If you’re on the hunt for a fast and sensible weight loss plan, the 1200 Calorie Diet is an ideal springboard into a healthy lifestyle. Quite automatically, you’ll be eating low GI, low fat and nutrient dense foods while making gradual changes to your eating habits. By the time you’ve lost your excess body weight, you’ll have already transitioned to a healthier way of eating – hopefully for good.
How does the 1200 Calorie Diet work?
The human body is not that complicated. We need to fuel our energy needs with food. A calorie is the measure of energy in food and when the daily intake is inadequate, the body turns to stored fat to fuel its energy needs. A regular restriction of calories will ensure this process of ‘fat burning’ continues and steady weight loss will result.
What are the benefits of the 1200 Calorie Diet?
Getting informed. Most people are shocked at the calorific values of so-called ‘healthy foods’. Fruit juice, for example, is loaded with calories not at all satisfying. Fats and oils can triple the calorific value of a simple salad or vegetable dish with no nutritional benefits. This initial inventory allows you to choose which of your favourite foods are worth keeping in your 1200 Calorie Diet plan and which are best left behind.
Variety makes up a large part of the 1200 Calorie Diet menu. Unlike diets that plan out your meals and control your ingredients, the 1200 Calorie Diet encourages exploration within its parameters. There are many useful cookbooks and low calorie recipes online to support this.
No one is a perfect. The 1200 Calorie Diet allows for some high calorie meals, as long as they are balanced by some low ones; high calorie days, as long as they are followed by some low ones. Exercise is a non-food related feel-good activity that can be used to add calories to your daily allowance or to make up for over-consuming.
What are the challenges of the 1200 Calorie Diet?
Low calorie, high sugar foods are a tempting way to ingest your calories, but these foods are not nutritionally adequate and addictive in nature. Convenient high sugar snacks like Fruche, low fat yoghurt and dried fruit send the blood sugar soaring and ultimately crashing an hour or so later. Unless you stick with low GI fruits, vegetables, whole grains and beans, you will need a will of steel to manage your cravings.
‘Calorie Counting’ has a reputation for being tedious and leading to obsessive behaviours in dieters. Ultimately, calorie counting is a science, and on the 1200 calorie a day diet you will need to do the sums. Online calorie counting websites or phone applications certainly make it more enjoyable, but after the basics have been grasped and the weight has been lost, it’s best to leave the exacting behind.
Related posts: