Diet Plans

Diabetic meal plans help you take the guesswork out of following a healthy diet. A good diabetic meal plan will not only guide your food decisions at breakfast, lunch, supper and snack time, it will also be flexible enough to provide you with a variety of healthy and tasty menu choices.

Along with managing your diabetes, a successful meal plan will also help you prevent complications from other conditions like heart disease and stroke. Here are a few resources to help you develop and follow a diabetic meal plan:

Friends and families rarely want to hear that their chum, matriarch or patriarch is on a diet -- it generally means that, by proxy, they're going to be privy to an insufferable amount of bland, flavorless food that's "good for them" for quite some time. It is possible, however, to cook good diet foods for your friends and family without sacrificing flavor. Finding a user-friendly weight loss program to please everyone in your life, though, can be difficult. Are you trying to lose the pounds but don't want to burden your loved ones with dressing optional salads, wheat germ and rice cakes? The diet meal plans on this list will help you shed the pounds while retaining your family's sanity. Don't keep them to yourself -- these guilt free options are good enough to share!

You've heard of the flat belly diet: changing what you eat can change the shape of your midsection. Easy to incorporate into your existing schedule, it has the potential to put you on track to eating better and feeling great. We look at some of the simpler flat belly diet tips to jumpstart a flatter stomach and change your look for the better!

A high blood pressure diet is a simple way to manage a dangerous health condition. While it's not necessary to completely abandon all foods that can contribute to this very common disease, limiting salty foods and and upping your intake of the good stuff can help in reducing high blood pressure and could quite possibly give you a chance at staying healthy without medication. Here is the low down on some of the best (and worst) foods for keeping your blood pressure under control!

If you or a family member have high cholesterol, defined as an LDL ("bad" cholesterol) level of 160 or higher, keeping a lower cholesterol diet that also limits saturated fats is one way to reduce the risk of heart disease. The US National Institute of Health recommends a maximum of 200 milligrams of cholesterol a day, with calories from saturated fat at 7% or less, and up to 35% from unsaturated fats. As a general rule, processed and high cholesterol foods are cut out as much as possible; meats, fish, poultry and egg yolks are limited, dairy products are low-fat and oils are monounsaturated (such as canola). Fruits, vegetable and whole grains -- high cholesterol foods come from animal products, so these foods are naturally cholesterol-free -- are limited only according to calorie intake. The healthiest thing you can do for your heart health is to lose excess weight and/or maintain a healthy weight. If you know your LDL level is high, keep to a high cholesterol diet such as the Therapeutic Lifestyle Changes (TLC) Diet.