Meal plans for Pakistani kitchens

Choosing your calorie level

Every plan comes at 1200, 1500 and 1800 kcal a day. These follow the American obesity guideline, which sets weight-loss diets at usually 1200–1500 kcal for women and 1500–1800 kcal for men, adjusted for weight and activity.

Start at 1200 if you are a woman and 1500 if you are a man. Move up a level if you are hungry all day, feel faint or are losing weight very quickly; move down only if nothing has changed after a month.

Don't go below 1200 on your own. Very-low-calorie diets — under 800 kcal a day — are done only under medical supervision.

These levels are for adults. Children, pregnant or breastfeeding women, and older people who are losing weight without trying need advice of their own.

Rules for every plan

• Measure the oil. Each katori of salan, daal or sabzi in these plans has one teaspoon, which comes to about 2 tablespoons for a family pot that serves six. In Pakistani cooking, oil is where most of the calories hide.
• Eat from the family pot. The plans use the same salan everyone else is eating — take your katori out before extra oil or tarka goes on top, and keep to your number of rotis.
• Half the plate salad and sabzi, a quarter protein, a quarter roti or rice. This is the American Diabetes Association's plate method, and every meal in these plans follows it.
• Chai without sugar. If that's too hard at first, go down to half a teaspoon and keep going.
• Water is the drink. Cold drinks, packet juice, sharbat and sweet lassi have no place in any of these plans.
• The same measures as the carb counter: a roti is a 6-inch chapati from about 30 g of atta, a plate holds about 240 g of cooked rice, and a katori is about 150 ml.