What a great weight loss question:
The best diet for losing fat is the same as the best diet for building muscle which is the same as the best diet for maintaining health and body weight. In other words, everyone should be eating essentially the same macronutrients, vitamins, minerals, and fiber barring special health or medical considerations because we all have essentially the same physiognomy. Here is the diet approved by the US National Institute of Health…the people your doctor listens to.
Eat varied, wholesome, and high quality foods such that your daily caloric intake is about equal to your daily caloric burn while keeping your macronutrient ratios at about 55/25/20 (%calories from carbs/fats/protein). Only slight changes should be made in the macronutrient ratios to accommodate the extreme demands of special activities such as athletics or inactivity due to illness.
Note: Here are the details in case you’re interested. —> http://health.gov/dietaryguidelines/2010.asp
and here —> http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/nutrition.html
You get to make the food choices based on culture, available foods, personal preferences, your resources, food allergies, etc. However, the words "varied", "wholesome", and "high quality" are important. And, you should consume your food in 4-6 daily meals with healthy snacks between such that you’re nourishing yourself every two hours when awake.
If you want to burn body fat, simply decrease portion sizes of your food such that your daily intake is 500 calories less than your daily burn rate. That should result in a loss rate of one pound per week.
If you don’t know how to proceed, here are the only two websites you need.
1. This site has a wide range of information about foods, fat, diets, and exercise with calculators, diet tips, food facts, etc. —> http://www.freedieting.com/
2. This website is a great way to track calories, macronutrients, water, and exercise. It also does all the math for you and makes it super easy to look up foods to enter into your online food intake diary. There’s a discussion forum where you can exchange info with thousands of other dieters. —>http://www.myfitnesspal.com/
Here’s my food intake diary as an example —> http://www.myfitnesspal.com/food/diary/clickmaster
Tracking your calories is crucial to your fat loss and maintenance. Tracking your macronutrients is crucial to your health. And, of course, it is implied that you will learn how to read labels, weight portions, do food lookups, enter data, interpret data, etc., if you don’t already know how. It’s all easy stuff and, if you persist, it will eventually become such a routine that you’ll be able to enter data from your cell, know what your daily nutritional requirements are real time by the hour, interpret labels and estimate recipes, plan cheats, and, best of all, you’ll have no plateaus because you’re not relying on the scale to tell you if you’re losing, gaining, or maintaining.
Good luck and good health!!
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