What is the pen and paper diet?

The Pen and Paper Diet is simply A Personal Daily Calorie Budget. It uses simple math and takes about 3 minutes a day to do. Research from the National Academy of Sciences, USDA and CDC was republished in the book. Half the book list calorie info for about 95% of the world's foods. Once you learn the basic skill of keeping a calorie budget to control your weight, you can then focus on eating more healthy and exercising more. You can continue to eat the types of food you enjoy with the diet since your boundary is how much you consume, not what you consume.

The basic steps are to first found how much you are consuming on an average day. Then find out what your estimated calorie requirement is for your height, age, sex, activity level and desire ideal weight. This calculation is found by using a simple formula from the National Academy of Sciences. Then, decide if the the difference in average calorie consumption and ideal calorie requirement is small or large. If small, start consuming only your ideal requirement the next day. If large, gradually decrease your calorie budget over months. You'll then proceed through some stages and arrive at a plateau. Since the estimated calorie requirements are only estimates, you may not arrive at your ideal weight. Refine your budget until you plateau again.

Once you've found Your Calorie Number, adjust for activity level and age. If you jog on a treadmill and it says you burned 300 calories, add that number to your calorie budget for that day. Also, starting at age 19, people's calorie requirements decrease slowly unless a lot of strength training is performed.

You can do this diet with other diets, if you have food prohibitions that you observe, if you're a professional athlete, if you are unemployed, etc. The book takes about 20 minutes to read and about 2/3 of the book is reference material (worksheets for calorie requirements and calorie info for most of the world's foods). High school dropouts, non-GED, have understood the book simple it is presented at a basic level.