Top Weight Loss Meal Plans

The best weight loss meal plans you can have are those that give you less fuel intake (calories or kilojoules) per day than your body burns off as energy. The equation is a such simple one, yet millions of people - myself included - have varying degrees of difficulty with it.

If you eat more food than your body can burn up as fuel, you will grow fatter and fatter. But if you burn off more energy than you can eat, your body will lose weight steadily. There is no fast and easy way to lose weight, just as there is no quick way to get fit and look good. But best weight-loss meal plans? Yes, there are some excellent ones you can choose from.

The easy way to diet and lose weight is to practice portion control with your meals. It takes a lot of self-discipline when cooking and preparing your own food to weigh and measure every meal. If you can do this and stick with it, fine. But you will probably find it easier to have your cooked and frozen meals delivered to your home each week. Most services that do this are quite reasonably priced, and their chefs and dieticians can do the preparation for you. All you have to do is make your selection from their menus, place your order and pay them.

Portion control is one of the best weight loss meal plans. Other weight-loss methods involve counting calories and/or omitting the most fattening foods, such as sugary treats and high-fat snacks. And of course you can lose weight through strenuous exercise; but it is far better to combine regular exercise together with a moderated meal plan like the ones mentioned below:

Many so-called 'low fat' foods are heavily laced with sugar. it makes them taste great, but sugar is calories... and if you don't burn those calories off through exercise, your body will store it all as more FAT. You don't really want to get any fatter than you are now, do you?

It works best if you empty your home of all the snack foods you like to eat, and learn to live by eating the good foods of your selected diet plan... And nothing else.

Three of the most well-known diet methods are the Pritikin Diet, the Atkins Diet and the Cabbage Soup Diet.

The Pritikin diet plan is based on unprocessed or minimally processed foods such as fruit and vegetables, legumes (like peas and beans), whole grains like brown rice, starchy vegetables such as potatoes and yams, lean meat, and seafood. The Pritikin Plan also requires you to exercise for a minimum of 30 minutes a day several times each week, and it has been proven to control diabetes, reverse heart disease, control hypertension, and improve the overall health of both men and women.

The Atkins Diet points the finger at refined carbohydrates, especially sugar, flour, and high-fructose corn syrups as being key factors in our obesity epidemic. So the Aktins Diet plan cuts back strongly on carbohydrates to induce ketosis and to switch the body's metabolism from burning glucose as fuel to burning stored body fat. It too is a low-carb diet plan that approves of eating whole-grain foods that are nutritious and have a high-g.i. (glycemic index). They take longer to digest, and therefore you get to feel 'full' for longer after each meal.

The Cabbage Soup Diet is basically a quick weight-loss diet plan that is undertaken for one week at a time... a seven day weight loss plan, if you like to think of it as such. During each seven days of the Cabbage Soup diet, you may only eat the cabbage soup for each meal. But you can have as much of it as you like.

Cabbage Soup Recipe

Ingredients

• 6 large onions
• 2 green peppers
• 2 cans of tomatoes (diced or whole)
• 1 bunch celery
• 1/2 head cabbage
• 1 package dry onion soup mix
• 1 or 2 stock cubes (any flavor)

Add salt and pepper to taste, chopped parsley, curry powder, garlic powder, Maggi or soy sauce to add more flavor (or use any other seasonings you enjoy).

Method

Spray a large pot with cooking spray and sauté all vegetables except cabbage and tomatoes until tender. Add cabbage and about 12 cups (3 liters) of water. Add the stock or bouillon cubes, soup mix, and seasoning. Cook until soup reaches desired tenderness. And add the tomatoes just before serving.

To keep the soup recipe interesting you can make a base soup and then add seasoning/ herbs each day for different flavors.

Whatever diet you choose is entirely up to you, but people tend to lose weight much more effectively if they join some kind of support group - such as Weight Watchers or Overeaters Anonymous. But if these don't appeal to you, why don't you try and find somebody you know who will agree to do the plan together with you.

It takes time, it takes determination, focus and hard work to lose appreciable weight and improve fitness. And the longest-lasting weight loss is slow weight loss. Crash diets may cause you to lose a few pounds temporary, but the moment you end the diet the weight will creep back on again.

Anybody who tells you differently is no better than a snake-oil salesman. They are telling you what they know you want to believe, and their motives are not to your benefit - but to theirs somehow. But yes, there are thousands and thousands of fatties out there who want the magic diet pill, the instant liposuction, the easy way to losing weight and looking good once again.

Boys and girls, once we hit thirty or forty years of age, we are past our physical prime. Our metabolism slows down, and most of us put on some weight. Face it, none of us will ever look like we're twenty-something ever again. But we want to look good. We want to feel desirable still. It's only human nature.

Becoming young and twenty-something again just isn't on the cards, but looking a hundred percent better than you do right now is possible, with a sensible calorie-controlled diet and a healthy plan of moderate daily exercise.