How To Use Nutrition Data In Planning An Effective Diet

By Marion Peters


If you are on a diet program, it is understandable that you will be required to watch what you eat keenly. While it may seem as if this is very complicated an undertaking, in actual practice it can be easy to keep to strict guidelines set on your diet regimen. This guide shows you how to work your diet plan by using the nutrition data given on food packages.

There is a misplaced though pretty common sentiment that all you need to take care of in a diet are the amount of calories. While it is true that most diets are structured to help weight watchers limit the calorific content of their food, this is just part of the program. Just as important is the need to look after the nutrients, minerals and vitamins in every dish served.

Your diet program will come with specific guidelines showing recommended levels for your nutritional requirements. To make sure you keep track and eat within limits of the program daily, consider keeping a journal to outline what you take on a daily basis. The journal should ideally take the form of a table with about five columns.

On each day's schedule, set the main nutritional elements you need to keep watch on in the first column of your table or spreeadsheet. To allow for variety of foods for each nutritional element, leave at least three or four rows blank before indicating the next nutritional element. The next column should be used to indicate the daily intake recommended for each nutrient with the rest of the columns being devoted to showing how much of the nutrients will be taken in each meal.

For each day, you will need to plan a set of nutritional elements as set out in your diet guide. Indicate the first element such as carbohydrates on the first column and leave four or five rows blank before indicating the next nutrient. Transfer the daily recommended intake against each nutrient in the second column of the journal. The other columns will be used to indicate amount set for each meal.

To make it easy, begin by planning the main meal of the day such as the dinner. The food packaging will indicate how much of each nutritional element is contained in a serving or certain amount of grams of the food item. Typically, you will find that most food items will have different nutrients and minerals in varying proportions.

Managing a healthy diet is much easier than many people believe. You only need to plan your program on a simple journal. This becomes easy as most packaged foods come with nutrition data on the packages.




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