Dietary food does not necessarily reduce your daily menu to fresh and boring dishes. You can eat very varied and even sometimes afford your favorite, not quite dietary foods. The main thing is to understand what your body gets with this or that dish.
Why limit yourself?
Many nutritionists agree that you need to control the amount of food consumed throughout your life. And knowing how many calories you need to maintain your body in optimal condition is just as important as brushing your teeth daily.
There are even theories that reducing calories per day by 30-35% of your usual amount can slow down the aging process in the body and increase life expectancy in general. It is worthwhile to objectively evaluate the size of your portion. If this is already a fairly modest amount of food, then it is completely useless to reduce it. It is very easy to reduce everything to normal starvation and at the same time amass a huge amount of various diseases. Fasting can be prescribed only by a doctor in case of urgent need.
If you think that it’s very difficult to monitor how many calories your breakfast or lunch contains, then you are wrong. Any regularly performed action over time becomes a habit. And after a month or you, you do not have to make complex mathematical calculations. Awareness of how many calories your body has consumed will automatically appear in your head. And yet, at first it’s best to know several options for the 1200 calories per day menu to facilitate daily food selection.
Appetizers
This appetizing term in cooking refers to an appetizer that is served before a hot dish. Her goal is to awaken appetite. And if you are limited in calorie intake, this does not mean that your meal should be limited to one or two dishes. Food for 1200 calories per day, the menu of which we will further consider, both in stages and in an integral form, may include snacks, salads, soups, main dishes and even delicious desserts.
So, what kind of snacks are suitable for a limited-calorie menu? An excellent flavoring range is created by salmon and dairy products, supplemented with herbs or spices.
You can combine these products with each other by changing their texture and adding various vegetables. You can make sandwiches with smoked salmon and cream of low-fat sour cream with herbs. And you can fill the tartlets with a paste of salmon and goat cheese and add a small piece of bell pepper for juiciness. Such small snacks do not require a detailed recipe and give complete freedom to your imagination. The main thing is not to forget that the appetizer is designed to wake up an appetite, and not to get enough of it. Therefore, the size should be appropriate, literally for one bite.
Salads
So that your salad does not replace the main course and dessert in calories, you should pay attention not only to the ingredients, but also to the dressing that you use. Of course, vegetable salads are more suitable for a simple menu of 1200 calories per day. But the recipes for the Greek salad or Caesar salad have been known to you for a long time. And they are quite suitable, but we offer you a more interesting recipe. It will be a Turkish salad with an unusual combination of flavors.
For cooking, you will need to peel and chop the whole carrot, fresh cucumber, Bulgarian, sweet pepper and add chopped pickled cucumber to them. Next, you will need about 300 g of pickled champignons and 200 g of olives. Chop them randomly and add to already prepared vegetables. For dressing, mix olive oil, lemon juice and a little liquid from a package of olives. After adding dressing, mix thoroughly, but do not salt. The salad contains quite salty ingredients, and you can easily spoil it by adding more salt. It is better to do this after you try the salad already seasoned.
Soups
Products with negative calorie are called those that have less than 5 kcal per 100 g of weight. And soups belong to those dishes that may be entirely composed of such products. For meals of 1200 calories per day, the menu can consist entirely of various soups. After all, their diversity is simply amazing.
Now a recipe for low-calorie cream soup with zucchini, which quickly saturates the body, will be presented. You need to boil 40 g of rice. And a little 50 g of zucchini in a frying pan and then cut into small pieces. Mix rice with zucchini in a blender, adding to your taste your favorite spices. For the base of the soup, fry several tablespoons of wheat flour in butter, without ceasing to stir. Dilute the fried flour with 100 ml of milk and simmer until thick. After that add the rice-squash mixture and 150 ml of vegetable broth. Warm everything together and you can serve.
Soups on meat broth can also be on the menu, if we are not talking about over-calorie pork. Chicken, turkey and even beef are much better for broth. Yes, and boiled meat can be added to the dish itself, and your soup will become much more satisfying. This can limit your meal to an appetizer and a first course, eliminating the need to eat hotter foods.
