error with further mistakes. Stay as close to a 1200 calorie meal plan as you can, even with the mistake, and you'll be just fine. Exercise Of course, if you feel like a 1200 calorie meal plan is untenable for whatever reason, you can always increase the amount of exercise you do. The more calories you burn, the more you can eat without noticing the effects on your waistline. In today's busy world, it's often easier to adjust your diet than add in more time at the gym, but if you find the opposite more enticing, it's always something to consider.