Custom Meal Plan to Control Your Weight and Improve Health
Custom Meal Plan to Control Your Weight and Improve Health
Most people are not very successful with their plans to lose weight because they have problems with diets. They find diets very difficult to organize, because they have to go along with the preparation of ordinary food for the family. Diets can get boring, when you have to eat the same uninteresting food, day in and day out. Ultimately, once a body starts getting used to a diet, the diet actually stops working. All this can be avoided if you go in for a custom meal plan that is tailored to suit your own bodily needs and varied when needed.
Successful Weight Loss
Meals must include the right percentage of carbohydrate, protein and fat, and each person’s metabolism has different requirements. A custom meal plan has more chances of succeeding when it constantly varies its ingredients, while staying within the nutrient ratio percentages. This makes the food interesting and never becomes boring. It reduces the chances of a person falling prey to any temptation for food that is not included in the diet.
Every person’s body has its own demands depending on height, weight, age and gender. This can also be affected by any daily exercise routine that is being followed, which has its own demands on the energy required from the consumed food. Once a person does start losing weight, the metabolism changes, and calorie intakes can reduce, and this has to be reflected in changes made to any custom meal plan.
It is necessary to keep a track of the ratio of body fat to lean body mass, as otherwise you may find yourself losing muscle instead of fat. This does happen, when a very drastic cut is made in calorie intake, and the metabolism anticipates starvation and hunger and prefers to retain the fat for using it as energy and instead takes its protein from muscle.
A successful diet is one that does not mean simply eating less, but requires planning a custom meal that is the best for the individual.
Using Software to Arrive At a Custom Meal Plan
Fortunately dieticians and medical personnel have collaborated with IT experts to develop software that allows you to plan a custom meal depending on your own personal lifestyle, body structure and preferences in food. Sports personnel use such software to plan their own meals that best suits their particular form of activity or sport. The software also allows you to constantly vary your diet until you can find one that is giving you the best results.
This software (there a number of them) gives you a lot of options for food, giving you as many as 14000, and all this within minutes of your feeding in the necessary information. You can choose your own percentages for the carbohydrate, fat and protein. If you are not sure of this, some of them will ask you for some details about height, weight, age, gender, lifestyle and weight loss requirements and make their own suggestions, for the percentages. You can then use this to keep on varying the custom meal plan till it comes up with something that you feel that you can stay with. Once this information is in the system, food choices can be continuously varied, so that there is never any chance of getting bored with food choices.
You can even build your plan around any branded food, food supplement, or a dietary system if that is what you are comfortable with. The data that you have fed in regarding your person will enable the software to give very precise figures for suggested calorie intake. When you feed in this personal data, you are also asked to specify the exercise that you normally undertake, and this software can list as many as 90 or more forms of exercise, which can fit into all known exercise routines followed by people. So the calorie requirement indicated is very precise and can be put on auto pilot. Changes can be made as per new requirements or changed preferences and this is why a custom meal plan has always a greater chance of succeeding. The software also shows you how to track body fat levels to ensure that you have the right ratio of fat to muscle.
The software can help you to customize any meal plan to the goals that you have set out, and suggest how you can maintain a particular weight or even gain weight, if that is what is desired.
A Custom Meal Plan Makes For a Sensible Choice of Diet
At any given time, there will always be some diet plan or the other that has gained a lot of publicity and is popular. Whether it can work for you is a completely different thing. Much of the hype comes from advertising and marketing and is rarely a complete indication of its effectiveness. What you need to do, is stay away from the herd instinct and understand that you have your own unique body type, and are different from everybody else in the way you eat, work, exercise and sleep. Your genetics are different, and this means that food has its own unique effect on your body, something that only you are aware of. You are therefore far more likely to succeed in losing weight or putting it on if you come up with your own custom meal plan.
You must analyze your diet by noting everything that you eat in a normal week. Go online and get the calorie count for your meals. While you are at it, also home in on nutritional information. You will be surprised to find, that there are just a few things in your diet that have very high calorie counts and you must immediately look to find substitutes for them or look at a way of avoiding them all together. It is not necessary for a custom meal plan to include items that you have never eaten before. All that you need to do is eliminate the high calorie ones and look for something else that can keep your nutritional percentages, so that you can continue with your lifestyle. An example of avoidable bad calories is sodas. They are really not necessary and can be easily substituted by plain good old water.
Ensure that you custom meal plan has food that you like to eat, and a diet that you can sustain as a part of your lifestyle in the future. Eat smaller meals at closer intervals. Once a fortnight take a break from your meal plan for a day or two. Just make sure that you do not overeat on those days. The results of your diet will not be far from showing up on your body.