If you are on a diet program, it is understandable that you will be required to watch what you eat keenly. While it may seem as if this is very complicated an undertaking, in actual practice it can be easy to keep to strict guidelines set on your diet regimen. This guide shows you how to work your diet plan by using the nutrition data given on food packages.

There is a misplaced though pretty common sentiment that all you need to take care of in a diet are the amount of calories. While it is true that most diets are structured to help weight watchers limit the calorific content of their food, this is just part of the program. Just as important is the need to look after the nutrients, minerals and vitamins in every dish served.

All you need to get started is a diet program with recommended nutritional intake daily. You can then make a simple journal setting out how much to take daily with respect to calories and nutritional elements. Your journal should be a simple table with at least five columns or you can use a spreadsheet software program.

For each day, list the nutritional elements such as vitamins, carbohydrates and minerals you need to watch in the leftmost column of your journal. Remember to leave about four or five blank lines under each element of nutrition you are keeping watch over. Label the second column, "daily intake" and label the other columns to correspond with the meals you take daily though the rightmost column should be blank to add up the totals.

For each day, you will need to plan a set of nutritional elements as set out in your diet guide. Indicate the first element such as carbohydrates on the first column and leave four or five rows blank before indicating the next nutrient. Transfer the daily recommended intake against each nutrient in the second column of the journal. The other columns will be used to indicate amount set for each meal.

To make it easy, begin by planning the main meal of the day such as the dinner. The food packaging will indicate how much of each nutritional element is contained in a serving or certain amount of grams of the food item. Typically, you will find that most food items will have different nutrients and minerals in varying proportions.

Managing a healthy diet is much easier than many people believe. You only need to plan your program on a simple journal. This becomes easy as most packaged foods come with nutrition data on the packages.