Hot meals
Many dietary main courses include a variety of seafood. And since there are a great many marine reptiles, the menu for 1200 calories per day becomes much more diverse. Chicken breast can get bored with daily use, but shrimp, squid and even fish will save the situation. Therefore, the recipe will be offered with squid, and you will take it for yourself that other seafood is prepared in hundreds of different ways, and almost every recipe can be attributed to low-calorie. It is suggested to cook squid stewed with tomatoes and mushrooms.
First you need to rinse and clean 1.5 kg of squid. Or buy already prepared carcasses. Put mashed carcasses of 5-6 pre-soaked kilos in the pan with warmed vegetable oil, grated with a small amount of citric acid. Next, 4-5 tomatoes need to be ground into a paste and added to the pan. Put chopped squids and dried or fresh mushrooms there. You can use any mushrooms to your taste. Add spices, add water and simmer over low heat for about an hour.
This dish perfectly diversifies the menu for every day for 1200 calories. Squids are very soft, and vegetable sauce makes the dish dietary and at the same time quite hearty.
How to treat yourself
Even if you are indifferent to sweets, receptors require vivid tastes and sensations during the diet. Therefore, desserts bring much more pleasure. But how then can a menu for a week of 1200 calories per day contain along with desserts? It is very easy if, as in previous recipes, you use the right products and methods for their preparation.
Often, store sweets look very attractive and even make people with great willpower consume extra calories from time to time. A menu of 1200 calories per day does not allow this. But you can be pampered. For example, to prepare a bright homemade marshmallow, you need basic ingredients and a minimum of time. So, you need to prepare 200 g of your favorite berries. Let it be strawberries in our case. Using a blender, make strawberry puree out of it. Introduce one pack of edible gelatin in mashed potatoes and give it time to swell. Squeeze the juice from half a lemon, add to the berry puree along with a small amount of powdered sugar. Warm the resulting mass over low heat until the gelatin dissolves. After that, allow to cool and beat with a mixer until slightly thickened. Cover any form with parchment and pour whipped strawberries. Leave in the refrigerator for 3 hours. And now the dish is sweet and almost harmless for the figure.
Full menu
A diet of 1200 calories per day menu suggests a very varied and appetizing. Nevertheless, we will make a generalized version of such a menu for the whole day.
- Breakfast: omelet with ham and tea without sugar. A slice of ham is best taken no more than 50 g - 212 kcal.
- Second breakfast: yogurt with a reduced content of fat and berries or some fruit - 85 kcal.
- Lunch: vegetable stew and 2 chicken cutlets. Stew should be stewed without oil, and cutlets are best steamed. Chicken cutlets can be replaced with fish. 385 kcal.
- Snack: a few nuts or dried fruits - 150 kcal.
- Dinner: baked fish of low-fat varieties and boiled cereals. For dinner, it is better to give preference to barley groats - 325 kcal.
In this menu, 1157 kcal, which fully meets our requirements.
Battle of the sexes
It is worth remembering that a menu of 1200 calories per day for women is a way to lose weight. But for men, such a restriction can be dangerous to health. After all, the male body requires much more energy for normal functioning. Therefore, you should consult a nutritionist before resorting to diets that will radically change your daily diet. But, regardless of your gender, if you expect instant results or do not believe in yourself at all, then most likely you will fail. Therefore, the main thing in any undertaking is faith in one's own strength.
Fast food
It seems very strange that the concept of fast food has found a place in our article on dietary nutrition. You will be even more surprised if you find out that you can eat fast food. But!
It is categorically impossible to make the consumption of such food the norm. But if you don’t have the opportunity to allocate time for a normal meal and there is nothing nearby except a fast food cafe, then you can still afford a burger with Coke as an exception. Nutritionists have shown that the consumption of harmful food affects the body is not as bad as the complete absence of breakfast or lunch.
We hope that our recipes from the 1200 calories per day menu will help you become more attentive to what you eat.