Daily Menu Planning 

Creating nutritious meals that help you meet your weight-loss goals and that you enjoy is easy with a little pre-planning. Planning your eating in advance, you’ll be able to decrease your calories without starving yourself while you get the proper nutrients you need for good health. Here’s what you’ll need:

Step #1 – Take a sheet of paper and write five headings: breakfast, morning snack, lunch, afternoon snack, dinner. Add a sixth heading if you want to eat your evening dessert an hour or two after dinner. Don’t skip your snacks . . . you’ll eat fewer calories overall if you spread calories out during the day with snacking.

Step #2 – Write a first-draft menu for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and decide on your snacks.

Step #3 – Determine the calories for each meal and snack. For example, if you plan on having a bowl of cereal and a glass of juice for breakfast, read the nutrition labels on the creal box, milk carton and juice container. Do this for each meal and snack. For fresh foods, find a printable list of fruits and vegetable for quick reference.

You can conduct quck searches for the calories in fruits and vegetables at websites like NutritionData.com. You can type a word like, “banana” in the search box at the upper, right-hand side of the first page, and you’ll find that a medium banana has about 100 calories.

Step #4 – Add up your total calories to see if you’ve met your daily calorie goal (LINK HERE). Make adjustments where needed to create tomorrow’s eating plan.