Transitioning from a regular and unmonitored diet into one that is structured and properly designed to meet your weight loss needs can be a challenging and frustrating exercise if you do not know how to proceed.
As a result, many people ask how to begin a diet plan but never really gain sufficient knowledge to transition from just wanting to knowing and application.
Weight loss is complicated enough in itself that a proper diet plan should be self sufficient and easily repeatable.
That means that developing a diet plan should cater to your needs without being overly stressful or time consuming when being developed.
The first step of how to begin a meal plan is to determine your weight loss goals and your current weight state relative to the recommended number for your height and age.
The best way to do this is by a measure called Body Mass Index which simply refers to the ratio between height and weight.
Doctors and nutritionists recommend a working range of 20-23 BMI for one to be considered healthy; going above this value means one is overweight while going below means one is underweight.
A second measure to consider is Body Fat Percentage which refers to the total percentage of body fat in one person.
This is important because weight alone is not an excellent measure of health; note that some people who build muscles will generally weight more than others because muscle is heavier than fat for the same volume.
There are also established numbers for body fat percentage so you can target a specific body morph.
As a guideline, the lower the body fat percentage is, the better.
Now, how to begin a diet plan based on these numbers is simply a matter of calculating one's calorie requirement and use this to define a calorie intake regimen for the day.
Diets promote weight loss via a balance of calorie intake and consumption.
That means that the more weight you want to loss within a certain period, the more calorie expenditure you need and the lower the calorie intake recommended.
For a 2 pound per week weight loss purely based on dieting, a diet plan of 1,800 calories is sufficient.
This can be varied accordingly and some diet plans calling for drastic weight loss can even go down as low as 1,200 calories per day.
The diet plan can then be built from the ground up once you have the target calorie consumption.
Split your meals into smaller portions of up to 6 times a day.
That means that per meal, you should get 300 calories worth of food.
You can tweak this a bit to have 400-500 calories per major meal and 100-200 calories per snack depending on your plan.
There are countless literature on calorie content of various foods and these are invaluable resources when considering how to begin a diet plan.
As a guideline, more natural, unprocessed foods are preferred.
Stay away from fatty servings or those that are fried.
Lastly, gradually introduce your new diet plan to your daily routine.
How to begin a diet plan is contingent on how much you are currently eating versus what you want to achieve.
Over a period of two weeks, slowly lower your daily calorie consumption until you get to the final recommendation of the diet plan.
Afterwards, sustain this for the period required for you to get to a lower target weight.
It might not be easy but it is definitely worth it.
Armed with this knowledge, move out from simply asking how to begin a diet plan to actually implementing one and watch your waistline and your weight come off.
It only requires commitment and dedication but the results are definitely worth it.