At the same site you can access the menu planner module which you can use to keep track of your daily intake of food. You will also find tips there on how to properly intake the different food types.

The following are some tips about eating healthy:

1. Eat plenty of whole grain, because they have more nutrients and vitamins.
2. Eat different kinds of vegetables. The nutrition we get from vegetables varies with the kind of vegetable. This is why it is important for you to rotate the vegetables that you include in your daily diet.
3. Of course, you should take in plenty of fruits and calcium.
4. Avoid fatty meat.
5. Drink plenty of liquids to keep your intestines moving

With your food pyramid in hand and the tips above you should be in a better position to select the 1200 calorie diet menu that will work best for you and that will not be harmful for your health.

Nevertheless, it is always advisable to consult with your doctor or nutritionist first before actually beginning on your 1200 calorie diet menu. Remember, for dieting to be effective, the diet menu has to be taken for some period of time. Having the wrong menu to go on with can result in severe avitaminosis and starvation. You should also be aware that there is a psychosis called anorexia nervosa which makes a person want not just to diet, but to starve himself for some compelling psychological reason.

If you are allergic or intolerant to some foods, it is also wise to consult your nutritionist for possible substitutes for that food that may be included in your 1200 calorie diet menu.

1200 calorie diet menus can also be made from national foods. Such recipes may be availed of at the health and nutrition sites of the respective countries. Since these recipes will have been approved and endorsed by a good nutritionise, they are probably safe choices for dieting. But make sure that the ingredients needed will be available at your local market.

No matter what source you get your 1200 calorie diet menu from, always use your food pyramid to determine whether the ingredients in that menu will be giving you the correct amount of nutrition and calories that you need for staying in slim and healthy. Your food pyramid is a necessary reference for any dieting that you are doing now or are planning to do in the future.

Because observation is such an important factor in getting the most of a 1200 calorie diet menu, you will need to have your diet planner notebooks as well as notebooks to record the results of your diet. Tape measures and scale weights also come in handy.

Before you even start planning out your 1200 calorie diet menu, you must know what your food pyramid is. The food pyramid of a certain person is a table in which the amounts of ideal intake from each food group are indicated. The basic food groups are grains, vegetables, fruits, milk and beans/meat. The quantity of each food group that a person should eat daily is determined by his age, gender, physical characteristics and hours of intense daily exercise. At the website MyPyramid.gov, there is an interface that allows you to calculate your food pyramid.

Once knowing your food pyramid, your should start assembling your 1200 calorie diet menu, in consultation with a food nutritionist. You may probably have to hire one because this process can take some time to complete. The length of time that you will spend on creating your menu will depend on how many different variations you want to make. You could make three menus which cycle back every three days, or seven menus which turn around every 7 days.

After the planning out of the menu is finished, you should go to your doctor to have him approve of them.

The next thing to do, if your doctor gives his go signal to your 1200 calorie diet menu, is to get another notebook where you shall record two things; the date and the menu you used for the day as well as the actual amount of servings you ate of each food item. This notebook has to be religiously filled up every after each meal, every day for each day that you are still on your dieting menu.

The use of this log is for you to be able to compute for the amount of calories that you took in for a certain period. This will help to gauge whether the 1200 calorie diet menu you have concocted is really working for you as expected. In the long run, this log can help you replace food items and food amounts in the menu that don’t seem to be contributing to the overall objective of your dieting.

Effective dieting is very much like effective experimental researching.