You may have come to this site looking for weight loss tips, hoping that maybe the answer is the 1200 calorie diet. Well, the goods news is it just may be the answer you need. However, in order to know if it is, you need to consider some things before you just jump into a diet like this. Here is the single most important thing you need to understand.
You have to know your BMR or base metabolic rate; this is the amount of calories you would burn lying in bed all day long without doing so much as lifting a finger. There are many BMR calculators on the internet for you can use and most of them are free. You need to calculate yours first before you can give any consideration to the 1200 calorie diet plan.
Here is why; let’s take for example a 30 yr old woman who weighs 130 pounds and is 5 feet tall. Her BMR is between 1270 and 1375 calories per day, depending on the method used. If this woman’s goal is weight loss and she jumps into the 1200 calorie diet plan, she may wonder why she isn’t losing weight or losing it fast enough. For her to lose a little over 1 pound per week she needs to create a 500 calorie per day deficit with diet and exercise. This means eating a little over 1000 calories while burning approximately 230 calories working out. That would then give her the 500 calorie deficit she needs to succeed. If she is on the 1200 calorie diet plan she is eating 200 calories over where she should be, and if she doesn’t workout she may be on the 1200 calorie diet and never lose a pound. This is why people get discouraged and go back to unhealthy eating, claiming diets don’t work. The truth is, it would work but she didn’t know how to make it work for her.
Now let’s look at a woman who’s also 30 years old, but is6 feet tall and weighs 165 lbs. Her BMR is 1500, so if she gets on the 1200 calorie diet she is already at a 300 calorie per day deficit with no workout. She only needs to add in a workout burning 200 calories per day. This isn’t very hard to do and even if she didn’t do that, she is already in negative numbers and will therefore lose weight.
There are many 1200 calorie diets out there, so what is on the typical 1200 calorie diet menu? Just about anything that a normal healthy balanced diet would have but usually in smaller proportions. Obviously, I recommend a balanced diet of whole grains, vegetables, fruit and lean meat. If you limit each meal to 240 calories, you can easily have the 5 small “fist-sized” meals per day. You could also eat three 300 calorie meals and two snacks of 150 each and you’re still at 1200 for the day. Just do yourself a favor and eliminate all the junk food and the junk food in disguise i.e. anything with high fructose corn syrup in it.