How to Maintain the 80/20 Rule For Weight Loss

One of the biggest problems of sticking to a restrictive diet is the restriction. Your favorite foods are off-limits. You will, of course, be losing weight, but you are still craving fries and cookies. The best diet for you to be able to consistently lose weight and not miss the foods you love is the 80/20 rule. This rule is basically that everything is in moderation. You eat healthy meals 80% of the time and 20% of the time you can indulge in the foods you enjoy.

Before you start this and eat lots of salads during the week and then tons of ice cream and fried foods on the weekend, this is not how it works. You need to know what foods are filled with good calories and which have bad calories. Measure the ratio of the number of fruits, vegetables, and nuts that you are consuming with the bad calories of those filled with sugar or high in fat.

Some of the compliant foods for the healthy 80 percent of your diet are; plant-based foods, lean animal protein, whole grains, low-fat dairy, nuts, seeds, and olive oil. And the suggested foods to indulge in for the 20 percent are foods high in saturated fat, highly processed food, alcohol, and white sugar.

Working out the 80/20 rule might take a little bit of math. Before you start this diet you want to write down your weekly intake of food and their calorie amounts. This will give you a baseline of how much you consume over a week. Once you have worked this out you can calculate the calories that make up the 80 percent, including all the meals and the snacks, and then everything else you eat would be in the remaining 20 percent.

It might take a while to get the hang of it but once you know how to do it you will see great weight loss results and it will become a way of life.