4-4-8 Diet Plan
400 Calories for Breakfast
400 Calories for Lunch
800 Calories for Dinner
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1600 Total Calories Per Day
This plan is simply a matter of dividing the 1600 calories in to three meals and can be modified to any calorie diet. Using this plan is only half the solution, the other half of the solution is to understand how many calories the food your eating contains. This was made 100 times simpler when I started logging my consumed food in to the Fit Day Web Site (Click here to see my personal Fit Day). Using Fit Day I was able to see how many calories I was consuming each day and eventually learned what foods where good and which were bad.
The hardest part for me was going out to eat, especially the fast food restaurants. I dealt with this problem the same way I learned about good and bad foods. I went to the fast food restaurants web sites and located their nutritional information for the foods I ate and entered it in to Fit Day. While this was time consuming it paid off in the end.
The next step was to make better choices when I selected my foods to eat. For this I decided to follow the USDA diet (the food pyramid).
Nutritional Guidelines
30% Fat
20% Protein
50% Carbohydrate
This guideline is somewhat flexible and you can afford a 5% +/- variance in each area.
Here is some additional information that I find useful:
* An average bagel is the size of a hockey puck.
* A cup of fruit is the size of a baseball.
* A medium potato is the size of a computer mouse.
* A medium apple or orange is the size of a tennis ball.
* Three ounces of grilled fish is the size of your checkbook.
* Three ounces of meat is the size of a deck of cards.
* An ounce of cheese is the size of four dice.
* A teaspoon of peanut butter is the size of the tip of your thumb.