MEAL PLANS

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MEAL PLANS are a great way to get started quickly on a new dietary pattern. They leave out all of the guesswork! By following meal plans, you know you are eating the right number of calories each day, as well as getting the right number of servings from each DASH food group. Meal plans are also great teaching tools. Following a meal plan helps you learn about how to estimate a DASH serving of pasta or meat or just about any other food. Here is where we will let you in on a little secret. We know from experience that people starting on a new diet want meal plans. When we start a new eating pattern, knowing what and how much to choose can be overwhelming. Meal plans spell it all out. Easy, right? Well, not quite. In some ways, meal plans can be difficult to follow. Our seven-day meal plans lay out all your meals for a week. And breakfast is different every day, and so is lunch, and so is dinner. Most of us don’t eat a different breakfast on each of the seven days of the week, and then a different lunch as well. It’s a lot of work to eat that way. Not to mention, it can be expensive. If you are going to eat only ½ cup of grapes twice each week, how much do you buy? If you run into this same issue with all of the fruits and vegetables in your meal plan, you have to be a pretty savvy shopper so you aren’t left with a refrigerator full of uneaten produce at the end of the week. In addition, maybe you won’t like what we lay out for lunch on Day 2 or dinner on Day 6. So the best way to use our meal plans is to use swapping and substitution.

“Swapping” is the term we use for taking an entire meal, say lunch on Day 1, and using it on multiple days of the week. That’s easy to do and easy to understand. “Substitution” is a little bit more difficult. Here you omit one item in a meal plan and substitute with another item that’s equivalent. A good substitution is a food that has a similar calorie content and has the same number of DASH servings. So, for example, let’s say your lunch meal plan calls for blueberries, but you don’t have blueberries in your house. Substituting ½ cup of fresh pineapple chunks at 40 calories and 1 DASH serving of fruit for ½ cup of blueberries at 45 calories and 1 DASH serving of fruit is near perfect. A less perfect substitution would be ½ cup of sliced banana (at 70 calories) or ¾ cup of orange juice (at 80 calories). Both the banana and orange juice are 1 DASH serving of fruit, but are higher in calories than the blueberries would have been. Consistently making substitutions that are higher in calories (more calorically dense) are going to put you over your calorie target and slow your weight loss. But don’t get stressed about this. Even if you don’t follow every meal plan to the letter every day, if you use them as a guide and try to pick Hi-Lo-Slo foods to meet your DASH goals, when you deviate from the meal plans you will be doing just fine.

1,200 CALORIES: DAY 1

Target: 5 grain, 3 fruit, 4 vegetables, 2 dairy, 1 ½ meat, ¼ nuts/seeds/ legumes, ½  added fat, ½ sweets

Breakfast (160 calories)

1 ounce bran flakes (about ¾ cup), 1 grain (90 calories)

½ cup fresh strawberries, 1 fruit (25 calories)

½ cup nonfat milk, ½ dairy (45 calories)

Morning Snack (150 calories)

1 small low-fat granola bar, 1 grain (100 calories)

1 medium apple, 1 fruit (50 calories)

Lunch (375 calories)

2½ cups mixed raw leafy greens and vegetables (bell peppers, carrots, etc.), 2½ vegetable (50 calories)

3 ounces grilled skinless chicken breast, 1 meat (150 calories)

1 tablespoon unsalted, roasted sunflower seeds, ½ nuts/seeds/legumes (50 calories)

1 tablespoon low-fat creamy Italian dressing, ½ added fat (40 calories)

Half a 7-inch whole-wheat pita pocket, 1 grain (85 calories)

Afternoon Snack (160 calories)

1 cup nonfat vanilla yogurt, 1 dairy (160 calories)

Dinner (310 calories)

Piled-High Veggie Pizza ( 1/6 of a 14-inch pizza) , 2 grain, 2 vegetable, ½ dairy (250 calories)

1 medium orange, 1 fruit (60 calories)

Evening Snack/Dessert (40 calories)

2 dark chocolate kisses, ½ sweets (40 calories)

Nutrition analysis for the day: 1,995 calories, 5 grain, 3 fruit, 4½ vegetable, 2 dairy, 1 meat, ½ nuts/seeds/legumes, ½ added fat, ½ sweets

Copyright ©Thomas J. Moore MD, Megan C. Murphy MPH, and Mark Jenkins –Originally appeared in The DASH Diet for Weight Loss by Thomas J. Moore MD, Megan C. Murphy MPH, and Mark Jenkins.