OK ladies, if you're like me you've probably eaten ten times your body weight in incredible xmas fare and now need to go on a diet, and like me you hate diets cos they generally suck. But I have devised a special myfoodeeblog diet plan where you can have chocolate and ice cream every day and still lose weight!
Too good to be true? No...
From reading around the interwebs I've realised that most nutrition advice is complete and utter bollocks and way more complicated than it should be. Listen girls, dieting is simple:
- if you consume less calories than you burn you will lose weight. Anyone that tells you otherwise is a moron
- diets higher in protein satiate you more so you don't feel as hungry
- you should be having 5 portions of fruit and vegetable a day and a portion is about a handful
- diets should not be extreme behavioural changes because that makes long term lifestlye shifts impossible to maintain
That's the basics, now onto the geeky mechanics that will allow us to have chcolate and ice cream every day and still lose weight...
First you need to work out your basal metabolic rate. This is the number of calories you would burn at complete rest eg asleep for 24 hours. Here is a simple tool for you to do that and my BMR is 1700. If you stick to this number you will lose weight by virtue of all the extra calories burned walking and moving and...stuff.
OK, next up we want to work out how many calories we need from nutritionally rich foods and how much from chocolate and ice cream. Anthony Paradis is a registered dietitian and nutritional expert over at foodandfitnessonline.com and reckons you need about 80% nutritionally balanced calories and 20% 'discretionary calories' which in our case is chocolate and ice cream. So on my diet I can eat 340 cals of chocolate and ice cream and still lose weight and if I go for a cycle or something probably much much more.
Now lets construct an example diet plan using the rules above and I've made everything else super healthy eg low glycemic index carbohydrates, high % cocoa chocolate etc. I've also saved you the time and effort by making the diet example for an average female of 5'5 and 70 kgs with a BMR around 1400.
Breakfast
Banana and strawberry smoothie (1 banana, 10 strawberries, 1/2 pint low fat yogurt, 1/4 pint skimmed milk): 170 cals
Lunch
Chicken and avocado salad (I skinless chicken breast, 1 tomato, 1/2 avocado): 340 cals
15g dark (70% cocoa) chocolate: 94 cals
Dinner
Beef salad with roasted red peppers (125g lean beef streak, 1 red pepper, 2 portions greens of your choice eg asparagus, pak choi): 335 cals
1/2 cup chocolate ice cream: 143 calories. You could swap this for frozen yogurt and have a full cup of you really want...
Snacks
Dried fruit and nuts 50g: 200 cals
15g dark chocolate: 94 cals
Total cals: 1376
And how much weight will you lose on this plan? I reckon you will burn off about 500 cals in 'deficit' every day (remember that's the amount of cals over and above your BMR that you burn doing walking, housework etc) and this should translate to about a 1lb loss per week.
Feel free to vary the portion sizes if you do more activity eg a half hour walk will probably burn about 200 cals which you could use to treat yourself with more ice cream etc.
PS I totally insist you should be eating as much ice cream and chocolate at work so your dieting co workers will be all like crying salty tears of despair into their rice cakes...
PPS I used a calorie projector to plan weight loss over the next few weeks www.myfitnesspal.com/ - you should too.
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