Liz Vaccariello - The 400 Calorie Fix Dining Guide. Eat Out and Lose Weight with One Simple Rule!

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I f youve spent much of your adult life battling extra pounds, youre not alone. Most of us struggle with our weight on an ongoing basis, and more than two-thirds of Americans weigh too much, according to the National Center for Health Statistics, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Why do we have so much trouble shedding pounds and keeping them off? Cutting-edge scientific research has laid the blame on everything from bacteria to hormones to our own genes. But at the root of all of these theories is a very simple answer: We eat more than our bodies need. For those of us who are watching our figures, calories have become the enemy. Its certainly true that we eat too many of them.

In each of the past 10 years, the average American ate close to 2,700 calories per day, an increase of 500 calories a day since 1970, according to the USDAs Economic Research Service. That daily difference can add up to an extra pound of body fat every week! Whether they take the form of carbs, protein, or fat, calories clearly matter when youre trying to shed pounds and keep them off. Scientific research keeps coming back to calorie control as the smartest means to losing weight for good. In a landmark study published in 2009, more than 800 overweight adults were assigned to one of four lower-calorie diets: lo w-fat/high-carb, low-fat/moderate-carb, high-fat/low-carb, and high-fat/very-low-carb. Each diet group lost about the same amount of weight over 2 years, regardless of which diet the group was on. The problem is, it turns out that counting calories is hard to do-especially when were eating out.

In one study, close to 200 survey respondents who were asked to estimate the calories and fat in nine restaurant entres were off by more than 100 percentthey thought that a meal with more than 1,300 calories had only 642 calories! Lisa Young, PhD, RD, an adjunct professor of nutrition at New York University, found that most restaurant portions are up to eight times larger than the portions that the government recommends in its Food Guide Pyramid. Thats why I developed the 400 Calorie Fix, an easy and fun guide that provides you with tools for viewing and choosing food through a healthy calorie lens without counting every calorie. As former editor-in-chief of Prevention magazine and coauthor of the best-selling Flat Belly Diet!, I understand that any eating plan has to fit into your life, not the other way aroundwhich means that you need to be able to take the 400 Calorie Fix out on the town with you. So, once again, I enlisted the help of Mindy Hermann, RD, registered dietitian extraordinaire, to put together a portable 400 Calorie Fix Dining Guide so you can do just that.

If you grew up on 1,000-calorie burgers or plates of pasta, 400 calories probably sounds like a starvation diet. But if youve tried any of the meals in our first two books, 400 Calorie Fix or 400 Calorie Fix Cookbook, you already know that 400 calories is the perfect per-meal "fix," with enough food and calories to provide the energy you need and keep you satiated until your next meal.

If youre new to the 400 Calorie Fix, we promise youll be pleasantly surprised by how full you can feel on 400 calories. Youll find that 400 calories gives you plenty of room for variety so that you can enjoy different tastes, textures, and nutrients at each meal. And you dont need to give up anything; you can have your cake (and cheese and chocolate and cocktails, too) and still lose weight on the 400 Calorie Fix. In fact, when we asked some of our readers to test the plan for us, they lost an average of 6 pounds in just 2 weeks, with several shedding up to 11 poundsand they did it eating pizza, steak, and chocolate chip scones!

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