1200 Calorie Diet Menu and Meal Plan

A 1200 calorie diet is nutritionally adequate for most of the people for a healthy, safe and permanent weight loss. Starving your body with fewer calories will slow down your metabolism and consequently using up of the calories by the body will also get decreased. This will result in a tired and emaciated body and also the weight loss will not be as much as expected because the calories are still stacked up inside the body.

Following a daily diet of 1200 calories is shown to be nutrition rich to support a healthy body and also brings about the calorie deficit which eventually leads to weight loss. Of course, the actual calories that should be taken depends on a lot of factors such as age, gender, metabolic rate, body size and other medical conditions to name a few. 1200 calorie diet plan fits most of the people on average but it is necessary to confirm with a doctor or dietician before starting with the diet.

How to choose the best 1200 calorie diet menu?

The diet plan should be chosen in such a way that it strikes a proper balance of the macronutrients. The macronutrients include proteins, carbohydrates and fats. The calories that come from the macronutrients should be ideally distributed as follows: 15% of the calories should come from proteins, 55% of the calories should come from carbohydrates, 30% of the calories should come from fats and only less than 10% of the total calories should come from saturated forms of food.

When the diet plan is composed of healthy, nutritious and wholesome food it will keep your food cravings in check and you will feel full for longer. Moreover there will not be any compromise to your health when you follow a diet that satisfies all the above conditions. A diet is followed to make us healthy, supple, strong and slim. Any proper diet should work to achieve all of these. Therefore make sure that you take nutritious food whose calories add up to 1200 or so.

Sample 1200 diet plans:

Below are two diet plans whose total calorific value comes around 1200. From this you can get an idea of how to construct your diet.

Sample 1:

Breakfast

One whole wheat muffin with a spoon of peanut butter and half a banana.

Mid-Morning Snack

An apple and few almonds.

Lunch

2 slices of whole wheat bread; 2 oz. low sodium turkey breast; 1 oz. cheese; a lettuce, an orange, a tomato and a spoon of mustard.

Mid-afternoon snack

8 oz. low fat yoghurt

Dinner

3 oz. skinless grilled, baked or boiled chicken breast.

A cup of cooked broccoli and 2/3 of a cup of brown rice.

Snack

A cup of milk and two fat free fig cookies

Sample 2:

Breakfast

A hard boiled egg, 2 slices of whole wheat bread smeared thinly with butter and a large slice of watermelon.

Lunch

100gms of baked potato and baked beans and 100gms of reduce fat cottage cheese.

Snack

Muesli meal replacement bars.

Dinner

Pasta salad made with olive oil. Wash it down with tinned tuna in brine.

Typically any 1200 calorie diet plan can be broken down into the following proportions: The breakfast is the most important meal of the day and makes up 300 calories of the entire 1200 calories. The mid-morning snack adds up to 100 calories, lunch to 300 calories and the mid-afternoon snack to 50 calories. Finally the dinner contributes to 450 calories of the total. Any nutrition rich diet plan that follows this breakdown can achieve good results in terms of weight loss. Snacks can be taken at any time of the day where you feel the need to snack. But timing is important for breakfast. Make sure that you finish you breakfast within an hour of the time you woke up at. For the rest of the day, timing is up to you and you can divide the calories as you want among the meals, but make sure that the total calories don't exceed 1200.

Last but not least, wash down you meals with lots of water. Adequate amount of water is absolutely essential for maintaining the metabolism and for the healthy functioning of the body. Keeping your body well hydrated is an important factor that constitutes weight loss. Make it as a habit to drink at least eight glasses of water each day. It may look difficult at first, but once you start making conscious efforts it will no longer seem as hard as it was at first.

A word of caution:

Before you kick start on a diet, please catch up with your doctor or dietician and get expert advice on the meal plan that you have formulated. This is especially important for pregnant or breast feeding women. You don't want to follow some diet and weaken you body, so always ask for the doctor's opinions and then jump into your diet plan.