A good place to start would be by looking at what the best way to diet is. What kind of quick meals are we looking to make here? Is going low carb the answer, or is that just the current fad?
The simplest way to look at a diet is as calories in, calories out. The more calories you eat, the more you have to burn. If you can maintain a calorie deficit then you’ll lose weight and if you eat more than you burn, you’ll gain weight. Simple!
Eating less fat is just one way to lower your calories as a gram of fat contains 9 calories – as opposed to 4 calories found in a gram of protein or carbs. You shouldn’t completely cut fat out of your diet though as it has nutritious value and it’s good for things like raising testosterone.
There are problems with this too though. For starters, counting calories is
dull and boring and it takes ages. This is the quickest way to put someone off of dieting. What’s more, the calories you eat don’t perfectly match up with the calories that you take in – and there’s no precise way to know precisely how many you’re burning.
Low carb diets work on the principle that calories from carbohydrates get stored as fat quicker (by spiking the blood sugar) and that cutting these can also be a convenient way to lower calories without making it obvious – especially as most puddings and desserts are carbs.
Which approach is the best one? Neither – they’re both completely legitimate and the best approach is to combine them. That’s what we’ll be doing here.
We’re going to aim to lower carbs and fats slightly, as well as the overall calorie intake. We’re not going to cut anything from the diet though and nor are we going to count calories.
The Process
On paper, what this means is that you’ll be reducing your carb and fat elements in any meal and you’ll be coming up with recipes that contain less of both. At the same time, you’ll read up on the number of calories in all of your common meals so that you can work out roughly how many calories you’re consuming in a day and where best to cut these.
Most people burn about 2,000 calories a day on average. If you can keep your caloric intake safely below this number then, you won’t need to count and you can still lose weight. Read up on what you’re currently eating and
you might find that some of your current meals are already nice and low calorie. That soup for instance? It’s probably under 200 calories – 400 if you add bread rolls. Make that one bread roll to reduce your carbs and hey presto!
On the other hand, that pizza you’re eating on lazy nights might well be costing you 700 calories if you’re eating half… 1,400 if you’re eating a whole one. You see the easy solution here? Time to replace that with a healthier alternative!
Adding the Nutrients There’s just one more thing we’re going to add in here now. Because while you want to lower your carb and fat intake, you want to make sure that you are keeping your nutrients nice and high. This means you should be eating a decent amount of vitamins and minerals as well as other things like creatine, CoQ10 etc. These will give you more energy, they will make you more efficient at burning fat and more. So look for foods that are low in calories but high in nutrients.
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