Healthy Dinners & Weight loss

For most people, dinner is the meal in which they consume the most calories or kilojoules each day. This being the case, dinner is a logical place to start making changes if your goal is to lose weight.

In this article, we provide some tips to help you make these changes, including how to incorporate more healthy dinner recipes into your diet.

The Basics

Let’s start with the basics.

Whether you lose weight or put on weight depends upon how much energy you consume versus how many calories your body burns each day.

According to many health authorities around the world, including America and Australia, the average person should consume around 8700kJ (2,081 calories) per day in order to maintain a healthy weight.

Of course, we’re not all average, so if you want to know how many kilojoules or calories you need to consume to maintain your current weight, visit our free Energy Needs Calculator and plug in your details.

If your goal is to lose weight, simply work out what your body needs to maintain your current weight and reduce the kilojoules or calorie amount by 10%. As you lose weight, you’ll need to revisit the Energy Needs Calculator and plug in your new information to recalculate your energy needs.

How you split your energy consumption up between breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks is a personal thing, but to maintain a constant energy levels throughout the day, it make sense to ensure that there isn’t too much difference between the main three meals of the day.

For example, it’s better if breakfast, lunch and dinner each represent around 30% of your daily energy consumption with 10% for snacks than say, 10% of your energy consumed at breakfast, 10% at lunch and 80% at dinner.

Healthy Dinner Tips

Here are ten proven tips to help you include more healthy dinners in your diet:

1. Find healthy dinner recipes the whole family will enjoy.
2. Cut your normal dinner portions in half and put the other half in the fridge – if you’re still hungry after dinner, you can always go back for more, but will be less likely to.
3. Find healthy dinner recipes that incorporate healthier ingredients, like fruit and vegetables, low fat sources of protein, etc.
4. Share healthy dinner recipes with friends, and encourage them to do the same.
5. Try at least one new healthy dinner recipe per week, and don’t afraid to be more adventurous, you never know what you might find.
6. Incorporate as many fresh ingredients as you can in your healthy dinners.
7. Look for healthy dinner recipes that help you to get as many different ingredients into your diet as possible (it is suggested that we should eat between 30 - 50 different foods/ingredients per day).
8. Use a food diary to track your daily energy consumption. There’s a free food diary download on this website.
9. Plan your meals. Most of us are time poor, so the key to eating healthier dinners is in the planning.
10. Try using some of the free Diet Plans / Healthy Eating Plans we’ve created for you and publish on this website.

Conclusion

For most people, dinner is the meal in which they consume the most calories or kilojoules each day. This being the case, dinner is a logical place to start making changes if your goal is to lose weight.

In this article, we provided you with ten proven weight loss tips to help you make these changes, including how to incorporate more healthy dinner recipes into your diet.

Good luck with your weight loss and thanks for visiting weightloss.com.au.

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