Weight Loss Using Exercise

Recommended Daily Allowances

When it comes to losing weight or maintaining your weight, your focus needs to be on keeping within your recommended daily allowances. Keeping within your RDA for total fat, saturated fat, sugar and salt, and eating the right amount of fibre, is the best way of keeping a check on what you are eating, and the best way to help you to make better food choices.

Eating an excessive number of calories is obviously not good, but it is when you exceed the recommended daily allowances for total fat, saturated fat, sugar and salt, that your problems start.

It’s not difficult to build up your knowledge about the quantities of nutrients in the food you eat. Becoming aware of what they are is the first step.

Here are the Recommended Daily Allowances, RDAs, for the nutrients total fat, saturated fat, sugar, salt and for fibre

Nutrient: Total

Total Fat 70 grams

Saturated Fat 20 grams

Sugar 25 grams

Salt 6 grams

Fibre 30 grams

This is the RDA for free sugarwhich is sugar added by a food manufacturer and any sugars present in honey, syrups and fruit juices. You do not need to worry about the naturally occurring sugar in milk (maltose) or in whole fruit and vegetables.

The World Health Organisation recommends that your RDA for sugar should be 25 grams, 6% teaspoons. 25 grams is the level recommended by the Slim Habit. (RDA, Recommended Daily Allowance is the same as Rl, which is an abbreviation for Reference lntake)

Fibre 30 grams is the daily minimum number of grams of fibre you should eat. The more fibre you eat the better. Remember your ancestors consumed up to 100 grams.