A simple menu for 1200 calories a day

2024 Author: Isabella Gilson | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:14

Diet food does not necessarily reduce your daily menu to bland and boring dishes. You can eat very varied and even sometimes allow yourself your favorite, not quite diet 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 you eat throughout your life. And knowing how many calories you need to keep your body in optimal condition is just as important as brushing your teeth daily.

There are even theories that cutting calories a day by 30-35% of your usual amount can slow down the aging process in the body and increase life expectancy in general. In this case, it is worth objectively assessing the size of your portion. If this is already a rather modest amount of food, then there is absolutely no need to reduce it. It is very easy to reduce everything to ordinary starvation and at the same time acquire a huge number of all kinds of diseases. Therapeutic fasting can only be prescribed by a doctor in case of acutenecessary.

If you think that it is very difficult to keep track of how many calories your breakfast or lunch contains all your life, then you are wrong. Anything you do regularly becomes a habit over time. And in a month or so, you won't have to do complex mathematical calculations. The realization of how many calories your body has consumed will automatically appear in your head. Still, it's best to know a few 1,200-calorie-a-day menu options in the beginning to make it easier to make daily food choices.

Appetizers

This appetizing culinary term refers to an appetizer served before a hot meal. Its purpose is to awaken the appetite. And just because you're on a calorie restriction doesn't mean your meal should be limited to one or two meals. Meals for 1200 calories a day, the menu of which we will consider further, both in stages and in a holistic form, can include snacks, salads, soups, main courses and even mouth-watering desserts.

So, what kind of snacks are suitable for a calorie-restricted menu? Salmon and fermented milk products, supplemented with herbs or spices, create an excellent flavor range.

You can combine these products with each other by changing their texture and adding various vegetables. You can make sandwiches with smoked salmon and low-fat sour cream with herbs. Or you can stuff tartlets with salmon and goat cheese pate and add a small piece of bell pepper for juiciness. Such small snacks do not require a detailed recipe and give a completefreedom of your imagination. The main thing is not to forget that the appetizer was created to wake up the appetite, and not to gorge on it. Therefore, the size must be appropriate, literally one bite.

Salads

So that your salad does not replace the main course and dessert in terms of calories, you should pay attention not only to the ingredients, but also to the dressing you use. Of course, vegetable salads are more suitable for a simple menu of 1200 calories a day. But the recipes for Greek salad or Caesar salad have probably 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 cut a 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. Roughly chop them and add to the already prepared vegetables. For the dressing, combine olive oil, lemon juice and some liquid from the olives. After adding the dressing, mix thoroughly, but do not add s alt. The salad contains quite s alty ingredients, and you can easily spoil it by adding more s alt. It's best to do this after tasting an already dressed salad.

Soups

Negative calorie foods are those that have less than 5 kcal per 100 g of weight. And soups are among those dishes that can consist entirely of such products. For a 1200 calorie a day meal, the menu can and does consist entirely of various soups. After all, their diversity is simply amazing.

Now a low-calorie creamy zucchini soup recipe will be presented, which quickly saturates the body. It is necessary to boil 40 g of rice. And 50 g of zucchini a little bit in a frying pan and then cut into small pieces. Mix rice with zucchini in a blender, adding your favorite spices to taste. For the base of the soup, fry a few tablespoons of wheat flour in butter, stirring constantly. Dilute the fried flour with 100 ml of milk and simmer until thick. After that, add the rice-zucchini mixture and 150 ml of vegetable broth there. Warm everything together and you can serve.

Soups with meat broth can also be on the menu, if we are not talking about super-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 appetizers and entrees, eliminating the need to eat hot as well.

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 boring with daily use, but shrimp, squid and even fish will save the day. Therefore, the recipe will be offered with squid, and you will take into account that other seafood is cooked in hundreds of different ways, and almost every recipe can be classified as low-calorie. It is proposed to cook squid stewed with tomatoes and mushrooms.

First you need to wash and clean 1.5 kg of squid. Or buy already prepared carcasses. Put the mashed carcasses of 5-6 pre-soaked sprats, grated with a small amount of citric acid, into a pan with heated vegetable oil. 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. Mushrooms can be used any, 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 satisfying.

Treat yourself

Even if you are indifferent to sweets, during a diet, receptors require bright tastes and sensations. Therefore, desserts bring much more pleasure. But how can a menu for a week of 1200 calories a day contain along with desserts? Very easy if, as in the previous recipes, you use the right ingredients and how to prepare them.

Often, store-bought sweets look very attractive and make even people with great willpower consume extra calories from time to time. The 1200 calorie a day menu doesn't allow that. But it's okay to pamper yourself. For example, to prepare a bright homemade marshmallow, you need elementary ingredients and a minimum of time. So,you need to prepare 200 g of your favorite berries. Let in our case it will be a strawberry. Using a blender, make strawberry puree out of it. Introduce one pack of edible gelatin into the puree and give it time to swell. Squeeze the juice from half a lemon, add to the berry puree along with a little powdered sugar. Heat the resulting mass over low heat until the gelatin dissolves. Then let cool and beat with a mixer until slightly thickened. Cover any form with parchment and pour in the whipped strawberries. Leave in the refrigerator for 3 hours. And now the dish, sweet and almost harmless for the figure, is ready.

Full menu

The 1200-calorie-per-day diet offers a varied and appetizing menu. And yet we will make a generalized version of such a menu for the whole day.

1. Breakfast: Ham omelet and tea without sugar. A slice of ham is better to take no more than 50 g - 212 kcal.
2. Second breakfast: low-fat yogurt with berries or some fruit - 85 kcal.
3. Lunch: vegetable stew and 2 chicken cutlets. The stew should be stewed without oil, and the cutlets are best steamed. Chicken cutlets can be replaced with fish cutlets. 385 kcal.
4. Snack: some nuts or dried fruit - 150 kcal.
5. Dinner: low-fat baked fish and boiled cereals. For dinner, it is better to give preference to barley groats - 325 kcal.

This menu has 1157 kcal, which meets our requirements.

Battle of the Sexes

It is worth remembering that a menu of 1200 calories a day for women is a way to lose weight. BUTfor men, such a restriction can be dangerous to he alth. After all, the male body for normal functioning requires much more energy. Therefore, it is worth contacting a nutritionist before resorting to diets that will radically change your daily diet. But, regardless of your gender, if you expect instant results or don’t believe in yourself at all, then most likely you will fail. Therefore, the main thing in any endeavor is faith in one's own strengths.

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 do not have the opportunity to set aside time for a normal meal and there is nothing nearby but a fast food cafe, then you can still afford a Coke burger as an exception. Nutritionists have proven that eating junk food is not as bad for the body as the complete lack of breakfast or lunch.

We hope our recipes from the 1200 calorie a day menu will help you become more mindful of what you eat.