1600 Calorie Lower Carb Diet Plan

A 1600 calorie lower carb diet plan helps people interested in a lower-carb lifestyle to lose weight and get healthier without making major changes to their diets. While not being as drastic as the ultra-low carb phases of The Atkins Diet, for example, simply going lower carb can help people stabilize their blood sugar levels without making huge changes in their diets.

The Benefits of Lower Carbs

While most health experts acknowledge that people need some carbohydrates in their diets, many people take carb loading to the extreme and gain a lot of weight because they're eating tons of white bread, white rice, white pasta and other processed foods far removed from the way nature intended us to eat them.

Choosing a lower-carb diet that also focuses on choosing smart, complex carbs, can help dieters control their blood sugar levels. Eating lots of refined carbohydrates causes blood sugar to spike and crash, making you feel hungry for more refined carbs, which adds more calories to your diet as the cycle repeats.

Picking more sensible carbohydrates and eating less of them, in addition to choosing healthy foods in the rest of your diet, can make a 1600 calorie lower carb diet plan a healthy and sensible way to lose weight.

Developing a 1600 Calorie Lower Carb Diet Plan

If you don't know how many calories you are currently getting in your diet, that is the place to start before developing a reduced-calorie plan. You may find that you are eating much more than 1,600 calories a day, or you might see that with a few changes you can easily adapt to a lower-calorie diet.

The key to finding out how much you're eating each day is to keep a food diary, writing down everything you eat and the approximate serving sizes, every day for a week or so. Then you can use an online calorie counter to help you determine how many calories you ate.

A 1,600 calorie diet is fine for most people, and choosing the right carbs will help you feel satisfied, even if you are eating a lot less than you used to.

There are many ways you could work this number of calories into your diet, but a sample 1600 calorie lower carb diet plan would likely include:

• Eggs, yogurt, or whole-grain oatmeal for breakfast, along with fruit or fruit juice
• Lean protein for lunch, such as a turkey sandwich on wheat bread, fish or a salad with beans and cheese, as well as a good selection of vegetables
• Dinner of fish or another lean meat, maybe a broth-based soup, plus more salad and vegetables or brown rice
• Snacks of cheese, nuts, fruit and peanut butter or a low-carb snack bar

The idea is not to completely eliminate carbs, but to choose better carbs than you were probably eating before. Instead of grabbing a doughnut for breakfast, choosing oatmeal provides you with a longer energy burn and many fewer calories. It's more nutritious, especially if you add fruit to the oatmeal or drink some juice alongside.

Carbs that are included in your diet plan should be as whole and unrefined as possible. Try to eliminate "white foods" like white bread and dinner rolls, white rice, white pasta and anything else made with these products. At first it will seem like that is everything you used to eat, but when you go to the grocery store you will see there are whole-grain substitutes for many of your favorite foods, and they actually taste good.

Switching to more complex carbohydrates is not a license to eat as many whole-grain crackers as you like, however. Remember that you're also cutting calories and should limit your portions of even complex carbs to keep your blood sugar steady and your weight on the decrease. But these two changes should make it possible for you to live a healthier and lighter life while still being really happy about the foods you are eating..