1500 Calorie Diet Review
What You Should Know
The 1500 Calorie Diet is a weight loss plan based on a simple principle: lose weight by reducing calorie intake. Since weight loss is based on burning more calories than you take in, one way to fix that ratio is to lower calorie intake. While nutrition facts on products are geared toward a 2000 or 2500 calorie diet, this diet plan reduces the intake to 1500 calories.
While there is no official 1500 Calorie Diet promoter or inventor, there are some 1500 calorie diet cookbooks available. They feature tasty sounding recipes that have calorie counts that make the diet math easier.
List of Ingredients
None applicable – the 1500 Calorie Diet just uses normal food.
Product Features
To follow the 1500 Calorie Diet, you don’t need any special pills or supplements. You don’t have to buy certain meal packs. You don’t have to follow a strict exercise regimen. You really don’t even need to buy a book. You just eat fewer calories than normal – 1500 calories per day.
You can purchase a cookbook that recommends 1500 calorie daily menus and recipes if you’d like. Or you can just count portions and calories on your own. Either way, the goal of this diet is to keep your calorie intake significantly lower than your calorie expenditure so that you will lose weight. On the surface, it’s a very simple plan.
A potential drawback to the 1500 Calorie Plan is that 1500 calories just isn’t enough sometimes. That’s a problem. If your body can’t manage on only 1500 calories, it could react as though you were starving. If your body goes into that survival mode, it will actually lower your metabolism and defeat the purpose of dieting. It could even result in weight gain.
Pro’s
- There are no supplements, pills or strange foods to buy.
- This diet allows a lot of variety in your food choices.
- It is all natural.
Con’s
- There is the danger of lowering your own metabolism by eating too little.
- The math needed to keep track off all your calories requires a significant amount of time and discipline.
- Preparing the appropriate meals for this diet requires special time and attention.
- Most of the recipes in the cookbook use meats – this diet would require a lot of tweaking for a vegetarian.
- This diet lacks a clear follow-up plan for keeping weight off.
Conclusion
The 1500 Calorie Diet looks very simple and appealing on the surface. It seems, however, to have a couple significant drawbacks. One is that it just takes a lot of time and planning to limit your calories appropriately. For busy people on the go, this diet will difficult to maintain strictly.
The other concern is that it could actually backfire. If your body thinks that you’re not getting enough calories to survive, your metabolism will slow and you might actually gain weight.
