Daily Menu Planning 

Creating nutritious meals that help you meet your weight-loss goals and that you enjoy is easy with a little daily menu 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:

recommended daily calories

Plan Your Daily Meals and Snacks

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.

List Individual Healthy Meals

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

Determine Your Daily Calorie Count

Determine the calories for each meal and snack as you do your daily menu planning. 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 quick searches for the calories in fruits and vegetables at websites like Calorie.info. 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.

Review your Plan

Add up your total calories to see if you’ve met your daily calorie goal. Make adjustments where needed to create tomorrow’s eating plan. Use the USDA Daily Calorie Chart, which shows you how many calories you should target each day based on your sex, age and activity level (go to page 151 in the pdf, which shows page 140 in the bottom right corner, for some reason!).