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Developing vegetarian meal plans is a difficult but not impossible challenge. Following a few simple steps you too can have nutritionally balanced and tasty meals.

Developing Vegetarian Meal Plans For Weight Loss
By William Witt

One of the critical parts of any weight loss plan is developing good, quality meal plans. Anybody can slap a few recipes together and call it a meal plan, but developing vegetarian meal plans is a challenging process. You must ensure that there is balanced nutrition. Additionally, you have to plan for adequate protein without relying on animal sources. Thirdly, you need to maintain the proper caloric level for your weight loss needs. Once you have done this you will discover that all the planning and work is truly worth it for you will consuming truly wholesome foods in the proper amounts.

Your first step in developing meals plans is to ensure you are going to have balanced nutrition. Now you need to get a copy of the USDA 'food pyramid'. You can easily adapt this to a vegetarian diet. The only real change to the pyramid will be in the protein category which we will discuss in a little bit. Next using the pyramid as a guide either create some meals on your own or from a collection of vegetarians recipes. Now make some preliminary meal plans, ignoring protein which we will get to next.

Ensuring there is enough protein in your diet is not as difficult as it sounds. Even without using animal products it is not hard, and if you allow dairy products into your diet it is even easier. But it is worth repeating animal products are not required in your diet to have enough protein. First here are some guidelines as to how much protein we really need in our diets. In 2002, the National Academy of Sciences published a 'Dietary Reference Intake'. It included everything from fiber to fatty acids. For protein they recommend that an optimal range of protein is 10 to 35 percent of calories (On a 2,000 calorie diet this would be 50 to 175 grams of protein). In everyday terms this means that adult women need at 46 grams of protein daily and adult men need at least 56 grams of protein daily (very active and elderly people may need more).

Now here are some foods with their protein amounts:

                Food product                                                       Protein, Grams

• Black Beans, 1-cup cooked                                              15
• Bread (whole grain), 2 slices                                             6
• Brown Rice, 1-cup cooked                                                 5
• Corn, 1-cup cooked                                                           6
• Corn Tortilla                                                                     2
• Garbanzo Beans, 1-cup cooked                                        12
• Kidney Beans, 1-cup cooked                                            15
• Lentils, 1-cup cooked                                                        18
• Pasta, 1-cup cooked                                                          7
• Potato, Baked with skin                                                      5
• Re-fried Beans, 1-cup cooked                                           16
• Split Peas, 1-cup cooked                                                   16
• Tempeh, 1/2 cup                                                               16
• Tofu, 1/2 cup                                                                    20
• Yogurt (NONFAT), 1-cup                                                    13

As you can see getting enough protein should be an issue for even the pickiest eater. So now review the meal plans you developed before and modify them to ensure your protein amounts are what you want them to be.

Maintaining the proper caloric level in your meal plans is perhaps the easiest of all. You need to review the meal plans you developed thus far with an eye towards the calorie levels each day. If your calorie counts are too high either substitute foods (i.e. spinach for lettuce) or reduce the added fats from oils & margarine. Once your calorie levels are good, your vegetarian meal plans are ready to go.

Well if you have made it this far I would say that you have some workable vegetarians meal plans for weight loss and in developing them you have made sure that there were proper calorie levels on a daily basis. You also discovered how easy it is to ensure adequate protein as a vegetarian. Lastly you maintained balanced nutrition throughout your meal plan. I hope you enjoy yourself as you develop and implement you vegetarian meal plans.

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