The Pen and Paper Diet
What is the pen and paper diet?
The pen and paper diet was created by Michael Dow along with his wife, together they both helped each other with losing weight as well as managing to keep it off. They then created a plan that could be easily maintained to follow the rest of their life. The reason for it being called the pen and paper diet as on the diet you will determine the amount of calories you take in and how many you will need to reach your own goal weight as well as how many you need to consume to support your ideal weight.
How the diet works?
The structure of the diet is established on necessary physiology, which means you are going to consume a lot less calories than what you are using and is a diet that will help to control how many calories you actually take in. This diet can be specially adapted to your own needs this will depend on the calories and your activity level, current weight, goal weight, height, age and gender. The pen and paper part of it comes when you start calculating the calories of each food that you eat.
At the beginning of the diet you are recommended to write down everything you have consumed in one day. The calories will then need to be determined so this then helps to produce an estimate of the average amount of calories that are being consumed. Dieters find out what their daily calorie allowance is by comparing the amount of calories that they consume to the amount that would be suitable if they were at their ideal weight.
If the difference between the daily calorie intake and the ideal body weight calorie intake is greater than the dieters are advised to cut down on the calories that they take in until they then can eat at their ideal body level without encountering overbearing hunger as well as other symptoms.
In order to accomplish this, from food which is consumed the calories must then be counted. It will be easy to find out the calorie count information from the foods that are packaged as it will be stated on their labels but may be elementary to measure other foods as well as weighing them.
As you are progressing on the diet you may find that your weight plateaus as your body adapts to the lowered amount of calories you take in. Dow suggests that for one month they should cut down on their calorie intake by 100 calories per day until they accomplish their ideal weight.
Pros:
• Helps you to measure and to keep track of the portion sizes.
• You don’t have to give up any preferred foods.
• As you become more attentive to what you are eating you will no longer need a calculator.
• A favourable way to lose weight is to keep a food diary.
• A good and proven way of weight loss is to count calories.
• The diet can be designed to meet dieters own weight loss goals
• The author of the book ‘Pen and Paper Diet’ has a website that can provide more information about restaurant meals and their calorie content.
Cons:
• This diet obliges that you need to count calories, weigh food and measure it.
• When counting calories its only generic foods.
• However much you eat each day you have to track it daily as well as calculate the calories.
• As the body adapts to a set level, you may still have to continue to cut down on the calories.
• Does not consider the nutritional quality of food.
Approved foods
On this diet dieters can eat whatever they desire however the calorie allowance is not to be exceeded.
Exercise
This diet doesn’t focus on exercise but concentrates more for dieters to learn how to drink and eat properly rather than exercise. Doe states that you should however try different types of activities until you find something that you enjoy.
You will need a Calculator for this one!
